Golden Gate Opens: An Icon of American Ingenuity Rises

Two hundred thousand people walked across it before a single car did. The Golden Gate Bridge opened to pedestrian traffic on May 27, 1937, and San Franciscans arrived on foot, on roller skates, and on stilts to cross the mile-wide strait that had separated San Francisco from Marin County since the city's founding. Chief engineer Joseph Strauss had spent over a decade fighting for the bridge. Ferry operators, the War Department, and skeptics who insisted the strait's violent currents and frequent fog made construction impossible all opposed it. Strauss won approval in 1930, and construction began in January 1933 during the depths of the Depression. Building the bridge killed 11 men, a figure Strauss worked hard to minimize. He installed a safety net below the work deck that saved 19 workers who fell during construction, an innovation so radical that the "Halfway to Hell Club" of saved workers became a point of pride. The net failed once, on February 17, 1937, when a scaffold fell through it, killing 10 men in a single incident. The bridge's chief contribution was aesthetic as much as structural. Consulting architect Irving Morrow chose the International Orange color and designed the Art Deco towers, cable housings, and lighting that gave the bridge its visual identity. Engineers expected the bridge to be painted silver or gray. Morrow's choice made it visible in fog and iconic in sunshine, arguably the most photographed bridge in the world. Vehicle traffic began on May 28. The bridge immediately transformed the economies of the North Bay counties, turning Marin and Sonoma from isolated agricultural areas into commuter suburbs. The span was the longest suspension bridge in the world until New York's Verrazano-Narrows Bridge opened in 1964. The Golden Gate Bridge cost $35 million and was completed ahead of schedule and under budget, an achievement so unusual for a public works project that it has rarely been replicated since.