Transport: Gate Party

They opened another bridge in California last week. At 6 a. m. when a foghorn snorted, 18.000 people started a mass dash, each eager to be first across the Golden Gate between San Francisco and the Marin County mainland. By nightfall 178,000 had crossed on foot and each apparently had been first in “one way or another. Sprinter Donald Bryant was first man across. Esther & Ann Bullard were first twins. Carmen & Minnie Perez were first skaters. Florentine Calegari was first on stilts. A Scottie was first dog. Police rushed to aid one woman staggering along with her tongue out. She was only becoming first across with tongue out. Two postmen took their lunch hour to be first mail-carriers across. Other firsts: the man who pushed a pill box with his nose, the girl who walked the chalk line in the centre, the boy who walked backward the whole way.

Reason for all this fuss, aside from California’s surpassing exuberance, was that the bridge was the world’s greatest by practically every measurement—length of span, height, difficulty of achievement. San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge was conceived 20 years ago by Engineer Joseph Baermann (“Colossus of Roads”) Strauss and finally completed at a cost of eleven lives and $35,000,000.

When Joe Strauss offered his plans to bridge the Golden Gate’s mile of surging tidal currents, everybody laughed. After the California Legislature authorized a Bridge District with power to build the bridge, it took six years of legal battle before the U. S. Supreme Court permitted it to proceed. The War Department debated a year before giving its permission, fearing that destruction of the bridge during a war would cork the harbor. Shipping interests fought it bitterly and the Government finally imposed a high-tide clearance 100 ft. higher than Brooklyn Bridge’s. The PWA refused to help, as did most banks. Then Amadeo Peter Giannini’s Bank of America took the bonds which financed it.* These preliminaries at last over, the builders faced what Joe Strauss called “the most diffi cult engineering feat ever tackled.” Three years of construction overcame this obstacle too.

A single-decked suspension with two piers, the bridge has a total length of 9,266 ft. The main span is 4,200 ft. long, 700 ft. more than George Washing ton Bridge’s centre span. The two grace ful towers are 746 ft. high, the clearance of the six-lane roadway and two passenger walks over the water, 220 ft. More intriguing than all these statistics are the allowances for the great stresses which the bridge may meet. In case a hurricane sweeps in from the sea, it can swing 21 ft. out of line without harm. When the sun expands the steel, the towers will lean several feet, the two 36½-in. cables will lengthen 16 ft. Greatest stress of all that the bridge may have to meet is an earthquake. Only six miles away and parallel to the Golden Gate Bridge is the San Andreas Fault, whose 22-ft. shift in 1906 leveled San Francisco. The question which has agitated Californians more than any other is: What will happen to the Bridge if another ‘quake comes?

Engineer Strauss & staff declare that the bridge could stand a ‘quake twice as bad as the 1906 one, plus a hurricane, without harm. But there are others who claim differently. Chief of these is Dr. Bailey Willis, an 80-year-old Stanford geology professor with a handsome white beard. Two years ago a diver, working on the preliminary survey for the Bridge’s great south pier 1,000 ft. from shore came up to declare that the rock was “as soft as plum pudding.” Dr. Willis devoted months to proving that the rock on which the pier would rest was crumbly serpentine “unstable to a degree likely to endanger the bridge.” This blast was apparently the reason the PWA refused to aid the builders. Dr. Willis was presently overwhelmed by numbers in the row over the Bridge and is currently saying nothing on a question which only a major earthquake can definitely settle. Last week, when practically everybody else journeyed to San Francisco for a week’s fiesta over the opening, Dr. Willis was absent, prospecting for gold in the Philippines.

*Remarkable in being built completely without Federal financial aid, the Golden Gate Bridge will repay its bondholders by tolls like those on San Francisco’s other great bridge across the bay to Oakland. Last week, after six months’ operation, 4,408,092 vehicles had crossed the Bay Bridge, yielding tolls of $2,575,500. Traffic has been so much greater than expected that the toll was cut from 65¢’ to 50¢.