SAN FRANCISCO: The Golden Gate Bridge was a larger than life engineering project undertaken against dangerous odds and it opened 75 years ago on Sunday against vehement protest, at the cost of 11 lives.
One of the most astonishing and admired man-made wonders of the world, gracing millions of postcards, featured in countless films, the bridge was not at first welcomed with open arms.
Ferry operators and environmentalists opposed it, and many engineers doubted such a daring leap over a treacherous Pacific Ocean strait could be built. The military worried a collapsed Golden Gate span could block access to the Bay in wartime.
Some San Franciscans even fought against it because they thought a bridge might ruin the view, according to historians.
Kevin Starr, author of “Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge,” said 2,000 related court cases were filed over nearly a decade.
But Starr said litigation and regulatory scrutiny largely concluded in the 1920s allowed builders to move quickly once bank funding was nailed down in 1932, in an early form of public-private cooperation.
“President Obama talks about shovel-ready projects,” Starr said in a phone interview. “This was shovel ready.”
The less than two decades between conception and completion means the Golden Gate compares well with the new quake-proof second span of the Bay Bridge a few miles away, he said. That $6.2 billion project is due to be done in 2013, 24 years after a deadly earthquake literally jolted the authorities into action.
Yet building the Golden Gate, at an estimated cost of $1.2 billion in current dollars, was a Herculean task. While the idea took hold in the prosperous 1920s, by the time ground was broken the Depression had left many people desperate for jobs. “Launched midst a thousand hopes and fears; Damned by a thousand hostile sneers,” was how the head engineer for the bridge, Joseph Strauss, described the bridge in a poem he wrote to mark its completion in 1937. He died less than a year later.
FROM: Reuters
