Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America's Greatest Bridge
By Kevin Starr
3.5/5
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About this ebook
headlands of Marin County, as if to suggest the paradox of California
and America itself-the place that Fitzgerald saw as the last spot
commensurate with the human capacity for wonder. The bridge, completed
in 1937, also announced to the world America's engineering prowess and
full assumption of its destined continental dominance. The Golden Gate
is a counterpart to the Statue of Liberty, pronouncing American
achievement in an unmistakable American fashion. The nation's very
history is expressed in the bridge's art deco style and stark
verticality.
Kevin Starr's Golden Gate is a brilliant and
passionate telling of the history of the bridge, and the rich and
peculiar history of the California experience. The Golden Gate is a
grand public work, a symbol and a very real bridge, a magnet for both
postcard photographs and suicides. In this compact but comprehensive
narrative, Starr unfolds the hidden-in-plain-sight meaning of the Golden
Gate, putting it in its place among classic works of art.
Editor's Note
Fascinating paean…
A loving history of the societal, political, and architectural forces behind California’s great architectural icon, told by former state librarian and acclaimed historian Kevin Starr.
Kevin Starr
Kevin Starr is one of America's most celebrated historians. His many books include a magisterial seven-volume history of California (Americans and the California Dream). He served as California State Librarian and in 2006 was awarded the National Humanities Medal. He currently teaches at the University of Southern California.
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Reviews for Golden Gate
45 ratings14 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Starr does his usual excellent job of placing this bridge into historic, geographic, and cultural contexts. The prose is often beautiful and engaging, but sometimes over-reaching and forced. The story could have stood on its own merits, and did not really need to be forced into a thesis that this represents the "greatest" bridge. A lot of interesting points are made toward that thesis, but ultimately it is not an objective question and the result comes across a bit stilted. Still, many fascinating details about the bridge eloquently laid out - fans of the bridge (and Starr) will no doubt come away enriched.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Not bad for a quick guide. The Golden Gate Bridge is fascinating enough to merit a much more in depth book, but Starr's book is plenty good for a quick refresher before a trip to San Francisco. There's enough in here that you'll be able to impress your friends and family with trivia as you take an open-topped bus trip over the span -- including the Golden Gate was nearly painted in stripes to increase visibility. In the end, "International Orange" proved to be a much better choice.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Kevin Starr does an excellent job in framing this great American icon into a wonderful interdisciplinary context.. His descriptions, both detailed and poetic, serve to clearly convey a wonderful understanding and an appreciation of the development of this engineering wonder. I found his categorical (Vision, Politics, Money, Design, etc.) organization through his Table of Contents to be very useful in my understanding of the various aspects of the bridges history. The color photos were also very helpful. A descriptive map would have also been useful. I'm an engineer turned high school teacher and I often teach an Orientation to Engineering class through a study of bridge design. This a work I will recommend highly to my students. I also strongly recommend it to anyone interested in history, specifically the history of California or of Technology and Engineering. It truly is a story of the drama of human achievement.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A concise but far ranging history of the Golden Gate and the iconic bridge built over it. I would have liked to see more photos of the bridge, esp. during construction, which would have made the descriptions easier to understand.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A short, albeit even shorter after bypassing the "what the Bridge 'means'" material, but interesting history of the bridge's site, planning, design, construction, continuing life post-building and all the associated political machinations.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Starr has an engaging style, and when he gets out of his own way, the work is very good general audience type of history. The book begins with some seriously purple prose that turned me off as a reader. Starr seemed to think it necessary to extol the grandeur of a structure that can be counted as one of the few in America to lack the need for such advocacy. As others have noted, Starr also has a penchant for attempting scholarly passages that end up confusing the reader. But on the whole the book is an easy read.One other issue I had with the book, which could be the fault of the publisher rather than the author, was the lack of inclusion of photographs described in the text by the author. Two examples are the Ansel Adams photograph depicting the Golden Gate in the years just prior to the construction of the bridge and the unnamed photographer who Starr mentions snapped an image of the only serious accident as it occurred. I would like to see every image Starr mentions included in the center piece.One of the strengths of this work is the unusual organizational approach. Chapters are dedicated to subjects having to do with the bridge, this their content can be carried from beginning to end of the construction and use of the bridge. This allows Starr to tell us a more coherent story of some of the less well known aspects of the bridge than a straight chronological organization would have allowed.Overall, despite the prose and image inclusion errors there is a lot to like about Golden Gate. As you read it, skip the parts you fail to enjoy or that fail to inform you. You'll still know more about the bridge than you did, and you'll still enjoy the book as a whole.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I rather enjoyed reading this book about the building and 'life' of the Golden Gate Bridge. It is one of the great icons of the American scene, along with the Statue of Liberty and the Grand Canyon. This is a story of politics and vision, engineering and persistence. The book does touch on the 'suicide situation.' It answered the question of how the word golden got associated with the bridge, whose color is clearly orange (the name Golden Gate preceded the bulding of the bridge). I was also interested in the presence of the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District, which, bsides the bridge, also operates the Marin County bus service (inherited from Greyhound), and a ferry business. The author's writing has a nice literary style, which I appreciated. I also appreciated Starr's descriptive list of sources at the end of the volume.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5For a book that is so small, it is in desperate need of an editor. Chapters 4-6 drag on endlessly with tales of boards, commissions and political dealings that only the most ardent historians would care about. Once you get past the list of names and educational backgrounds of all the people who ever had anything to do with the project you finally arrive at the construction, art, city chapters of Golden Gate which is vastly more interesting. I would have liked to see Chapters 4-6 combined as one and the remainder of the book expanded. This book seems to have been written for California natives who already have a great deal of knowledge about the Bay area as no maps exist to give a better feel for those who have never been.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I had to push myself to read on past the first philosophical paragraphs. I always have a great deal of disenchantment with writers or commentators who seem to need to report about or read some sort of mysticism into normal life. I cannot accept that there has to be some sort of metaphysical reason for the collective thought processes that give rise to progress. If we humans build something functional and make it beautiful as well, why do 'thinkers' and writers dream up a master plan for our psyches as a reason for its completion 'as built'? Perhaps my training and early working life as a steam engineer make me pragmatic and therefore suspicious of psychology. I believe that we don't really need psychological crutches. We can get along very nicely if we accept what is, build what we need, make it generally 'attractive' to the eye and enjoy it while we use it.Then the book got interesting - Chapter 4: Vision. I got riveted and excited and really enjoyed the following parts of the story - until the waffling about 'art' at the end. In fact I found the shortage of pictorial enhancement of the construction phase discussion to be an unfortunate omission. So much so that I went out to my favorite "Used and Rare" bookshop and picked up a copy of "Spanning the Gate" by Stephen Cassady. Some of the photos in that book are superb and enlightening to both authors' writings about the bridge. I then spent a good part of a morning messing around on the internet exploring the information available. There is a lot of it but I'm somewhat disappointed that there is not a dedicated museum at the site.In all, this book is OK. I was left wanting more and, if that is Mr. Starr's intent, he succeeds. I will soon be visiting the bridge for other-than-crossing-it reasons but I wont, however, be searching out any of his other books.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Kevin Starr reminds us that a bridge is much more than just a structure connecting two points. He gives a short history of the genesis of the bridge and the political, social, aethestic and cultural dimensions of it. This feat of engineering says much about the ethos of our country in the pre-war years. For someone not familiar with the geography of the bay area, some maps would have been helpful. The chapter on suidices, while clearly a part of the bridge's history, was a bit unnecessarily lurid.All in all, a very helpful overview of this important icon in American advancement.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Kevin Starr is the greatest, and likely the most read, historian of any American state. His six volume series, Americans and the California Dream, is as readable as it is informative. The present small volume, although not a part of the larger series for which Starr is so much admired, is likewise readable and informative. It is a history of the Golden Gate Bridge in the broadest sense (conception, planning, financing, construction), as well as an analysis of the bridge in multiple senses—philosophical, artistic, and even psychological. While certainly celebrating the bridge, Starr does not hesitate to openly discuss the many people who have used it as a means of taking their own lives. He speculates about the Golden Gate Bridge’s future vulnerability to earthquakes, to terrorism, and to inadequate materials maintenance. He notes how photographs of the bridge have stylistic variations from one era to another. Only when he discusses the ancient Greek historian Pythagoras’ theory of number as “a direct revelation of the structure of creation itself” did I wonder if the author might have drifted a bit far afield. Amazingly, Starr does all of this in slightly less than 200 rather small pages. Of special interest to people in the Bay area and those of us who love our periodic visits to the Bay area.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I expected more from this book. Many of the early chapters are devoted to the politics and geological formation of the area, however there is no map to show me where the counties are, the shape of the bay, the location of the islands in the bay etc. I think I would have understood the problems of getting everyone to sign on to the project and the difficulties of the physical limitations. Maybe locals and California residents would know intuitively about this, but if you want your audience to be wider than one state you have to give us more information.I was also dismayed by the pandering language of the writing. Such overblown words as "monumental" , "grand", "ambitious" fill the descriptions of the project and the participants. Yes, it probably was monumental but I don't need to be continously reminded of that. Strauss "made grand entrances to and exits from the construction site, Sol Hurok on a Hollywood set" ????? "Cone would be best played by Spencer Tracy" ????? It is just overblown.I am dismayed the book isn't more objective.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Say San Francisco and the first thing most people think of is the Golden Gate Bridge. Starr's books gives a good and concise history of the building of this remarkable landmark - a "Wonder of the World." It gives incite in the political machinations in getting the bridge built. Many didn't want it put up at all - but the people liked the idea and they won. Just see its shape and you know what is being talked about and then there's gorgeous orange color that adds to the sunset of the Golden Gate itself, the opening of that harbor.The book is very easy to read, but full of details. It tells the story nicely and add little tidbits of how the bridge has "starred" in books and movies and of how they are working to make sure that the bridge continues to do so for many more decades.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5After watching Ken Burns fascinating documentary about the Brooklyn Bridge on PBS I jumped at the chance to read and review Golden Gate by Ken Starr. The author, a history professor and published historian included many facts unknown to me such as how the bridge got its name. It's named after the Golden Bosporus in Turkey. You will find scattered throughout this book many instances of factual information that can surprise you pleasantly. Starr also employs great descriptive prowess in portraying the physical attributes of the site.But something is whispered in my ear that asks the question why would the author have taken in more than one chapter a non-chronological approach? Why would the material written by a historian jump from on era to another and back again all in one chapter? Starr's remarkable ode of sorts to the bridge presented me with intellectual hiccups as I struggled to keep up with his changing time table.The best of the best dealt with the obvious admiration he has for this iconic structure. And, of course, the terrific amount of research he performed. You have to be struck by his adept telling of how overwhelmingly crowded the ferries were before the bridge was built as thousands of commuters waited as long as three hours to cross. His telling of the actual building of the bridges and other chapters such as the one on suicide show clearly the he reviewed a lot of material to master this tale.A different more coherent structure could have added a lot of readability to the book. And, would have enabled Starr to better show case what appears to be an object of his great affection. Structure aside there is still much to be learned and enjoyed from this epic story.
Book preview
Golden Gate - Kevin Starr
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915
Land’s End, a Novel
California!
Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era
Over California
Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s
Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California
The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s
Commerce and Civilization: Claremont McKenna College, the First Fifty Years, 1946–1996
Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940–1950
Coast of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990–2003
California, a History
Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950–1963
GOLDEN
GATE
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF AMERICA’S
GREATEST BRIDGE
KEVIN STARR
CONTENTS
1. Bridge
2. Icon
3. Site
4. Vision
5. Politics
6. Money
7. Design
8. Construction
9. City
10. Suicide
11. Art
Essay on Sources
For my seven grandchildren —
In years to come, may they feel the same thrill as I do
each time the Bridge comes into view.
–1–
BRIDGE
The Golden Gate Bridge is a global icon, a triumph of engineering, and a work of art. In American terms, it was shaped by the City Beautiful movement, the Progressive Era, and the Great Depression. More mysteriously, the Bridge expresses those forces that science tells us constitute the dynamics of nature itself. Like the Parthenon, the Golden Gate Bridge seems Platonic in its perfection, as if the harmonies and resolutions of creation as understood by mathematics and abstract thought have been effortlessly materialized through engineering design. Although the result of engineering and art, the Golden Gate Bridge seems to be a natural, even an inevitable, entity as well, like the the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. In its American context, taken historically, the Bridge aligns itself with the thought of Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other transcendentalists in presenting an icon of transcendence: a defiance of time pointing to more elusive realities. Were Edwards, Emerson, or the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, a mystic thinker of great importance to the formation of American thought, alive today, they would no doubt see in the Golden Gate Bridge a fusion of material and trans-material forces, held in delicate equipoise.
For all that, the Golden Gate Bridge is a bridge. It gets you from one side of the water to the other. Regionally, it serves practical and pragmatic necessity. But here as well iconic forces are at work. Of all American regions, outside Manhattan, California, taken cumulatively, is the most impressive instance of nature rearranged through engineering. From the beginning, water had to be moved from where it was, the north, to where it was needed, elsewhere, as California invented itself through water engineering. The entire Central Valley depended upon irrigation. The port of Los Angeles was blasted by dynamite to sufficient depth. From the Gold Rush onward, most Californians lived in cities and suburbs dependent upon elaborate systems of water and, later, electrical engineering. Yet the early response of Americans in California to the Golden Gate itself was poetic. John Charles Frémont named the entrance to San Francisco Bay in honor of the Golden Horn of the Bosporus protecting the harbor of ancient Constantinople. William Keith and other American painters in California delighted in depicting it as the entrance to a brave new world of gold and cities to be. A young UC Berkeley philosophy professor by the name of Josiah Royce considered the Gate the perfect symbol of the natural grandeur but philosophical isolation of the remote province in which he found himself.
As early as the frontier era, there were daydreams of spanning the Gate, one of them coming from Joshua Norton, a madman who thought he was an emperor. The early 1920s witnessed the emergence of the grandest daydreamer of them all: Joseph Strauss, bridge-builder, Emersonian visionary, promoter extraordinaire, P. T. Barnum of public works, the Wizard of Oz behind the green curtain. In proposing a bridge, Strauss linked up with an equally emblematic figure, San Francisco city engineer Michael O’Shaughnessy, who was playing a defining role in reconceptualizing and rebuilding San Francisco following its destruction by earthquake and fire in April 1906. As a Progressive, O’Shaughnessy envisioned public works as, among other things, a redemptive enterprise. Public works improved moral tone. In the decades leading up to the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, Progressives had been busy completing California, rearranging it so as better to serve an emergent society. From this perspective, the Golden Gate Bridge and its sister structure crossing the Bay to Oakland constituted the last and greatest engineering masterpieces of this post-earthquake Progressive program.
The Bridge, however, had to evolve out of the political process. The Southern Pacific did not want it because it threatened Southern Pacific ferry operations on San Francisco Bay that each workday brought into the Ferry Building at the foot of the Embarcadero some fifty thousand commuters, making it the busiest terminal outside of Charing Cross Station, London. The Navy did not want it. It could be shelled from offshore during wartime and collapse, blocking entrance and egress to the harbor. The environmentalists did not want it. The Bridge seemed an arrogant intrusion on nature. Yet the established governments of the counties ringing San Francisco Bay, together with Del Norte County on the Oregon border, wanted it. Such a bridge would open the Redwood Empire to the north and, more important, further consolidate the counties of the Bay, especially the North Bay counties, with the Bay Area itself, where nearly half the population of California was then living.
A political battle ensued, pitting the Progressive impulse to complete California through public works against other interests and a generalized resistance to change. The Great Depression affected the outcome. Public works provided one of the leading ways Americans were combating unemployment during this era. Yet the Golden Gate Bridge was not a federal project, as was the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. The Bridge resulted, rather, from a localized, county-driven process; and a private entity, the Bank of America, bought the bonds, bringing into the genesis of the Bridge yet another iconic American, A. P. Giannini, one of the most notable bankers in American history.
Joseph Strauss was a great promoter, but the bridge he initially proposed was a clumsy monstrosity. The Golden Gate could not be defiled with such ugliness. Strauss eventually came to recognize this fact, however reluctantly, and he retained the best bridge designers in the nation to come up with a better solution. The result: engineering as high art, and high art as engineering. And then the color! International Orange, it was called, at once a natural color and a color highly suggestive of artifice, capable of blending into all the hues and colors of the site and the pageant of wind, fog, and maritime weather moving through the channel. Designs complete, bonds sold, supervising engineer Russ Cone and his construction crews got to work. Not since the Brooklyn Bridge was built more than a half century earlier had bridge-builders faced such a challenge. Americans build things, and the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge constitutes an epic achievement of American labor. It is a powerful story—the sinking of the piers, the erection of towers, the spinning and emplacement of cables. Eleven workers lost their lives, ten on one day. Could such a structure be built, one is tempted to ask, without some form of sacrifice? The ancients would have answered No! The Golden Gate Bridge represented a defiance of nature as well as a tribute to it, and a certain score had to be settled.
Triumphantly, the Golden Gate Bridge linked the urbanism of San Francisco with the unspoiled headlands of Marin as if to suggest the paradox of California/America itself: a gift of nature, a continent that F. Scott Fitzgerald described as the last place commensurate with the human capacity for wonder, a sacred text, a revelation of the Divine Mind, as far as the Anglo-American Protestant imagination was concerned—yet a place as well to be reshaped into cities, with canals, roadways, railways, highways, aqueducts, bridges, and all those other entities required by urban civilization. Yet the Bridge did not destroy its site; rather, it enhanced it, as the Parthenon enhances the hill upon which it stands. The Golden Gate Bridge announced to the world something important about the American imagination and the American stewardship of the continent, taken at its best. For all their faults, Americans could reform themselves to exercise proper stewardship and would more and more do so, despite the squanderings of the nineteenth century.
From an iconic perspective, the Golden Gate Bridge offers a West Coast counterpart to the Statue of Liberty, announcing, in terms of American Art Deco, American achievement and the higher purposes of American culture. And it does this with its own element of historical narrative, subtly contained in the Art Deco stylization of its towers played off against repetitive cables descending into a reversed arch against an interplay of city, sea, and sky. Lest this all sound too positive, even triumphant, it must be noted that the Golden Gate Bridge, almost immediately, became, literally, the springboard, the platform, for human tragedy, beginning with the great accident of mid-February 1937 that claimed the lives of ten workers. Quite soon, the Bridge became the venue of choice for suicide throughout the greater Bay Area. By 2009 some 1,300 people had ended their lives via the Bridge. What do these seven decades of death by suicide mean? Why have the guardians of the Golden Gate Bridge been reluctant to, as they put it, mar the beauty of the Bridge with suicide-prevention nets or fences? Is this connection of the Bridge to death preventable or inevitable? And if it is inevitable, what does that mean as far as the iconic status of the Bridge is concerned? Here, in any event, where the American continent gives out, the Golden Gate Bridge continues to draw those who have lost what the English novelist Evelyn Waugh has described as the unequal struggle with life.
So hail and farewell, Golden Gate Bridge! You are in the company of the grandest public works achievements of all time; and like these structures, ancient and modern, you serve practical necessity while at the same time encoding meanings multiple and various. Generations have by now been once young and grown old in your company. You have helped to define a culture. You have succeeded in making nature even more beautiful through engineering and art. In times past, you were constructed, foot by foot, cable by cable, bolt by bolt. But you also descended as golden Fire from abstract Number in a manifestation that the ancients would have understood. Like Rockefeller Center, you continue to celebrate the best capacities of Art Deco. Your color remains a joyous fusion of nature and artifice. You were built to last for a thousand years, and both your permanence and your vulnerability testify to your greatness. Do you foretell a better world, ordered as you are ordered, according to utility and grace? Or will human beings, ages from now, gaze upon your ruins and marvel at the American nation that once bestrode the continent and the resourceful citizens of that once great but now lost Republic?
–2–
ICON
According to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, an icon, the Greek word for image, is more than a symbol. While a symbol can signify or point to something larger, an icon embodies the forces that are being signified. Thus from an Orthodox Christian perspective, an icon is not only an image of the sacred, it is itself a sacred object. Most world religions nurture something akin to this belief. With their theologized Puritan heritage, Americans shared this sense of the iconic; indeed, for the great eighteenth-century theologian Jonathan Edwards, briefly president of Princeton University, the American continent itself was a sacred text to be read, simultaneously, as a natural and a sacred event. When he presented us with the Great White Whale of Moby-Dick (1851), Herman Melville did more than present us with a symbol. The whale, Captain Ahab fails to understand, with tragic consequences, was not only a sign of the sacred innocence and otherness of nature, it was also a living manifestation of this truth, intensified to transcendental proportions.
Nor were Americans oblivious to the iconic power of engineering and architecture. Hence the taste for classicism in the decades of the early Republic, as Americans sought to link their society with what they believed to be the democratic republics of the ancient world. Hence the taste for Gothic Revival as romanticism swept the nation in the early mid-nineteenth century, with its suggestions of older and more picturesque cultures. And hence the triumph of steel and glass industrialism, in factories and train stations initially, but carrying over into skyscrapers as well, despite a tendency to design these new structures with some sense of historical reference. But so too, when it came to engineering, did Americans behold in each new turnpike, lighthouse, canal, aqueduct, or reservoir proof positive of an assured destiny