The Final Leap (5 page)

Morrow chose the bridge's paint color, too—orange vermillion, or “international orange.” While Strauss's plans called for carbon black and steel gray, Morrow wanted a color that complimented the green hills of Marin County and the blue sky that often bathed the area, as well as was more visible in heavy fog. Orange vermillion was encouraged by California painter Maynard Dixon, a friend of Morrow's, and supported by a number of local residents, including San Francisco's preeminent artist and sculptor of the day, Benjamin Buffano. Requests by the U.S. Air Force to paint the bridge orange with white horizontal stripes so that it would be more visible to aircraft, and by the U.S. Navy to paint the bridge black with yellow stripes so that it would be more easily identifiable to passing ships, were—thankfully—rejected.

Strauss's original plans included a safety railing on the bridge that was five-and-a-half feet high. It would be, he boasted in the
San Francisco Call-Bulletin
, “practically suicide-proof” because of the way the guard rails were constructed. “Any persons on the pedestrian walk could not get a handhold to climb over them,” Strauss said. Shortly before construction began, the railing was reduced to its present four-foot height. Some people have theorized that this change occurred because Strauss himself was short—only five-feet tall—and wanted to be able to see over the side. In fact, Morrow is the person most often credited with the decision to lower the railing because he wanted people to have unobstructed views of the bay. It was another artistic decision.

Strauss submitted final plans for the bridge in August 1930. That November, by a vote of 145,057 to 46,954, citizens in the six counties encompassed by the Bridge District approved a $35 million bond measure to finance construction. At that time the country was in the midst of the Great Depression, however, and no one was buying bonds. Strauss turned to A.P. Giannini for help. Giannini, the son of Italian immigrants, had started a small bank in order to lend money to blue-collar workers, who had a tough time getting loans. Called the Bank of Italy in homage to his ancestors, it grew to become Bank of America. Giannini agreed with Strauss that a bridge spanning the Golden Gate was needed, and his bank bought $6 million worth of bonds. With that, construction could begin.

On January 5, 1933, workers started digging foundations out of hillsides for the anchorages and concrete pylons. In some cases, they had to blast through hard rock to a depth of sixty-five feet below water. Strong tides and heavy swells made excavation on the San Francisco side of the bridge especially difficult. In all, more than three million cubic feet of earth were removed. Meanwhile, sections of the twin steel towers, manufactured by Bethlehem Steel in Pennsylvania, were sent by train to seaports on the East Coast, loaded onto ships, transported through the Panama Canal to San Francisco, and carried by barge to the construction site. There, giant cranes lifted them into place while teams of workers bonded them together with rivets and hot steel. Next came fabricating and installing the thick, heavy rope cable on each side. This guide wire, adjusted to the proper sag, determined the placement of all the vertical wires connecting to the roadway. Each of the two cables would weigh twenty-two million pounds. There was no way to lift cables this heavy so the John A. Roebling & Sons Company, based in New Jersey, spun them on site. Steel saddles were placed on top of the two towers to hold the cables as they were made, and workers traversed catwalks of wire rope and redwood planking to position them. These sixteen-foot-wide catwalks were the first structures to cross the width of the Golden Gate Strait.

It took six months to complete the cabling. After that, the roadway was built. On May 27, 1937, four-and-a-half years from the day that work began, the Golden Gate Bridge was completed. The first day only pedestrians were allowed on the bridge. At 6
A.M.,
eighteen thousand people were waiting to cross. There weren't any speeches or ribbon cutting. By the end of the day, an estimated two hundred thousand people had walked along the roadway. The following day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt pressed a telegraph key in the White House and announced to the world that the Golden Gate Bridge was open to vehicle traffic. For the rest of the week there were celebrations—fireworks, parades, tournaments, races, and live entertainment.

During construction, eleven workers died. That number would have been higher except Strauss implemented safety precautions that were unprecedented at the time. He commissioned hard hats (actually mining hats made of leather) and insisted that workers wear them. He saw that tinted goggles were issued so that men would not be blinded by the sun's reflection, that steel workers were prescribed special diets to counteract dizziness, and that hand and facial creams were available to protect against the wind. Most significantly, in addition to safety lines, Strauss had a safety net mounted sixty feet below the bridge, running its entire length. He justified the cost ($130,000, equivalent to $2 million today) by saying that the men would be more confident and work faster if they felt more secure. Considering that the bridge was completed on time and within budget, he was right. At various times, nineteen men fell into the net and were saved. They became known, in the sardonic humor of the trade, as the “Halfway-to-Hell Club.”

Only one person died during the first four years that the bridge was being built. Three months before completion, however, on February 17, 1937, a section of scaffolding fell through the safety net and ten of the twelve men on it perished (two workers survived the fall, suffering broken bones and massive internal injuries). Strauss had a new net erected immediately, spending $130,000 again. When the bridge was completed, the net was removed.

The names of the eleven workers who died have been preserved for posterity. They appear in Bridge District publications and on the Golden Gate Bridge Web site. In contrast, no such list is maintained by the Bridge District or local historians of all the people who have leaped to their deaths. There's a practical reason for this: mentioning the names of jumpers might appear to glorify them and encourage others to jump. Furthermore, deliberately not naming these individuals serves to protect the commercial interests of the area and the tourism industry that feeds it by suppressing an unseemly problem.

Harold Wobber, a forty-seven-year-old veteran of World War I, is the first known suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge. Two-and-a-half months after the bridge opened, on August 7, 1937, he took a bus to the south end, walked out halfway, told a stranger, “This is as far as I go,” and jumped over the side. His body was never found.

The first suicide may have been even earlier, however. Only two weeks after the bridge opened, on June 12, 1937, the body of Henry Clay Torrence of Richmond, California (Contra Costa County) was recovered on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. According to two brief articles in the
Oakland Tribune
, Torrence suffered the sort of trauma associated with “having struck the water with a terrific force.” There were no apparent witnesses to his death, and no conclusion as to whether he died from an accidental fall, murder, or suicide.

In early 1939, barely eighteen months after the Golden Gate Bridge opened, ten more people were known to have jumped. Representatives from the California Highway Patrol, among others, began to express concerns. A year later, Bridge District officials discussed for the first time installing an “anti-suicide screen” on the bridge. After some debate, it was voted down for aesthetic and financial reasons, as well as for engineering concerns, that it might lessen wind resistance on the bridge.

Over the next twenty-five years, there were repeated failures to address the growing problem of suicide from San Francisco's famous landmark:

By 1968, it became impossible to ignore the four hundred confirmed suicides from the bridge. District officials voted unanimously to take action: they doubled the tolls on the bridge in one direction and eliminated them in the other. The real purpose of this was to improve traffic flow; however, it also would free up half the tollbooth workers who could be reassigned to patrol the bridge. The increased surveillance reduced the number of suicides, but only temporarily. The number dropped from twenty-nine in 1968 to seventeen in 1969; however, it rose to thirty-seven in 1970, thirty-five in 1971, and forty in 1972.

There was enough momentum in late 1969 to convene a symposium on Golden Gate Bridge suicides. Among those speaking were three national suicide experts—psychiatrist Jerome Motto and psychologists Richard Seiden and Edwin Shneidman. Motto noted that the Golden Gate Bridge attracts suicides because it's easily accessible, is simple (no preparation is needed), there's no mess, death is virtually guaranteed, and there's a psychological appeal (jumping from the bridge is dramatic). Seiden recommended that there be an epidemiological investigation in order to provide an overview of the problem as well as answer questions such as who jumps, when, where on the bridge, and why. Shneidman suggested that an aerodynamically-approved barrier be temporarily bolted onto the entire length for three months, then removed for three months, then restored and taken down in alternating three-month intervals over the course of three years, with subsequent studies done to determine the effectiveness of the barrier. (He noted the moral dilemma if, during the first three months, there were no suicides whether authorities had the right to take down the barrier, making suicide possible again, and said public opinion would have to determine that.) Bridge District board members said that they would study the proposals, but ended up taking no action.

A year later, the district commissioned the firm Anshen & Allen Architects to develop several designs for a suicide barrier. The designs included barbed wire fencing, safety netting, plexiglas screening, horizontal tension cables, vertical tension rods, U-shaped spikes on top of the rail, low-voltage electricity, and high-voltage laser beams. Many of the designs were deemed unattractive, and since the electric fence and laser beams might burn pedestrians and bridge workers, they were removed from consideration.

Three designs looked promising, and Anshen & Allen was hired to draft preliminary drawings. The designs, labeled 11, 16, and 17, consisted of thin, vertical steel rods eight feet high and six inches apart. Eventually, design 11 was eliminated because its curved spikes at the top were out of keeping with the rest of the bridge, and number 17 was eliminated due to its $3.5 million-plus price tag. The remaining design, number 16, held interest for three reasons. First, at $750,000 it was relatively affordable. Second, by replacing the current, solid bridge rails with thin steel rods, it would reduce the weight of the bridge by forty pounds per square foot, which in turn would lower the cost of bridge insurance because the insurance was based on weight per linear foot. Third, the slim steel rods (painted orange to match the rest of the structure) would provide everyone who used the bridge— motorcyclists, cyclists, and pedestrians—with fuller views of San Francisco Bay and the shorelines.