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Golden Gate Bridge
WGBH/American Experience on PBS
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The Golden Gate
Bridge is one of the best-known and perhaps the most beloved of modern icons. It is the
most photographed subject in the world today. Golden Gate Bridge, written and
directed by Ben Loeterman for the “American Experience” PBS series, is no mere
one-off documentary on the making of the bridge. While presenting how visionary promoter
(and incompetent engineer) Joseph Strauss actually got the bridge built, the film explores
the Golden Gate Bridge as an engineering statement, a social statement, and an art
statement. Along the way, the viewer is treated to the strange, idiosyncratic, “only
in San Francisco” behind-the-scenes stories, suggesting why the Golden Gate Bridge
itself is one of the greatest “only in San Francisco” stories.
It became evident in the new automobile era of the 1920s that some sort
of bridge was necessary to open the city to the counties north of San Francisco, to keep
the city growing and therefore economically viable. (San Francisco is a densely built-up
city, at the tip of a peninsula locked in on three sides by water, with no room to expand
physically.) The only feasible site of construction would be the Golden Gate, the
mile-wide-long gap in the coastal mountain chain where the fresh water flowing into San
Francisco Bay rushes out to meet the salt water of the Pacific. To conceive of building a
bridge at the very point of such a mammoth natural energy vortex is mind-boggling, even
today. It would take the almost-megalomaniac vision and drive of Joseph Strauss (Loeterman
compares him to P.T. Barnum and the Wizard of Oz) to transform this idea into a practical
reality.
Chicago-based engineer Strauss had built many bridges--many small,
ugly, black-painted bridges. He really was not the man to design or build the new Golden
Gate Bridge. With little sense for either the mathematical or aesthetic concerns of such a
huge and complex design project, Strauss persevered and succeeded in being publicly
credited as the chief designer and engineer of the bridge. Fortunately, Strauss also had
enough common sense to demur to the vastly superior talents of those he hired to his team.
Charles Alton Ellis, who had studied the Greek classics and was a
meticulous engineer, was over 50 when he joined Strauss’s firm in Chicago. Ellis
calculated all the details necessary for the bridge to be built as designed. Strauss,
apparently, so feared Ellis that he eventually fired Ellis from the project and refused to
give him full or accurate credit. Ellis went to his death, having never once seen the
fruit of his labors. New York-based Leon Moissseiff drafted the suspension bridge design,
the form the bridge would finally take, intuiting much of what would be needed to make
such a large and soaring theory stand up when actually erected. Irving Morrow, a
relatively unknown local San Francisco architect, persuaded Strauss to see the drama of
the bridge and transformed Moissseiff’s suspension principle into the towering
sculpture we know today, including its trademark “international orange" color,
the Art Deco details and the cascading open-air towers which reflect ever-changing light
as it plays off the bridge.
Something this monumental cannot be hurried. Part of the genius of the
bridge was doing it right the first time. No corners were cut; the scandal of major
corners cut in the building of the new San Francisco City Hall when it collapsed in the
quake of ’06 were still fresh in the public’s mind. (The restored [1995-1999]
City Hall makes a graceful cameo appearance.)
The remarkable story of
the actual building of the bridge has been covered before (for example, in the History
Channel’s Modern Marvels: The Golden Gate Bridge), but Loeterman
adds dramatic and idiosyncratic nuances to the familiar iron workers union and the Halfway
to Hell Club. Strauss had taken extraordinary safety measures to safeguard men working in
60-mph wind gusts and in icy fog conditions. Loeterman includes an oral history of Slim
Lambert (his son Skip was interviewed), one of only two survivors of the largest
construction accident on the bridge, caused by a collapsing staging platform. Remarkably,
only ten men died in this incident, compared with the dozens more who had met with tragic
ends on the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge project, which was gong on at the same time
on the other side of downtown San Francisco.
Strauss apparently paid a personal price for his public aggrandizement.
Before the bridge had been completed, he disappeared and was later reported recuperating
in the Adirondacks. Along with this news came word of divorce from his wife and marriage
to a new trophy bride, twenty years his junior. Upon return to San Francisco Strauss
withdrew from the public eye to his apartment on Nob Hill and oversaw the completion of
the bridge from semi-reclusion. A year later, he would be dead of a stroke.
Ellis, permanently banished back to Chicago, never saw the completed
bridge in person. But everyone who knew him and respected his skill believed what he
said--that he, in fact, had engineered every stick of the Golden Gate Bridge. Contrary to
his assertion, however, his name was not included on the dedication plaque. This program
restores Ellis to his rightful prominence at the very heart of the monumental project.
Like the Golden Gate Bridge itself, its story, as told here, is both transcendent and
enigmatic.
- Les Wright
