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San Francisco Information
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Sandpoint, ID
New York, NY
Washington, D.C.
Braintree, MA
San Francisco, CA
Columbus, GA
St. George Island, FL
Charleston, SC
Los Angeles, CA
Pasadena, CA
Disneyland, CA
Tropical Island
Punta Cana, Dominica
Oahu Is., Hawaii
Cebu Is., Philippines
Asian Cities
Beijing, China
Shanghai, China
Nanjing, China
Taipei, Taiwan
Manila, Philippines
Munich, Germany
Dubai, U.A.E.
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Golden Gate Bridge
The widly ambitious project of spanning the Golden Gate with a suspension bridge between Marin County and San Francisco was brought to fruition in 1937. This, the second-longest single-span bridge on the planet, with 745-feet-high piling bearing 1.86 miles of roadway 220 feet above the boiling waters of the bay, has become the absolute sysmbol of San Francisco. For over sixty years its pure, red-orange silhouette has soared above the green, ocher and blue waters of the bay, withstanding seismic tremors, high winds and increasingly dense traffic.
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JOSEPH B. STRAUSS (1870-1938)
The designer of the Golden Gate Bridge first attracted attention in 1893 at the University of Cincinatti with a project for a bridge across the Bering Strait. His plan for the Golden Gate was scarcely less ambitious, and it was only by dint of great tenacity and persuasiveness that he was able to push it through a a time of economic difficulty. A bronze statue of the man who "conceived and gave shape" to the Golden Gate Bridge now overlooks the bay. All the same, it was the calculations made in 1930 by Strauss' aide, a brilliant engineer named Charles Alton Ellis, that allowed him to overcome many of the technical problems posed by the construction of a bridge on such an unusual site. Strauss (who was not a public works engineer) commissioned Ellis to draw up the bridge plans in 1921, and employed him to put them into execution in 1929. But later, in December 1931, fearing that his much-admired protege would steal the glory, Strauss sacked Ellis, on the pretext of a disagreement over the cost and timing of the work.
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A TECHNICAL TRIUMPH
The building of a suspension bridge at the mouth of a great port, anchored in a difficult, rocky site dangerously prone to earthquake tremors and buffeted by strong winds and sea currents, was a gamble of heroic proportions : 676,000 cubic yards of concrete, a million tons of steal and over eighty thousand miles of metal cables were used in the construction work. The two parallel cables, 3 feet in diameter, which supplied the main support for the roadway, were anchored to the two gigantic pilings of the bridge and sealed into monster concrete blocks at either end of it. The construction of the north piling on the on the Marin County side posed no insuperable difficulties, but the south one took two years to build. The first stage involved groundings a concrete border. When the work was finished, conduits were added to allow the seawater to circulate freely within the border, thus cushioning the highly exposed structure from tremors and high tides. Apart from the collapse of a platform beneath the roadway which killed nine men, there were no other fatal accidents during the five years it took to build the Bridge.
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Golden Gate Bridge Photo Gallery 1996, 2004, 2005
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