San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge opened to pedestrian traffic on May 27, 1937. It was immediately praised for being the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time of its completion, but more importantly, the bridge came to be regarded as the definitive symbol of the nation’s western frontier. Below, in a piece for Architect, Dan Halpern examines the origins and national significance of the Golden Gate Bridge.

I’d come to San Francisco to work out whether the Golden Gate Bridge, named for the strait that connects the San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean, might not be the end of America – its final border, the end of the West. This notion follows if you consider the beginning of the country, naturally, to be the Statue of Liberty. If the country has a beginning and an end, these are surely the two spots.

Yet for an immigrant from the Pacific Rim, surely the Golden Gate is where the country begins, not finishes. Joan Didion knew this, writing in 1982, “The Golden Gate Bridge, referring as it does to both the infinite and technology, suggests, to the Californian, a quite complex representation of land’s end, and also of its beginning.” So the idea is not without problems. All the same, there is clearly some historical sense to the simple metaphor of the West as end, keeping in mind that the American movement westward through the initial stages of the nation’s development is a historical fact, not a point of view. There is a tradition of the West as the nation’s vanguard, the place of youth and revolution, and inasmuch as the bridge represents the place – who, please, goes to San Francisco and buys a postcard of Coit Tower? – the bridge thus also represents the frontier, the furthest reach, the edge.

The next problem in fixing a beginning at the Statue of Liberty and an end at the bridge is that it makes an uneven pair of anchors. The statue is only a monument, and the bridge, 1.7 miles long, is an essential and utilitarian piece of infrastructure as much as it is an icon. It can’t just stand there untouched, but is used every day: Indeed, about 40 million vehicles cross the bridge annually, coming down from Marin County into the city and vice versa. That is to say, the bridge is difficult to make stand still as a simple icon.

The bridge is now in the middle of a $471 million seismic retrofit aimed at making it as safe and strong as possible – that is, better able to move with and dissipate seismic forces – without changing its appearance at all. Phase 1, shoring up the North (Marin) Viaduct, began in 1997 and finished in 2002; the second phase, strengthening the South (San Francisco) Viaduct, finished earlier this year; and the third phase, retrofitting the main span, is expected to continue through 2012. Engineers have replaced all the steel towers, which are up to 150 feet tall, below the south and north approaches to the central span. Pylons and anchorage housing have been strengthened, dampers and stiffeners and bracing installed. “It’s 10 times stronger, but the public doesn’t see any difference,” I was told by Denis Mulligan, chief engineer for the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District.

The bridging of the Golden Gate was spurred by the need for an easier commute. By the 1920s, 50,000 commuters a week were coming into the city on ferries, and the number was only increasing. But San Francisco itself, surrounded on three sides by water, had stopped developing after decades of tremendously rapid growth, with no land to expand into, and its future was dependent on access.

As Kevin Starr, the longtime California state librarian and now librarian emeritus, has put it: “San Franciscans were beginning to realize that there was a vast northern and interior empire that had to be integrated into the San Francisco economy and transportation and travel network for San Francisco truly to survive.”

Thus, as early as 1916, the San Francisco city engineer, Michael O’Shaughnessy, began to consult engineers about the possibility of bridging the strait. The typical estimate he received came in at around $100 million, or about $2 billion today, but Joseph Strauss, a Chicago engineer with experience in much smaller projects – his patented design for a bascule bridge, or drawbridge, was used worldwide – proposed to create a bulky cantilever-suspension hybrid for $25 million to $30 million; indeed, his initial cost estimate turned out to be $17 million. (The eventual cost was somewhere between $27 million and $36 million.)

Strauss spent the following years working to raise the money and the support necessary for the bridge, promoting the idea to every community in Northern California that would listen to him. In 1921, he hired Charles Ellis, an academic and engineer, to run the staff of his company and oversee the project, and in 1923 representatives of 21 Northern California counties met to come to an agreement to form the Association of Bridging the Gate, which would become a special district of the state in that same year, created in order to raise money to fund the bridge, largely financed by bridge bonds. The district was officially formed in 1928, with six counties ultimately joining, and in 1930 they voted in a $35 million bond issue, pledging the value of their property and assets against the bridge. The bridge, thus, would not belong solely to San Francisco but to a set of Californian communities, existing as its own entity.

“In the midst of the Great Depression – what a tremendous leap of faith!” Mulligan said, sitting in a conference room in the district offices, which are located yards away from the toll booths at the base of the city side of the bridge. “Because voting in – voting in meant they bet the farm. Literally. They put up their homes, farms, factories as guarantees for the bonds. So the vote meant for 30 years afterward this obligation was mentioned in your deed. Nobody thought it could sustain itself. But it did.”

–Excerpted by Jodie C. Liu

*Photo courtesy yuzu.