Golden Gate

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 eff ortlessly 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 paint ers 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 de cades 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.