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Narrator: In June 1921, a 51-year old bridge builder from Chicago arrived in San Francisco to deliver plans for the project of his dreams. Joseph Strauss made His living building ordinary draw bridges
We have this file available for download.
Narrator: In June 1921, a 51-year old bridge builder from Chicago arrived in San Francisco to deliver plans for the project of his dreams. Joseph Strauss made His living building ordinary draw bridges, but he was a relentless dreamer - a man determined to be remembered for something much bigger. Now, Strauss had conceived plans for what he considered the most daring bridge ever. His chosen site fronted the turbulent waters of the Pacific Ocean at the mouth of one of the world's great harbors. San Francisco's Golden Gate was a treacherous spot the likes of which no bridge builder had ever attempted to span. Little did San Francisco's City Engineer realize, he was dealing with a man who had once proposed bridging the Bering Strait.
Kevin Starr, Historian of California: There was an archetypal American kind of personality, who comes to fruition mythically in the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. And that's the promoter, the P.T. Barnum, the visionary, the man who is constantly dreaming dreams and promoting big projects. And Joseph Strauss was that kind of person.
Narrator: Strauss arrived at an opportune moment. Though his plans would languish in the city bureaucracy for another 18 months, San Franciscans would soon understand they held the key to the city's future. Sitting at the tip of a peninsula, surrounded on three sides by water, San Francisco was bottled up, its expansion stunted by geography. By 1920, the federal census revealed the city's growth had dipped below the national average. Even worse, San Francisco had fallen behind its rival to the south. With plenty of land, Los Angeles was booming. San Francisco's future would depend on its ability to link with the underpopulated counties of northern California which stretched more than 300 miles to the Oregon border.
Kevin Starr: 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. It had already exploited as much of this bay hinterland as it could.
Narrator: San Francisco Bay separated two worlds, one urban and congested; the other rural and wide open.
Richard Dillon, Author, High Steel: Sausalito and Marin County was a rural and pastoral country.....dairy ranches, chicken ranches, that kind of thing, all the way extending up the coast...
Kevin Starr: It was also the area that you went for amusement... So you'd go over there on the weekends to-to go to the outdoors, to the park, to amusement centers, to enjoy the beaches; it was the playground of San Francisco..... And coming back on Sunday night could be quite a long line of cars waiting to come back to San Francisco.
Richard Dillon: My brother Bill, Bill Dillon, was a traffic cop for the Golden Gate Ferries. And his job was, with other officers, to keep the traffic from jamming the little town. They piled themselves up on that one main street, Water Street, all the way to the north edge of town and beyond.
Narrator: Over time, the weekend crush became a daily one. By the 1920's, 50,000 commuters a week surged through San Francisco's ferry building. Many came from the east bay, but increasingly from the counties to the north. It would take more than ferries to accommodate the growing traffic between San Francisco, and its outlying counties.
Kevin Starr: The 1920's is the decade of the automobile. San Francisco knew that it had to push forward, via the automobile, to its hinterlands. And that meant a bridge.
Narrator: In 1922 Joseph Strauss crossed the Gate by ferry and set out on a road trip north. The first stop on his self-orchestrated campaign was Sausalito's city council. A bridge would boost property values, he told a curious audience, encourage development and invite tourism. In short, the day a bridge opened, anyone who owned property in Marin County would automatically be wealthy. It was a performance Strauss would repeat before countless civic organizations and public meetings from communities throughout Northern California.
Mark Ketchum, Civil Engineer: This bridge needed a promoter. It needed a champion, someone willing to work half their life, almost, probably to his own financial detriment-promoting this bridge and making it happen.
Narrator: "If the people of San Francisco and other communities are willing to spend the money," Strauss told the San Francisco Chronicle, "the Golden Gate could be bridged by 1927."
To build his bridge, Strauss would have to overcome a formidable environment. Northern California's rivers, fed by the heavy snows of the Sierras, have only one outlet. The mountain water flows into San Francisco Bay, and then toward the mile-wide gap called the Golden Gate. At the Gate, it collides head-on with the incoming force of the Pacific Ocean.
Stephen Cassady, Author, Spanning the Gate: What you see is the collision of natural forces: fresh water and salt. All of the Pacific Ocean that hits the California coast is looking for a place to go. It has one place. And that's the mile-and-a-quarter aperture between Fort Point and Lime Point, between Marin and San Francisco.
Mark Ketchum: If you go out to the brid