The Final Leap (4 page)

The appendices also include numbers to call for help and information if you or someone you know is feeling suicidal, as well as the most complete listing to date of people who have killed themselves by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. The latter has a table with a year-by-year count of known suicides from the bridge. The total, midway through 2011 is 1,575. The actual number, as noted earlier, is certainly higher.

The Golden Gate Bridge is beautiful, but not to everyone. It's not beautiful to families and friends who have lost loved ones. While others celebrate the splendor, grace, and technological triumph of the bridge, they're reminded of a deep, never-ending hurt. With each new viewing of the span, whether in person, in a movie, in a company logo, or on an article of clothing, the wound is reopened. Few other death scenes embody so much emotion for so many people.

The bridge isn't beautiful to people who are unfortunate enough to witness a jump. Whether that person is a pedestrian on the bridge, a motorist driving by, a sailor on the bay, or a bridge worker, seeing a person hurtle over the railing is traumatizing. You view the bridge differently after that. Beauty and death can't be separated.

The bridge isn't beautiful to many police officers or Coast Guard personnel, either. It represents an unsavory part of their job, something they do only because there's no one else to do it.

This is the story of how one of the world's most famous landmarks became the top destination of people wanting to die. It's also the story of why, so far, the Golden Gate Bridge remains that way. If it takes you a week to read this book, and the Golden Gate Bridge still doesn't have a suicide deterrent, odds are that another tortured soul will have jumped before you finish. And a whole new group of people will be left to mourn.

One day steps will be taken so that suicides from the bridge end, just as they have ended on other famous monuments around the world. When that happens, lives will be saved. Unfortunately, that day isn't here yet. As a result, the deaths continue—tragic, misunderstood, and totally preventable.

The Golden Gate Bridge is practically suicide proof. Suicide from the bridge is neither possible nor probable.

—Joseph Strauss, chief engineer,
  Golden Gate Bridge, 1936

The issue of suicide has been inextricably linked with the Golden Gate Bridge since it was built. From the bridge's inauguration in 1937 to the present, the dangers of this iconic landmark have been ignored, obscured, and dismissed by nearly everyone—especially public officials and the media. The dark underside of the bridge's history offers testimony to its Janus-like appeal. While it is a monumental edifice, noted for its beauty, it also serves as the world's leading site for suicide.

The building of a bridge, over the shortest point at the mouth of San Francisco Bay, was deemed impossible during the nineteenth century due to the high winds and strong currents of the Golden Gate Strait. This stretch of water, named by Captain John Fremont several years before gold was discovered in California, intimidated engineers and city planners for decades. In 1872 business tycoon Charles Crocker advocated unsuccessfully for a bridge, and forty years later it was still deemed unfeasible. Nevertheless, Michael O'Shaughnessy, the city engineer of San Francisco, prompted by a local newspaper editor named James Wilkins, who had studied engineering, began sounding out others about ways that it could be accomplished. The population in and around San Francisco was growing, yet the city was surrounded on three sides by water. It had no place to expand. Meanwhile, fifty thousand people were commuting to San Francisco every day on ferryboats. The majority came from Alameda and Contra Costa counties to the east, although some also came from the north, from Marin, Napa, and Sonoma counties. They debarked en masse at the Ferry Building in downtown San Francisco, causing a mad crush of people that worsened as communities in surrounding areas increased in population. The most attractive option was to facilitate automobile access from the north; after all, by the 1920s Henry Ford was mass-producing cars, turning out one every fifteen minutes, at prices that were affordable to many working-class people. The ability to construct a bridge over the treacherous strait of water presented a significant roadblock, however.

The few engineers who said it was possible placed an enormous price tag on it—$100 million or more. That's when Joseph Strauss entered the scene. Strauss had never built a bridge remotely close in size or complexity to what the site demanded. He had graduated from the University of Cincinnati thirteen years before the school conferred engineering degrees, and he never belonged to the American Society of Civil Engineers. Furthermore, his specialty was drawbridges—he had constructed more than four hundred, all of the same basic design. Nevertheless, what he lacked in technological know-how he made up for with persistence, determination, and chutzpah. He told O'Shaughnessy that a bridge could be built across the strait at a cost of $27 million. In 1921 he submitted his design for it.

Resistance to the bridge came from multiple sources. The U.S. War Department, which had jurisdiction over the area, was concerned about possible disruptions to shipping and military traffic in the harbor. The War Department also owned the land on both sides of the strait, where the bridge's approaches would be located, and did not want to be responsible for the cost of maintaining them.

Southern Pacific Railroad opposed the bridge for financial reasons. In addition to railroads which crisscrossed the country, the company owned the ferryboats that transported passengers every day into San Francisco. Its lucrative monopoly was threatened if the city became accessible from the north by car. Company lawyers fought fiercely to protect Southern Pacific's interests; however, a series of court cases ended in rulings that favored the bridge.

Environmentalists also opposed the bridge. They believed that the site was too beautiful to mar with any kind of man-made structure. From bluffs on the Marin Headlands and cliffs on the San Francisco side, hikers had sweeping, unobstructed views of the bay, the hills, and the Pacific Ocean. This was one location where the awe-inspiring views had to be preserved, unblemished, they claimed.

Several counties north of San Francisco—Mendocino, Napa, Lake, and Humbolt—had supported construction of the bridge early on, but backed out as cost estimates rose. In the midst of the Depression, financing a project of this magnitude was considered too daunting even though it would provide much-needed jobs. It didn't help that the nearby Bay Bridge, connecting Oakland and Berkeley to the east with San Francisco, was already under construction, and all available government funding was allocated to it. The Golden Gate Bridge, as a result, had to be financed with bonds that would be paid back by revenues from future tolls.

In 1923 the California State Legislature passed the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District Act. The act gave San Francisco and five counties north of it the right to form a bridge district, borrow money, issue bonds, build a bridge, and collect tolls. In 1928, the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District was established, consisting of San Francisco (which is both a city and a county), Marin County, Sonoma County, Del Norte County, and portions of Napa and Mendocino counties. (In 1969, the legislature approved a bill that expanded the district's responsibilities to include bus and ferry service in the area. At that time the word “Transportation” was added to the district's name.)

After the district was formed, Strauss was named chief engineer of the bridge. His main task, early on, was to lobby for a ballot measure that approved construction. Multiple measures went down to defeat, and for awhile it looked like the bridge would never be built. At the same time, another problem emerged. Strauss's original design was part suspension span and part cantilever structure. Its functionality was questionable, and its appearance was far from elegant. According to Golden Gate Bridge historian John van der Zee, it was “a ponderous, ugly structure of mixed parentage, based on erroneous survey information and precious little actual engineering.” Most local officials didn't know enough to question the science behind the design. They were disappointed by the look of the bridge, though, and wanted something more inspiring, befitting the sweep of the bay and the international sophistication of San Francisco. Strauss brought in several consultants to help, among them Leon Mois-seiff and Charles Ellis.

Moisseiff was born in Latvia and came to the United States in 1891 at age nineteen. When Strauss began working on designs for the Golden Gate Bridge, Moisseiff was considered one of the best bridge designers in the country, having designed the Manhattan Bridge, among others. It was Moisseiff who determined that it was possible to construct a single span suspension bridge across the Golden Gate Strait even though no bridge had ever been built at the mouth of a major harbor, and no suspension bridge that long had ever been erected.

Unlike other spans, suspension bridges sway in the wind. They also expand in hot weather and contract in cold weather (the cables lengthening and constricting depending on the temperature). The longer the span, the more swaying and variation occurs, much like a clothesline. Given that the Golden Gate Bridge would be longer than any other suspension bridge in the world, it would sway more than any other. Based on the load it was supporting and the temperature, the bridge would deflect one to two feet both longitudinally and sideways, causing the floor of the bridge at mid-span to rise or fall ten feet from its normal elevation.

Charles Ellis was a faculty member in the engineering department at the University of Illinois when Straus contacted him. It was Ellis, the author of
Essentials in the Theory of Framed Structures—
must reading for engineering students at the time—who crunched the numbers upon which calculations for the Golden Gate Bridge were based. The calculations were complex, done with a circular slide rule and an adding machine, and filled eleven volumes. Seven different rivers empty into the Golden Gate Strait, which at its deepest point is 335 feet. In addition, the area is marked by high winds, thick fog, and rough tidal action. Also, the bridge would be built almost on top of the San Andreas Fault, a major fault line in California and the source of the 1906 earthquake that reduced much of San Francisco to rubble.

Many factors are considered in designing a bridge. Some are obvious, such as the length of the span and the terrain to be crossed (water presents different challenges than chasms). Others are more technical, such as height, materials, and the state of technology at the time of construction. Still other factors are considered only by engineers such as live load (the weight of traffic that the bridge will carry), dead load (the weight of materials that the bridge is constructed from), and wind load (the pressures exerted by wind on the bridge). Height was a key factor in the design and construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. Because it was the first bridge in the world to be built at the mouth of a major harbor, it had to be high enough to allow tall ships to pass underneath. As a result, the roadway—with pedestrian access—is considerably higher than the roadways of most other bridges. This height is the main reason why jumping from the bridge is so deadly; it's the equivalent of a twenty-five-story building.

Using Moisseiff's concept of a light-weight, highly calibrated suspension bridge that would sway with the elements, Ellis set to work. What inspired him was that the site for the new bridge was a dramatic meeting place of land and water. Ellis was a classical scholar as well as a civil engineer who translated passages from Greek to English in his spare time. He understood that this was an extraordinary opportunity to meld engineering skills with unparalleled beauty.

Ellis took charge of the test borings for the bridge towers, the surveying, and the location of the footings at both ends. The two steel towers of the bridge would be the largest and tallest ever built at that time, rivaling Manhattan skyscrapers. Their height above the water—746 feet—would be 190 feet greater than the Washington Monument. Each anchorage would require massive excavation and a staggering amount of concrete. Each tower would have a small elevator so that workers could make repairs to the saddles at the top holding the cables (originally, the elevators also would transport visitors to glassed-in observatories; however, this idea was scrapped for financial reasons). The south tower, on the San Francisco side, would be in the open sea, eleven hundred feet from shore. Professional divers were hired to search the ocean floor for an appropriate site, often swimming in near darkness due to alluvial deposits. Once a site was identified, divers cleared it and prepped it for the foundation. This tower required construction of a special pier, too, built like a bowl, set in the water and as long as a football field. Shortly after it was built, the pier was destroyed by a ship that was thrown off course because of heavy fog and crashed into it. It had to be reconstructed.

All of these details—and many others—Ellis calculated and recalculated in precise fashion. He worked twelve- and fourteen-hour days in order to meet Strauss's demanding schedule. Even with the efforts of Moisseiff and Ellis, as well as other engineers, the Golden Gate Bridge wouldn't be what it is today were it not for Irving Morrow. The bridge wouldn't be half as beautiful, half as distinctive, or anywhere near as famous. It also wouldn't be as deadly.

Morrow was a little-known architect who primarily designed houses, as did his wife, Gertrude. Every day he commuted by ferry from his home in Oakland to his office in San Francisco. During these trips he was continually struck by the play of light and shadows on the water at the mouth of the bay. When Strauss entrusted him with the task of making the bridge attractive, Morrow jumped at the chance. He added the distinctive Art Deco styling for which the bridge is now known. He tapered the enormous twin towers in order to accentuate their height, added vertical, chevron fluting on the tower bracing to pick up and reflect sunlight, and designed the toll plaza and pedestrian walkways. The latter, aimed to provide signature views, enabled people to amble, jog, and bicycle across the bridge. Unfortunately, they also gave individuals an easy avenue to jump.