Golden Gate Bridge history and facts: the strait, the fight to build it, Strauss and Ellis, the four years, the colour, the net and the numbers

Architecture · 4 September 2026

The Golden Gate Bridge crosses the mile-wide strait between San Francisco and the Marin headlands where the Pacific enters San Francisco Bay, and was built between January 1933 and April 1937, opening on 27 May 1937 with a main span of 4,200 feet (1,280 m), the longest in the world until 1964, and towers 746 feet (227 m) high, the tallest bridge towers until 1998. It was promoted for twenty years by the engineer Joseph Strauss, designed in its final form by the engineer Charles Ellis, whose name Strauss removed, and the architect Irving Morrow, who chose the Art Deco towers and the orange colour, and built in tides, fog and wind by about 1,000 men, of whom 11 died, 19 others being saved by a safety net; it cost 35 million dollars in bonds that were paid off by tolls in 1971. Below: the strait and the fight to bridge it, who designed it, how it was built, the colour, the opening, the numbers, and the stories, with the age's other iron and steel in how the Brooklyn Bridge was built and Art Deco architecture.

The strait and the fight to bridge it

The explorer John C. Frémont named the strait Chrysopylae, the Golden Gate, in 1846, after the Golden Horn of Constantinople, two years before gold was found in California; it is 1.7 miles long and a mile wide, 370 feet deep, with tides of up to 7 knots, fog for half the summer and winds of 60 miles an hour, and until 1937 the only way across was the ferry, which by the 1920s carried 50,000 cars on a weekend and made the ferry company the largest in the world. The idea of a bridge was first published in 1872 by the railroad promoter Charles Crocker, and in 1916 the city engineer Michael O'Shaughnessy asked engineers whether it could be done; most said no, or at 100 million dollars. Joseph Strauss, a Chicago builder of drawbridges, answered with a design for 17 million in 1921, an ugly hybrid of cantilever and suspension, and spent the next decade campaigning through the counties north of the bay, which had to form a Bridge District and pledge their property as security; the ferry company, the Southern Pacific railroad and the War Department fought it, with 2,300 lawsuits, and the district was formed in 1928 and won a 35-million-dollar bond vote in 1930, in the Depression, which the Bank of America's A.P. Giannini agreed to buy. Golden Gate Bridge.

Who designed it

Strauss's 1921 design was rejected as ugly and unsound, and the bridge as built was the work of three other men. Leon Moisseiff, the designer of the Manhattan Bridge, proposed a pure suspension bridge with a 4,200-foot span and the "deflection theory" that let the deck be light and flexible; Charles Ellis, a professor of engineering at the University of Illinois and Strauss's chief designer, did the structural calculations over two years, some 30,000 equations without a computer, designed the towers and the anchorages, and specified the steel, working with Moisseiff by telegram; and Irving Morrow, a local architect, designed the Art Deco form of the towers with their stepped-back portals, the lighting, the railings and the pedestrian walkways, and chose the colour. In December 1931 Strauss dismissed Ellis, apparently jealous of his growing credit, telling him to take a vacation and then not to come back; Ellis's name appeared nowhere on the bridge, and the plaque of 1937 named Strauss alone. The Bridge District recognised Ellis's role in 2007, seventy years later, and a plaque was added in 2012. Strauss died in 1938, a year after the opening; his statue stands at the San Francisco end.

How it was built, 1933–1937

• January 1933. Ground broken on 5 January; the anchorages, blocks of concrete of 60,000 tons each, are poured on both shores, and the Marin pier is built in shallow water without difficulty.
• The south pier, 1933–35. The San Francisco tower had to stand 1,100 feet from shore in the open ocean, in 100 feet of water with the tide running through; a trestle from the shore was wrecked twice by storms and a ship, and the plan for a caisson failed when it bucked in the swell and had to be towed away. The engineers built instead a "fender", an oval ring of concrete like a giant bathtub, poured in sections from barges by divers who could work only twenty minutes at slack tide, four times a day; the water was pumped out and the pier built inside it on bedrock, a serpentine rock that geologists warned was too weak and that has held through two earthquakes. It was finished in January 1935.
• The towers, 1934–35. Steel cells, 44,000 tons per tower, fabricated in Pennsylvania by Bethlehem Steel, shipped through the Panama Canal, and riveted together on site in a pattern that engineers had to draw in a manual of 25 volumes so that workers could find their way through the 23 miles of internal passages; the Marin tower was finished in November 1934 and the San Francisco tower in June 1935.
• The cables, 1935–36. John A. Roebling's Sons, the Brooklyn Bridge firm, spun the two cables in the air, as at Brooklyn, in six months and nine days: 27,572 wires each, 80,000 miles of wire in all, each cable 36.5 inches thick and 7,650 feet long.
• The deck, 1936–37. The steel roadway was built outward from each tower in balanced sections and joined in November 1936; the concrete surface was laid, the six lanes and two walkways, and the bridge finished on 19 April 1937, ahead of schedule and 1.3 million dollars under budget.

The net and the deaths

Strauss required hard hats, the first big project to do so, safety lines, a nurse on site and, at a cost of 130,000 dollars, a safety net hung under the deck as it went out, the first ever; nineteen men fell into it and lived, and called themselves the "Halfway to Hell Club". Until February 1937 the project had lost one man, a surveyor crushed by a derrick in October 1936, which was a record for a bridge of the size, where the rule of thumb was one death per million dollars. On 17 February 1937, three months before the opening, a scaffold under the deck carrying twelve men broke from its supports and fell into the net, which tore under the weight, and ten men died in the water; two survived. Eleven deaths in all, a memorial to them at the south end. About 1,000 men worked on the bridge at any time, ironworkers, riveters, divers and labourers, in a Depression in which every job was contested.

The colour

The steel arrived from Pennsylvania in a reddish-orange lead primer, and Morrow, seeing it against the fog and the hills, argued for keeping something like it rather than the black, grey or aluminium the Navy and the Army wanted, the Navy having proposed yellow and black stripes for visibility; his colour, International Orange, a vermilion mixed for the bridge, is warm against the blue of the water and sky and visible in fog, and the district adopted it. The bridge has been repainted continuously since 1937 by a crew of about 30 painters and ironworkers; the original lead paint was replaced with zinc silicate and acrylic between 1965 and 1995, and the story that the bridge is painted end to end every year is a myth, the crew touching up the worst corrosion where they find it. The colour's formula is public and paint companies sell it.

The opening and after

On 27 May 1937 the bridge opened to pedestrians only, and 200,000 people crossed on foot, some on roller skates and stilts, for a week of "Fiesta"; the next day President Roosevelt pressed a telegraph key in Washington and the bridge opened to cars, at a toll of 50 cents. It carried 32 million vehicles in the first year and about 40 million a year now, on six lanes that a movable barrier reassigns between directions twice a day; the toll, collected only southbound, is electronic since 2013. The bridge closed for weather three times in its history, in 1951, 1982 and 1983, when winds of 70 miles an hour swung the deck; after 1951 lateral bracing was added, and in 1986 the concrete deck was replaced by a lighter one over four years of night work. On its 50th birthday, 24 May 1987, 300,000 people walked onto the bridge at once and the deck, designed to arch upward, flattened under the weight, the heaviest load it had ever carried, without harm. A seismic retrofit began in 1997 and continues; a suicide-prevention net of steel mesh, 20 feet below the deck, was completed in January 2024 after decades of argument, the bridge having been the site of more than 1,800 deaths.

The numbers

• Span. 4,200 feet (1,280 m) between the towers; total length 8,981 feet (2,737 m); the longest suspension span in the world from 1937 to 1964, when the Verrazzano-Narrows passed it by 60 feet.
• Towers. 746 feet (227 m) above the water, 500 feet above the deck; 22,000 tons of steel each; 600,000 rivets each.
• Cables. Two, 36.5 inches (0.92 m) thick, 27,572 wires each; 80,000 miles (129,000 km) of wire; the cables would stretch three times round the earth.
• Clearance. 220 feet (67 m) at high tide; the deck sways up to 27 feet sideways in wind and rises and falls 16 feet with load and temperature.
• Time. 4 years and 4 months; 1,000 workers; 11 dead.
• Cost. 35 million dollars, about 800 million today; paid off in 1971.
• Traffic. About 40 million vehicles a year; 10 million visitors; the walkway is open to pedestrians and cyclists in daylight, free.

Versions and theories

• Strauss designed it. He promoted it, ran it and took the credit; his own design of 1921 was scrapped, and the bridge is Moisseiff's concept, Ellis's calculations and Morrow's form. Strauss's role, which was real, was in getting it built at all.
• The bridge is named for the Gold Rush. No: Frémont named the strait in 1846 for the Golden Horn, before the gold was found; the bridge is named for the strait.
• It is painted end to end every year. A myth; painting is continuous touch-up.
• The colour was a mistake that stuck. Partly: it began as the primer, but Morrow chose to keep it on purpose against the Navy's stripes and the Army's grey.
• The bridge nearly collapsed in 1987. The deck flattened under 300,000 people and engineers computed it was at about a third of its capacity; the crowd was stopped from growing, and the bridge has never been opened to a full crowd since.
• Serpentine rock under the south pier is dangerous. The geologist Bailey Willis said so in 1934 and the district's geologists disagreed; the pier survived the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and the retrofit since 1997 has strengthened the piers regardless.

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