The area known as the Golden Gate is the channel formed where the mouth of San Francisco Bay meets the Pacific Ocean. While it is said that John C. Frémont first named these rocky straights the "Golden Gate," it is known with certainty that the term was commonly used at least two years before the 1849 gold rush: a ship-master who traded in San Francisco stated in an April 1846 letter that he hoped "to sail in at the Golden Gate by the middle of September."1 The idea of bridging the three-mile-wide strait was proposed as early as 1872 by railroad magnate Charles Crocker, but it was not until the San Francisco Call Bulletin newspaper began an editorial campaign in 1916 that it received popular backing. After the California legislature passed the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District Act, voters, in 1930, finally approved a $35 million construction bond.
Bridge designer Joseph Baermann Strauss became the Golden Gate's chief engineer. He instituted unprecedented safety measures in construction of the bridge, including a prototype of the hard hat and a safety net which stretched end-to-end under the bridge. The 19 construction workers whose falls were broken by the net during the four-and-a-half-year project were known as the Half-Way-to-Hell Club.
The Golden Gate Bridge links San Francisco to the south with Marin county to the north. It connects a host of natural wonders ranging from Seal Rock to Mt. Tamalpais; and architectural delights from San Francisco's Mission District to Marin County's Civic Center designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
To those arriving by sea into the San Francisco Bay area, the Golden Gate Bridge is the counterpart of New York's Statue of Liberty. In May 1987, to celebrate the bridge's fiftieth anniversary, some 300,000 individuals reenacted "Pedestrian Day '37" with an event dubbed "Bridgewalk '87." Two years later, on October 17, 1989, the gracefully suspended bridge withstood the 7.1 magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake without incident.
- San Francisco and Marin Counties lie along the San Andreas Fault and have experienced many earthquakes, the most seismographically powerful occurring in 1838, 1865, 1906, and 1989. To see motion pictures of San Francisco prior to and just after the 1906 earthquake, search on the term San Francisco in Early Motion Pictures, 1897-1920.
- View the Today in History features on the Williamsburg Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge. Also learn about the first transcontinental railroad through which Charles Crocker, as one of the "big four" developers of the Central Pacific, became a railroad magnate. Search on San Francisco in the Today in History Archive for more information about the city.
- View the Today in History features on the Williamsburg Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge. Also learn about the first transcontinental railroad through which Charles Crocker, as one of the "big four" developers of the Central Pacific, became a railroad magnate. Search on San Francisco in the Today in History Archive for more information about the city.
- Search on Seal Rocks in Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920 to learn about Congressional legislation of the mid-1880s "to grant certain Seal Rocks to the city and county of San Francisco . . . in trust for the people of the United States." It was intended to "keep said rocks free from encroachment by man, and . . . preserve from molestation the seals and other animals now accustomed to resort there" and is an early example of Congressional wildlife protection accomplished by means of a grant to a local authority.
- The HABS/HAER Image Gallery is a sampling of the graphic records in the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) collections, among the largest and most heavily-used in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Explore this preview, designed to represent the depth and breadth of the collections, or search the full online collection titled Built in America: Historic Building and Engineering, 1933-Present.
