Chapter One
BRIDGE
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 effortlessly
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 Fremont 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 painters 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.
The Bridge, however, had to evolve out of the political
process. The Southern Pacific did not want it because
it threatened Southern Pacific ferry operations on San
Francisco Bay that each workday brought into the Ferry
Building at the foot of the Embarcadero some fifty thousand
commuters, making it the busiest terminal outside of
Charing Cross Station, London. The Navy did not want it.
It could be shelled from off shore during war time and collapse,
blocking entrance and egress to the harbor. The
environmentalists did not want it. The Bridge seemed an
arrogant intrusion on nature. Yet the established governments
of the counties ringing San Francisco Bay, together
with Del Norte County on the Oregon border, wanted it.
Such a bridge would open the Redwood Empire to the
north and, more important, further consolidate the counties
of the Bay, especially the North Bay counties, with the
Bay Area itself, where nearly half the population of California
was then living.
A political battle ensued, pitting the Progressive impulse
to complete California through public works against
other interests and a generalized resistance to change. The
Great Depression affected the outcome. Public works provided
one of the leading ways Americans were combating
unemployment during this era. Yet the Golden Gate Bridge
was not a federal project, as was the San Francisco-Oakland
Bay Bridge. The Bridge resulted, rather, from a localized,
county-driven pro cess; and a private entity, the Bank of
America, bought the bonds, bringing into the genesis of the
Bridge yet another iconic American, A. P. Giannini, one of
the most notable bankers in American history.
Joseph Strauss was a great promoter, but the bridge he
initially proposed was a clumsy monstrosity. The Golden
Gate could not be defiled with such ugliness. Strauss eventually
came to recognize this fact, however reluctantly, and
he retained the best bridge designers in the nation to come
up with a better solution. The result: engineering as high
art, and high art as engineering. And then the color! International
Orange, it was called, at once a natural color and a
color highly suggestive of artifice, capable of blending into
all the hues and colors of the site and the pageant of wind,
fog, and maritime weather moving through the channel.
Designs complete, bonds sold, supervising engineer Russ
Cone and his construction crews got to work. Not since the
Brooklyn Bridge was built more than a half century earlier
had bridge-builders faced such a challenge. Americans build
things, and the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge constitutes
an epic achievement of American labor. It is a powerful
story-the sinking of the piers, the erection of towers,
the spinning and emplacement of cables. Eleven workers lost
their lives, ten on one day. Could such a structure be built,
one is tempted to ask, without some form of sacrifice? The
ancients would have answered No! The Golden Gate Bridge
represented a defiance of nature as well as a tribute to it, and
a certain score had to be settled.
Triumphantly, the Golden Gate Bridge linked the urbanism
of San Francisco with the unspoiled headlands of Marin
as if to suggest the paradox of California/America itself: a
gift of nature, a continent that F. Scott Fitzgerald described
as the last place commensurate with the human capacity
for wonder, a sacred text, a revelation of the Divine Mind,
as far as the Anglo-American Protestant imagination was
concerned-yet a place as well to be reshaped into cities,
with canals, roadways, railways, highways, aqueducts,
bridges, and all those other entities required by urban
civilization. Yet the Bridge did not destroy its site; rather, it
enhanced it, as the Parthenon enhances the hill upon which
it stands. The Golden Gate Bridge announced to the world
something important about the American imagination and
the American stewardship of the continent, taken at its best.
For all their faults, Americans could reform themselves to
exercise proper stewardship and would more and more do
so, despite the squanderings of the nineteenth century.
From an iconic perspective, the Golden Gate Bridge offers
a West Coast counterpart to the Statue of Liberty,
announcing, in terms of American Art Deco, American
achievement and the higher purposes of American culture.
And it does this with its own element of historical narrative,
subtly contained in the Art Deco stylization of its towers
played off against repetitive cables descending into a
reversed arch against an interplay of city, sea, and sky. Lest
this all sound too positive, even triumphant, it must be noted
that the Golden Gate Bridge, almost immediately, became,
literally, the springboard, the platform, for human tragedy,
beginning with the great accident of mid-February 1937
that claimed the lives of ten workers. Quite soon, the Bridge
became the venue of choice for suicide throughout the
greater Bay Area. By 2009 some 1,300 people had ended
their lives via the Bridge. What do these seven de cades of
death by suicide mean? Why have the guardians of the Golden
Gate Bridge been reluctant to, as they put it, mar the beauty
of the Bridge with suicide-prevention nets or fences? Is
this connection of the Bridge to death preventable or inevitable?
And if it is inevitable, what does that mean as far as the
iconic status of the Bridge is concerned? Here, in any event,
where the American continent gives out, the Golden Gate
Bridge continues to draw those who have lost what the English
novelist Evelyn Waugh has described as the unequal
struggle with life.
So hail and farewell, Golden Gate Bridge! You are in the
company of the grandest public works achievements of all
time; and like these structures, ancient and modern, you
serve practical necessity while at the same time encoding
meanings multiple and various. Generations have by now
been once young and grown old in your company. You have
helped to define a culture. You have succeeded in making
nature even more beautiful through engineering and art.
In times past, you were constructed, foot by foot, cable by
cable, bolt by bolt. But you also descended as golden Fire
from abstract Number in a manifestation that the ancients
would have understood. Like Rockefeller Center, you continue
to celebrate the best capacities of Art Deco. Your
color remains a joyous fusion of nature and artifice. You
were built to last for a thousand years, and both your permanence
and your vulnerability testify to your greatness. Do
you foretell a better world, ordered as you are ordered, according
to utility and grace? Or will human beings, ages
from now, gaze upon your ruins and marvel at the American
nation that once bestrode the continent and the resourceful
citizens of that once great but now lost Republic?
Chapter Two
ICON
According to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, an icon,
the Greek word for image, is more than a symbol.
While a symbol can signify or point to something larger,
an icon embodies the forces that are being signified. Thus
from an Orthodox Christian perspective, an icon is not
only an image of the sacred, it is itself a sacred object. Most
world religions nurture something akin to this belief. With
their theologized Puritan heritage, Americans shared this
sense of the iconic; indeed, for the great eighteenth-century
theologian Jonathan Edwards, briefly president of Princeton
University, the American continent itself was a sacred
text to be read, simultaneously, as a natural and a sacred
event. When he presented us with the Great White Whale
of Moby-Dick (1851), Herman Melville did more than present
us with a symbol. The whale, Captain Ahab fails to
understand, with tragic consequences, was not only a sign of
the sacred innocence and otherness of nature, it was also a
living manifestation of this truth, intensified to transcendental
proportions.
Nor were Americans oblivious to the iconic power of
engineering and architecture. Hence the taste for classicism
in the de cades of the early Republic, as Americans
sought to link their society with what they believed to be
the democratic republics of the ancient world. Hence the
taste for Gothic Revival as romanticism swept the nation
in the early mid-nineteenth century, with its suggestions of
older and more picturesque cultures. And hence the triumph
of steel and glass industrialism, in factories and train
stations initially, but carrying over into skyscrapers as well,
despite a tendency to design these new structures with
some sense of historical reference. But so too, when it came
to engineering, did Americans behold in each new turnpike,
light house, canal, aqueduct, or reservoir proof positive
of an assured destiny for the American Republic.
When it came to such symbology, a bridge was easy to
understand. Within the classical context, so beloved by
the early Republic, the bridge, as structure and symbol,
had been enshrined in Roman religion and the state in the
title Pontifex Maximus, the great bridgemaker, given the
high priest of the ancient Roman College of Pontiffs.
Bridges led from one place to another, hence signified the
passage to and from one world to another through religion,
which underlies the social compact. In time, the
Roman emperor assumed this title, Pontifex Maximus, as
a matter of course, and in the mid-fourth century of the
Common Era it passed over to the Bishop of Rome, the
Supreme Pontiff or Pope.
Bridges connected the sacred and profane. Bridges suggested
journeys between time and eternity. Bridges also
branded cities with signature landmarks. Medieval Florence
is ineluctably linked to the Ponte Vecchio (1345), which extended
the city across the Arno in a stone-built promenade
of shops and residences. London Bridge (1831) was not only
built and rebuilt across the years, destroyed by fire after fire
and falling down in a well-known nursery rhyme, it was
upstaged in 1894 by the Tower Bridge, a marvel of steel
construction and steel-based technology masked in a neo-Gothic
sheath, announcing, like the buildings of Parliament,
that here, in this city, London, one quarter of the planet
was ruled in an empire upon which the sun never set.
When a new city in that empire, Sydney, wished to express
its coming of age as an urban entity, along with the coming
of age of the new nation it served, it also built a bridge, the
Sydney Harbour Bridge (1932), the widest long-span bridge
in the world, which in time would frame the Sydney Opera
House (1974), both structures becoming leading icons of
a new world city.
For a generation of post-World War I writers and intellectuals
living and working in New York, the Brooklyn
Bridge (1883) did more than signify the triumph of post-Civil
War industrial technology. The Bridge embodied the
hope that the subsequent industrial era did not, of necessity,
have to result in a dehumanizing civilization. In its beauty
and civil urbanism, the Brooklyn Bridge-its piers sunk
deep into the East River, its neo-Gothic towers rising against
the Manhattan skyline, its ser vice through its pedestrian culture
of the city as theater and human community-embodied
a better nation to come or, at the least, offered writers and
artists seeking such a better nation the personal comfort
that such a finer America might be achieved.
Thus Italian-born artist John Stella portrayed the Brooklyn
Bridge in 1919 as a futurist rendering of the brave new
world to which he had immigrated; and thus Lewis Mumford,
an aspiring literary, architectural, and cultural critic,
experienced through the Brooklyn Bridge the transforming
notion that modern construction did not have to be ugly and
oppressive. The Brooklyn Bridge led Mumford to explore,
throughout the 1920s, the literary and architectural history
of the nation in search of usable patterns for future development:
the search for a usable past, as Mumford’s friend
Van Wyck Brooks understood it, launching himself as well
into a lifetime search for patterns in American culture, as
revealed through literature, that might inspire a developing
American society. And thus Hart Crane, a young midwesterner
of Anglo-American descent, also spent a good part of
the 1920s-the decade in which the Golden Gate Bridge was
being designed and prepared for construction-employing
the Brooklyn Bridge as the imaginative matrix for a notable
American poem.
Written in response to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922),
descrying the emptiness of modern civilization, Crane’s The
Bridge (1930) at once offers tribute to Eliot’s modernity
of poetic technique while at the same time rejecting Eliot’s
dismissal of modernity as a moral and psychological dead
end. Encountering the Brooklyn Bridge by dawn, walking
across it by night, en route to the towers of Manhattan in the
distance, Crane experiences the bridge as a triumph of engineering
offering a portal into the American past-from
Columbus to the conquistadores, from Pocahontas to Rip
Van Winkle, from the Gold Rush to the settlement of
the Midwest, from the construction of the transcontinental
railroad to the invention of the airplane, from the rise of
industrialism to the creation of New York City and the construction
of the Brooklyn Bridge itself-and offering as well,
finally, the hope that modernity, meaning industrialism and
the machine era, can be made to serve productive purposes.
Guiding Crane on his imaginative journey, like Virgil
guiding Dante in the Pugatorio, is the affirming presence of
Walt Whitman, the great yea-sayer of nineteenth-century
America. Challenging Whitman’s optimism is his contemporary
Edgar Allan Poe, poet and short story writer of
trauma, doubt, and despair. Much too brief to be considered
an epic, Crane’s seven-part poem is nevertheless epic
in its intent, seeking to subsume unto itself, via the mystic
alchemy of the Brooklyn Bridge, the totality of American
experience. Modernism has destroyed much in its wake,
the poet admits, and there remains the possibility of even
further destruction and loss. Yet the cables curving gracefully
downward from their neo-Gothic towers to support a
roadway between river and sky suggest also that the age
of engineering and the machine, subways, skyscrapers, and
airplanes, may also be productive of good. Even more, the
bridge may offer an experience of time and transcendence.
The cosmos itself reverberates through the orphic
strings of the bridge’s supporting cables, creating one song,
one bridge of fire, linked to the stars themselves and to the
deepest human desires for Cathay, meaning for Hart Crane
perfection of place, fulfillment in the social order.
Elliptical and elusive, modeled on the vatic Ur-poem of
the twentieth century, fully cognizant of the perils and terrors
of modern life, Hart Crane’s The Bridge nevertheless
ends on a note of hope. Its historicism, however oblique,
fits into the search for a usable past characteristic of an entire
generation of New York City writers. For Crane, the
Brooklyn Bridge is not merely a symbol of the American
history he is construing. It is, rather, its living embodiment,
its icon, offering not only knowledge and interpretation but
the actual experience of human culture, art and engineering,
the American past, and, indeed, the cosmos itself, things
seen and unseen yet known through imaginative and spiritual
experience.
Continues…
Excerpted from GOLDEN GATE
by KEVIN STARR
Excerpted by permission.
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Bloomsbury Press
ISBN: 9781596915343
