The Golden Gate

It’s hard to believe that only 73 years ago, the Golden Gate Bridge did not exist. The airplane is older than the Golden Gate Bridge. The particle accelerator is older than the Golden Gate Bridge. Betty White is older than the Golden Gate Bridge.
Yet today, the structure rises like “a natural, even an inevitable, entity,” as Kevin Starr, the California historian and author of over a dozen volumes on his home state, writes in “Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge.”

This is an exultant, discursive and strange little book. Starr is not older than the bridge; at his birth, people had already been shuttling across it for three years. But his narrative tour does evoke a grandfatherly ramble. Imagine setting off over the Golden Gate and being forced to stop every few feet not only to greet each passer-by, but also to endure a cursory biography or windy tangent. It gets difficult to enjoy the view.

Starr harks back — way back — “one hundred million years” back, to the “eons of geological time” it took to form the strait that his subject spans. After a brief lesson on ice ages and sediment formation, he’s on to the nearsighted Spanish, whose galleons cruised the waters off the West Coast for over 200 years until finally, in 1769, an expedition moving on foot from the south ascended the hills and reported back with the “exciting news” that they had spotted what would become known as San Francisco Bay.

Starr zips through the railroad era to the quake of 1906 to the mid-1920s, when a resurgent city and the rise of the automobile combined to create a crucial stimulus for bridging the Gate: horrific gridlock. Fifty thousand commuters were ferrying to and from San Francisco every weekday. On weekends, those who had floated their cars northward for woods and relaxation returned only to endure waits of “one, two, even three hours” for a boat ride home. Something had to be done.

So ensued a decade of political and architectural wrangling. The bridge was designed and redesigned (an early version resembled an “upside-down rat trap”). Money was promised. Wary constituents were wooed, including those “of a certain vintage” who feared that the bridge would “profane its site.” But this is hardly a suspense story (behold: bridge), and Starr’s dutiful recounting of civic process, wanting drama, grows tedious.

Players large and small come and go, with few save Joseph Strauss (a “P. T. Barnum of public works” and the bridge’s chief engineer) and Charles Alton Ellis (a professor of engineering and armchair classicist who transports Starr into a bizarre digression on Pythagoras) coming into relief. There is also unintentional comedy at critical moments: “Enter Frank Doyle . . . ” a segue goes; “Enter Amadeo Peter Giannini . . . ”; “Enter Leon Moisseif . . . ” — the effect is one of vaudeville characters tap-dancing onto the stage just in the nick of time.

Things pick up when the bridge does. Deep-sea divers plunge to inky depths to dynamite wells for the south pier; towers rise and cables are spun “more than 700 feet above the surging sea”; a geologist descends with his trusty hammer “into the very core” of a site pumped clear of water to “bang on the rock walls” and test their strength.

Starr’s structure, alas, is more rickety, his text marred by repetition and clumsy phrasing. We read at least three times that the Golden Gate was named after the Golden Horn of the Bosporus. Joseph Strauss is “dapper,” and so, on the next page, is the civic leader Frank Doyle. Then there are circularities like this: “There was only one way for Ellis to test his conclusions — through mathematics. A bridge could not be built to see if it worked. It would have to be tested through mathematics before it was built.”

The best writing concerns the courage of construction workers — “scaffolding and ladder men, painters aloft in their bosun’s chairs . . . willing to risk the high steel at a time when millions of Americans were out of work” — 11 of whom died just three months before the bridge was complete. In describing them Starr summons a reverence untainted by unfortunate juxtaposition, which is not so in his chapter on suicides, where the dead include “the poet, the political fixer, the founder of Victoria’s Secret.”

The bridge is a worthy object of adoration. But here, I was hoping for a little more polish, a little more insight (a discussion of the bridge as art directs us to “the Web site art.com”), a little more fact-checking (the “tunnels through Twin Peaks” are not “on Stockton and Irving Streets”), a little less sentimentality (“So hail and farewell, Golden Gate Bridge!”). Then again, perhaps it’s unfair to nitpick a love letter.