 
Golden Gate Bridge's
Roots
Joseph Strauss, a Cincinnati native,
was a noted civil engineer who in 1937 helped design the Golden Gate Bridge in San
Francisco. The Golden Gate is a wonderful example of Art Deco design that
spans a submerged cleft in the Coastal Mountain Range called the Golden Gate. It
is almost 9,000 feet long (about 2 miles) and joins north San Francisco and
Sausalito, California.
 There were many challenges to bridge designers:
rough ocean waters, high winds, the width of the waterway, and the huge expense. Plans
for a bridge to span the waterway began in 1916. For the next 15+ years the
bridge underwent many design changes on paper. In 1929 Joseph Strauss was
appointed as Chief Engineer; he budgeted construction at about $27,165,000. At
the time it was the largest suspension bridge on the globe.
The Golden Gate Bridge is the result of the joint effort of Joseph Strauss,
Clifford Paine, engineer Charles A. Ellis, and consulting architect Irving F.
Morrow. The bridge was paid for by San Francisco and five north coastal
California counties. Construction was relatively speedy, taking only 52 months
to complete. It opened May 27, 1937, at a cost of $27,125,000 - under
budget. Strauss was also a pioneer in building safety. He required
workers to wear hard hats (an innovation at the time) and undergo daily
sobriety tests. 
Saving Fort Point
While the original plans for the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge
recommended destruction of
Fort Point,
a civil war-era brick structure, Joseph Strauss insisted on saving the building
and designed around it. In doing so, a large portion of the cliff behind the fort was
removed, and
the cables were anchored there. The fort was used as base offices for
construction, and then the building was preserved and today is a popular tourist
attraction, and became a National Historic Site on October 16th, 1970.
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