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The Golden Gate Bridge is a suspension bridge spanning the Golden Gate, the opening into the San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean. It connects the city of San Francisco on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula to Marin County. more...

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The Golden Gate Bridge was the largest suspension bridge in the world when it was completed in 1937 and has become an internationally recognized symbol of San Francisco. It is currently the second longest suspension bridge in the United States after the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York City.

History

The crossing of the Golden Gate Strait was for many years accomplished by a ferry running between the Hyde Street Pier at the foot of Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco and Sausalito in Marin County. The idea of a bridge to span the Golden Gate Strait was brought up in an article by the engineer James Wilkins. The bridge later earned its name, Golden Gate Bridge, after a mention of it in 1917, by San Francisco city engineer M. M. O’Shaughnessy.

The bridge was the brainchild of Joseph Strauss, an engineer responsible for over 400 drawbridges, though they were far smaller than this project and mostly inland. Starting in 1921 with his first drawings that were far from approved, Strauss spent over a decade drumming up support in Northern California. Strauss's initial design comprised a massive cantilever on each side connected with a central suspension segment. Other key figures in the bridge's construction include architect Irving Morrow, responsible for the Art Deco touches and the choice of color, and engineer Charles Alton Ellis and bridge designer Leon Moisseiff, who collaborated on the complicated mathematics involved.

In May 1924, a hearing, through a petition, was heard by Colonel Herbert Deakyne for the Secretary of War in a request to use land for the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. Col. Deakyne, in the Secretary of War's name, approved to give the land needed for the bridge structure and leading roads to the "Bridging the Golden Gate Association" and both the San Francisco and the Marin counties pending further bridge plans by Mr. Strauss.

The Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District was incorporated in 1928 as the official entity to design, construct, and finance the Golden Gate Bridge. The District includes not only the City & County of San Francisco, and Marin County, in whose boundaries the bridge sits, but also Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino and Del Norte counties. Representatives from each of the six counties sit on the District's Board of Directors. Voters within the District approved funding for the project in 1930 through a special bond issue that put their homes, farms and business properties up as collateral. This bond issue raised the initial $35 million to finance the building of the Bridge. Construction began on January 5, 1933. The last of the construction bonds were retired in 1971, with $35 million in principal and nearly $39 million in interest being financed entirely from tolls. Strauss, a graduate of the University of Cincinnati, placed a brick from his alma mater's demolished McMicken Hall in the south anchorage before the concrete was poured.

Read more at Wikipedia.org