The Final Leap Read Online Free PDF

for its beauty, it also serves as the world’s leading site for suicide.
    The building of a bridge, over the shortest point at the mouth of San Francisco Bay, was deemed impossible during the nineteenth century due to the high winds and strong currents of the Golden Gate Strait. This stretch of water, named by Captain John Fremont several years before gold was discovered in California, intimidated engineers and city planners for decades. In 1872 business tycoon Charles Crocker advocated unsuccessfully for a bridge, and forty years later it was still deemed unfeasible. Nevertheless, Michael O’Shaughnessy, the city engineer of San Francisco, prompted by a local newspaper editor named James Wilkins, who had studied engineering, began sounding out others about ways that it could be accomplished. The population in and around San Francisco was growing, yet the city was surrounded on three sides by water. It had no place to expand. Meanwhile, fifty thousand people were commuting to San Francisco every day on ferryboats. The majority came from Alameda and Contra Costa counties to the east, although some also came from the north, from Marin, Napa, and Sonoma counties. They debarked en masse at the Ferry Building in downtown San Francisco, causing a mad crush of people that worsened as communities in surrounding areas increased in population. The most attractive option was to facilitate automobile access from the north; after all, by the 1920s Henry Ford was mass-producing cars, turning out one every fifteen minutes, at prices that were affordable to many working-class people. The ability to construct a bridge over the treacherous strait of water presented a significant roadblock, however.
    The few engineers who said it was possible placed an enormous price tag on it—$100 million or more. That’s when Joseph Strauss entered the scene. Strauss had never built a bridge remotely close in size or complexity to what the site demanded. He had graduated from the University of Cincinnati thirteen years before the school conferred engineering degrees, and he never belonged to the American Society of Civil Engineers. Furthermore, his specialty was drawbridges—he had constructed more than four hundred, all of the same basic design. Nevertheless, what he lacked in technological know-how he made up for with persistence, determination, and chutzpah. He told O’Shaughnessy that a bridge could be built across the strait at a cost of $27 million. In 1921 he submitted his design for it.
    Resistance to the bridge came from multiple sources. The U.S. War Department, which had jurisdiction over the area, was concerned about possible disruptions to shipping and military traffic in the harbor. The War Department also owned the land on both sides of the strait, where the bridge’s approaches would be located, and did not want to be responsible for the cost of maintaining them.
    Southern Pacific Railroad opposed the bridge for financial reasons. In addition to railroads which crisscrossed the country, the company owned the ferryboats that transported passengers every day into San Francisco. Its lucrative monopoly was threatened if the city became accessible from the north by car. Company lawyers fought fiercely to protect Southern Pacific’s interests; however, a series of court cases ended in rulings that favored the bridge.
    Environmentalists also opposed the bridge. They believed that the site was too beautiful to mar with any kind of man-made structure. From bluffs on the Marin Headlands and cliffs on the San Francisco side, hikers had sweeping, unobstructed views of the bay, the hills, and the Pacific Ocean. This was one location where the awe-inspiring views had to be preserved, unblemished, they claimed.
    Several counties north of San Francisco—Mendocino, Napa, Lake, and Humbolt—had supported construction of the bridge early on, but backed out as cost estimates rose. In the midst of the Depression, financing a