Walking along the Golden Gate Bridge pedestrian walkway and approaching the towers, one can see rows of rivets that extend upwards as far as the eye can see. While this experience for me as a steel fabricator is moving, there are other features on this bridge that an iron and steel preservationist greatly appreciates. One of these is the arch located on the San Francisco approach to the Golden Gate Bridge, key to the preservation of the nineteenth century Fort Point underneath.
Initial bridge plans included the demolition of Fort Point, but chief engineer Joseph Strauss thought it was worth preserving. “It should be preserved and restored as a national monument.” He directed his engineers to revise the original plans to save the fort, and it was Charles Alton Ellis who made the revision. Ellis would later be recognized as the Golden Gate Bridge designer, as documented in John Van Der Zee’s 1986 book, “The Gate: The True Story of the Design and Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge.”
“In February 1931 Ellis, still performing at an intense level of inspiration, went to work on one of the crucial underpinnings of the bridge, that supporting the San Francisco entrance to the roadway. Here, above the site of the old Fort Point, which had at one time been scheduled for demolition to make way for the bridge, a structure would have to be built that buttressed the bridge while allowing room for the fort, a situation fraught with possibilities for compromise and an aesthetic hodgepodge. Instead, Ellis responded with another gem: a graceful arch made of three steel truss spans, curving over the fort and under the bridge in such a way that detracts from neither and serves as a transition between the lightness and strength of the steel bridge and the Romanesque red brick arches and vaults of the fort. Ellis’s design was converted into detailed plans by the Strauss Chicago drafting staff under the direction of the firm’s managing engineer, Clifford Paine. The bridge had been moved a graceful step closer to realization.” (p. 132, The Gate)
Ellis’s graceful steel truss arch still protects Fort Point, and these trusses are part of the ongoing Golden Gate Bridge Seismic Retrofit Project that involves modifying this nearly century old bridge to modern earthquake engineering standards. The arch retrofit was part of Phase II of this project and received the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Outstanding Civil Engineering Award in 2007.
I would recommend John Van Der Zee’s book, accurately described in the publisher’s blurb: “With novelistic flair, van der Zee recounts an exciting drama of human greed, ambition, frailty, courage, and intellectual achievement.”
Photos by Vern Mesler
