The first architectural rendering for a bridge spanning San Francisco Bay, unveiled in 1922, was an unmitigated disaster.

Awkwardly combining cantilever with suspension bridge elements, the clunky first Golden Gate Bridge plans displayed in The San Francisco Chronicle looked like they were designed by your junior high orthodontist. A subsequent drawing went too far in the other direction, with Corinthian columns painted gold, and garish lights on top.

But the final plans were just right — an Art Deco masterpiece that served as a timeless architecture and engineering triumph, a functional span, and possibly the greatest tourism magnet ever built.

“A necklace of surpassing beauty was placed on the lovely throat of San Francisco yesterday,” The Chronicle’s Willis O’Brien wrote on opening day in 1937. “It is the Golden Gate Bridge. It is the bridge that sings.”

The Golden Gate Bridge was completed to rave reviews that haven’t stopped. But like every bridge plan in San Francisco history, it was an excruciating process filled with bitter fighting, accusations of fraud and much unintentional humor. In a city where nothing involving politics happens easily, San Francisco’s bridges may be its greatest accomplishments.

The Bay Bridge, predicted 60 years earlier by Emperor Norton (“I command here a bridge!”), was the first major bridge in San Francisco by six months. (Shorter bridges over the channel at Third and Fourth streets in China Basin preceded the Bay Bridge by decades.) Overshadowed in subsequent years by its more famous sibling to the northwest, the Bay Bridge received a monumental welcome that has been largely forgotten.

The entire state was combed for enough scrap iron to complete the Bay Bridge project — 152,000 tons of steel was used — and Franklin Delano Roosevelt called it the biggest construction project in U.S. history.

Former President Herbert Hoover was on hand for the dedication, also speaking in superlatives.

“This marks the physical beginning of the greatest bridge yet erected by the human race,” Hoover said. “But it is more than a bridge. It marks the consummation of the unity of effort on the part of citizens of the municipalities, the State and the Federal Government, which is the genius of our countrymen.”

The Chronicle described a crowd of more than a million packing San Francisco for the Bay Bridge opening day party, a “swirling torrent of humanity” that continued for days. Telegraph Hill was reportedly “so covered in humanity, that from a distance you couldn’t see the cliffs.”

School was canceled, and the entire region enjoyed several fireworks displays and a floating light show courtesy of military ships. Some revelers idled in gridlock for eight hours for a chance to cross the Bay Bridge on the first day — and declared it worth the wait.

Some amusing side notes from the first days of the first large bridge in San Francisco.

• Gov. Frank Merriam and his police escort were supposed to be the first to cross the Bay Bridge, but were upstaged by some clueless tourists from Nebraska. Mr. and Mrs. William Acklie of Norfolk slipped through a side entrance, and made the first crossing from San Francisco to Oakland, leaving the governor and a second car of radio men (including a young Herb Caen) in their dust.

• Tollbooth heists were a huge worry in the early days of the Bay Bridge. Bulletproof Plexiglas was installed, and a team of toll-takers volunteered for months of pistol training so they could guard against would-be robbers.

•Early bridge tolls actually punished carpoolers. For both the Bay Bridge and Golden Gate, cars with more than four passengers were changed a nickel for each extra rider.

•In the early months of Bay Bridge toll-collecting, drivers without fare were forced to pawn items from their car, including watches, cufflinks and spare tires. “One man offered to leave his wife in pawn until he got the bridge fare,” The Chronicle reported in 1937. “The offer was rejected.”

The Golden Gate Bridge arrived later, and was the more controversial project.

Surveys for a Golden Gate Bridge began as early as 1918, and by the early 1920s, The Chronicle had launched what amounts to a pro-bridge, anti-ferry propaganda campaign called “Do You Realize That …”

“Do You Realize That … There are some other people worth knowing on the other side of the Bay?” one editorial advertisement read. “We might have an opportunity to meet them if we had a bridge or a tunnel?”

But there was much red tape to navigate, and at times it seemed like The Chronicle and City Hall against the world.

Chief among the protesters was essayist Katherine Fullerton-Gerould, who wrote in a 1924 Harper’s Magazine issue that a bridge connecting San Francisco and Marin counties would be “a nightmare.”

“When you have one of the most romantic approaches in all geography, why spoil it?” Fullerton-Gerould wrote, in an editorial reprinted in The Chronicle. “In the interest of your own uniqueness, dear San Francisco, do not bridge the Golden Gate. Leave that kind of gesture to Los Angeles — which, if it had a Golden Gate, would most certainly bridge it, and sink oil wells in the bay and ocean on either side.”

As late as the mid-1920s, the War Department said a bridge over the bay could never be built; among other things, officials were worried that the bridge could be targeted by enemies, collapse and trap the fleet inside the bay.

Southern Pacific Railroad, which owned the ferries, sued the project. Finally, there were the Shipowners Association of the Pacific Coast and the Pacific American Steamship Association, which suggested that the bridge might actually harm tourism.

“What will it profit San Francisco to have a bridge with tall towers to point out to tourists, if word gets round the world that here is a harbor that great ships cannot enter?” one anti-bridge advertisement read.

After a vicious battle, voters approved a bond measure in 1930, and construction began in 1933. If the party following the Bay Bridge’s completion in 1936 was a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10, then the Golden Gate Bridge “fiesta” in 1937 was a 12.5.

The Chronicle’s front page was nothing but an enormous photo of the bridge looking down from one of the spans, with a small headline: “A Steel Knife Unsheathed By the City Splits the Sky.” Inside, the gravity of the moment tested the best of The Chronicle’s metaphor reserves.

“The dawn came up with thunder from the bosom of the bay,” Chronicle columnist Floyd Healey wrote. “It broke like fiery jewels in a vast concourse of light.”

The newspaper’s Abe Mellinkoff added this: “Like ants swarming a sticky sugar bowl, uncounted thousands milled and counter milled through the Marina District, along the bridge approaches and on the bridge itself.”

That party lasted for six days, and never really ended. A 50th anniversary celebration in 1987 featured a pedestrian horde that alarmingly flattened the bridge, and overflowed portable toilets to the point of hysteria. (Take note, current city leaders: It’s definitely not too late to start planning adequate plumbing for the 100th.)

To the surprise of anyone who lived during those eras, the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge were the first and last major bridges built in San Francisco. Other bridges were planned or promised over the next 50 years. All proposals failed.

Among the fallen:

• Plans beginning in the late 1940s for a parallel Bay Bridge span. Engineers wanted to clone the current suspension bridge west of Yerba Buena island, so there would be dual spans side-by-side.

•A proposal pushed from the 1950s through the 1970s for a southern span, which would start near Candlestick Point and split into a Y that would land in Alameda and San Leandro. The coolest feature: a tollbooth proposed at the midway point, boosted up on stilts in the middle of the bay.

•A 1950s plan that would have added eight bridges at once, making Treasure Island one huge roundabout-style interchange for the spiderweb of new concrete bridges on the bay. Mercifully, this horrible blight died quickly.

•The plan for the Frank Lloyd Wright bridge. In his 80s, the renowned architect in the early 1950s unveiled plans for his Butterfly Bridge, a modern-looking concrete span that would have included a parklet in the middle.

And that was it. BART’s completion in 1972 quelled the talk of bridges for a while. And the growing fiascos surrounding the recent eastern span replacement of the Bay Bridge should kill any remaining public bridge-building ambitions for at least another generation.

But we did end up with two really good ones: the celebrity to the northwest, and the working-class hero to the east.

We’ll let Willis O’Brien have the last metaphor (with an assist from the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley). From O’Brien’s Chronicle article after the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge:

“The bridge that sings!

“It had a voice, a voice for all to hear. Perhaps, if a loving heart could plumb the mysteries of that song he might hear something like the words Shelley sang — ‘O wild west wind … Make me thy lyre even as the forest is … In me the tumult of thy might harmonies … Will take a deep autumnal note … O wild west wind …’

“The bridge that sings.”

Chronicle librarian Bill Van Niekerken contributed to the research of this chapter.

Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicle pop culture critic. E-mail: phartlaub@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @PeterHartlaub