During 1933 and for years thereafter San Francisco Bay will be the scene of two tremendous bridge-building operations. One bridge will run north and south near the mouth of the Golden Gate itself. The other will run approximately east and west across a much larger part of San Francisco Bay, from the city of San Francisco to Oakland, and will be one of the most formidable engineering tasks ever attempted.



The Golden Gate bridge has already been started, and will cost about $35,000,000. San Francisco lies at the tip of a northward-stretching peninsula running out between San Francisco Bay and the ocean, and this new bridge continues the line of the peninsula across the narrow and deep Golden Gate to the northern shore, at present comparatively unsettled.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, March 1966. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

The second bridge, across the bay, will be begun in March, and is expected to be open for traffic in about five years’ time. It extends from a spot near the foot of Market Street, San Francisco, to Yerba Buena Island, in the middle of the harbour (universally known to San Franciscans as “Goat Island”). At that point traffic will pass through a tunnel pierced through a hill on the island, will bear left at a slight angle, and continue over the rest of the bridge to the mainland at Oakland. The total length of the bridge will be seven miles, of which four and a half will be over water. Between San Francisco and Yerba Buena Island is a stretch of 9,000 feet over deep water. It will be covered by two huge suspension bridges, end to end, their midstream ends being anchored in a vast concrete pier shared between them.

The clearance at this point will be 214 feet, giving ample space for vessels to pass underneath. Between the island and the Oakland mainland there is a cantilever bridge 1,400 feet long; the remainder of the bridge is over shallow water, and this part presents few engineering problems.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Photograph: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

The bridge will have two roadways, one above the other. The upper will have six lanes for automobile traffic and two for pedestrians. The lower will have three lines for motor-lorries and two for electric trams.

The bridge will use in all 180,000 tons of steel, with 67,000 miles of steel wire strands three-sixteenths of an inch thick woven into cables. It will use 1,500,000 barrels of cement in the approaches to the bridge and in the great deep-water pier.

The San Francisco Bay bridge is being built largely with Federal money, lent by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and this fact played an important part in the recent election campaign. Mr. Hoover is a Californian, and the Democrats allege that pressure was brought to bear on the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to make this loan before the election in the hope that popular opinion in the State would turn towards the Republicans. Whatever were the facts about the bridge, California went for Mr. Roosevelt by a large majority.