The Golden Gate Bridge Is at the Edge of Anti-Suicide Infrastructure

On its opening day in 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge bore no protective barrier beyond railings. “This bridge needs neither praise, eulogy nor encomium,” boomed engineer J. Strauss, who designed the bridge. “It speaks for itself. We who have labored long are grateful. What Nature rent asunder long ago, man has joined today.”

Seventy-five years later, and little has changed. Aside from help-phones and attending call-for-help signage, the iconic structure has never been retrofitted with suicide deterrents.

Coming on the heels of the Golden Gate’s anniversary, Motherboard’s sister Vice took a lengthy look over the edge of the storied, unsettling history under Strauss’ bridge. More than the Euro-tethered customs and mileau of, say, New York City and the Atlantic, San Francisco, the Pacific and the Golden Gate – “a stunning structure set within an equally magnificent landscape,” as Bob Nikas writes – preoccupies the collective imagination as a beaming totem to “a greater unknown and a sense of freedom, connected to nature and Eastern thought, to the cycle of life and eternity.”

It’s precisely this mysticism that’s made a sort of grim Mecca of the Golden Gate – and sparked debate over what funds, if any, should be doled to fall-proofing what’s become the top suicide destination on the planet. People from around the world, resigned to ending their lives at their own hands, trek to the edge of the Earth – how fitting that Land’s End, a craggy park at the Golden Gate’s mouth, affords some of the most stunning views of the bridge – to do just that. Since it was first opened to foot traffic, the bridge has been the final stop for some 1,550 jumpers.

It’s a mythic crossing, the source of endless fascination for filmmakers, writers, shrinks, civil engineers, politicians and your everyday mere mortal (jogger) alike.

The Golden Gate has a way of casting spells over the living and the dead, making documentaries like The Bridge (2006) and The Final Leap, a recent book-length work on the jumper phenomenon, so heavy, so difficult to think about without turning off or shutting close the bummer in a jolt of shame. Why am I watching this again? But this is also what makes any meditation on the Golden Gate’s tragic pull so affecting – redemptive, even – just knowing that it couldn’t have been any easier for the documentarian or journalist or poet on the other end, that in fact their works can be read as final and lasting tributes to those who jump at alarming rates and with remarkable ease.

Some hope to change that. Decades’ old calls for a Golden Gate suicide barrier could be inching closer to daylight. As the Examiner reported recently, U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., has proposed “enabling legislation” permitting local agencies to tap federal transportation funds “to pay for suicide prevention systems on landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge.” It’s a polarizing issue, but not precedent setting. A life-preserving infrastructure, what could maybe be called the architecture of the living, already defines cities and landmarks around the world.

A common deterrent. Here, mulled fencing walls off Cold Spring Canyon Arch Bridge, which links Santa Barbara and Santa Ynez, Calif. More than 50 people have leapt off the bridge since it was raised in 1964, according to CalTrans’ Cold Spring Canyon Suicide Barrier Project, “with 38 deaths occurring in the last 25 years.”

Iron spikes at Hornsey Lane Bridge, a frequent suicide site in London.

Again, it’s not like any of this is entirely new. Take this enmeshed staircase at the Nuremberg Prison aimed at thwarting jumpers in the mid-40s. Or even this former safety net for some of Golden Gate’s first workers. Below, the infamous netting at Foxconn, a ramshackle, on-the-cheap take on an old catch.

Looking down a barrier at the Bloor Viaduct in Toronto.

Whether Boxer’s call brings about a revisioning of the Golden Gate remains foggy. And yet it’s maybe not at all crazy to admit that the lurching push to integrate suicide barriers with Strauss’ engineering marvel could be forever doomed. A netting plan was actually approved four years ago, but since then funding “for a net or some other barrier has not been found”. That’s an understatement: Calling for $50 million, the existing project remains $45 million short.

What’s clear, and maybe just as revealing about both jumpers and watchers, is that for now, at least, it’s not as if the problem is going away. And yet we’re able to freely choose whether or not to notice existing deterrents, or the first signs of anti-jump measures rolling out when a new building is being built. This stuff is by no means hiding under our noses. It marks a startling amount of urban space. Just look around. It’s not difficult to pick out, and doing so only gets easier the more you look for it (if that’s your thing?). The only thing, though, is that we often choose not to. At the very least, we trick ourselves into thinking the sometimes unsightly (but other times eerily eye-soothing) barriers to death aren’t that, that they bear some other purpose. Stabilizers, maybe. Or architectural flair.

And this strikes at the heart of the debate. While many look away, won’t those resigned to killing themselves just up and leave for another spot if and when barriers suddenly make, say, the Golden Gate entirely unattractive to try and plunge off? Who knows. Today, at least, many of those looking to jump first cruise over the Oakland Bay Bridge – just as easily hopped-off as any other non-fall-proofed bridge, in theory – just to get to the Golden Gate, where there are only railings.

Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson

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