Eight Mile Crossinp: The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge

摘要

In A Culture of celebrity worship, rhe designs of famous structures are commonly attributed to a single, visionary individual. The reality of the design process, however, is often quite different. The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, for one, is the product not of one man's dream but of a team of talented contributors, each bringing his own expertise to bear on what would become one of the most extraordinary achievements of 20th-century bridge engineering. Linking the cities of San Francisco and Oakland across San Francisco Bay had long been considered impossible, but by the mid 1920s, the alternative—a fleet of ferryboats transporting tens or millions of passengers every year— was no longer practical. In 1926 the state legislature established a toll bridge authority for bridging the bay.