The UpshotGolden Gate Bridge at 75: five facts
We hope we look this good at 75. The Golden Gate Bridge, the famously orange suspension bridge, connected San Francisco to Marin County for the first time in 1937. And the connecter became an icon of global renown for the city.
On May 27, 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge opened to pedestrians:
Here, five facts about the bridge:
1. At 75, the bridge, designed by Joseph Strauss, is certainly aging gracefully. That iconic orange color is maintained by constant repainting.
2. There are approximately 1.2 million rivets in the bridge's two towers.
3. The bridge's two towers support cables containing 80,000 miles of steel wire. Together, the cables weigh a whopping 49 million pounds.
4. In its first year, the bridge carried 3,892,063 motor vehicles and 8,000,000 passengers. More than 400,000 pedestrians walked the sidewalks. Today, 110,00 cars cross the bridge daily, and the bridge gets 10 million visitors a year.
5. It's also the place where more than 1,600 people have jumped to their deaths. That grim statistic makes it the most visited site for suicide.
But for many people, those golden spires have become the symbol of California.
