A Net at Last for the Golden Gate Bridge

March 27, 2014
A Net, at Last, for the Golden Gate Bridge?
By Tad Friend

San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge opened in May, 1937. Three months later, a man named Harold Wobber jumped off, becoming the first in a funeral train that now numbers some one thousand six hundred suicides. The bridge’s rail is only four feet high, and a footpath runs alongside it; stepping over, in the grip of depression or even of a wayward impulse, is child’s play. As Ann McGuire, one of only about two dozen people who have survived the jump, said after her plunge, in 1979, “They make it so easy. It’s creepy, and it’s sad, and it’s unnecessary.”

In 2003, when I wrote for The New Yorker about why the Golden Gate was the world’s leading suicide magnet, I learned that people jump from it simply because so many other people have jumped from it. My notebooks contained the story of a businessman named Charles Gallagher, who killed himself at the bridge in 1954 and was followed into the water four days later by his son, who jumped from the same spot. “I am sorry,” the son’s note said. “I wanted to keep Dad company.” Also in the notebooks was the story of Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press secretary, whose thirty-one-year-old son, Mark, jumped from the bridge in 1977. “It’s a fantastic place to commit suicide,” Salinger later said. “So, obviously, he probably thought, I’m going to leave this with my father—it’s something he’ll never forget. And he’s right. The only place I can commit suicide is where my son committed suicide.” (Salinger died of a heart attack, in 2004.)

But the bridge became a suicide magnet for another reason, too: it overlooks one of the most beautiful spots in the world. Those who jump imagine, wrongly, a peaceful transition to some less painful place, rather than a seventy-five-mile-an-hour impact that will burst their organs like a bomb. That beauty has been a huge obstacle in efforts to erect a suicide barrier. Barriers have gone up at other famous places with great views—including the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower—and have ended the problem without appreciably marring the vista. But, since 1970, the Golden Gate’s board, staunch in its exceptionalism, has resisted every proposal for a barrier. Meanwhile, the magnet’s pull has only grown stronger: last year, forty-six people went over the side, nearly one a week.

I worried, as I wrote my piece, about the copycat effect it could have. On the other hand, I thought, a lack of publicity wasn’t stopping jumpers—the word was already out. It pained me to read, in a Times story on Wednesday, that one of last year’s jumpers was an eighteen-year-old named Kyle Gamboa. Kyle was the funny, seemingly confident captain of his high-school basketball team, in Fair Oaks, a city some two hours from the bridge. The only signal of his true state of mind, apparently, was that he spent a lot of time watching the trailer for “The Bridge”—a 2006 documentary, made by Eric Steel, which was inspired by my story.

Kyle’s father, Manuel, has since brought photos of his son to every board meeting of the Golden Gate transportation district, reminding the board of the human consequences of its policy. And, at last, the board seems poised to approve a barrier—a net of stainless steel twenty feet below the bridge that will catch jumpers before they fall too far. It might mar the soaring profile of the bridge a little. But, as the board’s members seem finally to have grasped, beauty is not the only thing we need in order to live.

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