Halprin Chimes in on Golden Gate Barrier Debate-Design Ideas Welcomed

The pedestrian path across the bridge, here looking toward the Marin County side, reveals the modest railing height. At least 1,300 people have leapt over these rails.

If you've every walked across the Golden Gate Bridge or viewed it from afar, you know what a magnificent spectacle this span is that stretches from San Francisco to Marin County, soaring about 220 feet above the cold Pacific waters at high tide.

As a former long-time resident of the San Francisco Bay area, I recall the bridge often in the news, not for its beauty but to report another jumper. I remember when the number of suicides had reach 999 and there was a kind of morbid anticipation of the ?EUR??,,????'??official?EUR??,,????'?? 1,000th jumper.

Well, it continues, of course. At lease 1,300 people have leapt to their deaths from the bridge into those turbid waters. Over the years various groups have encouraged building a barrier, and many designs have been proffered to prevent those whose desperation is so great that they will vault the railing and take that dizzying tumble into the abyss.

Now, as the San Francisco Chronicle has been reporting, there is a push to erect a $25 million barrier. This time the cause is being fueled by the revelation that documentary film maker Eric Steel has caught on film many of the 19 people who made the leap in 2004, and the 50 or so would-be jumpers stopped by the bridge patrol. Steel got permission from the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, part of the National Park Service and said to be the largest urban national park in the world, to film the bridge over the course of 2004. He was reportedly duplicitous in stating his reasons for filming the bridge, and now indicates he is making a film about those suicides.

The no-barrier group basically argues to leave the esthetics of the bridge alone; the counterpoint is that preventing further suicides is the human thing to do.

The San Francisco Chronicle quoted local landscape architect Lawrence Halprin's written opinion to Marin County supervisors. Halprin, whose design work includes two San Francisco landmarks, Ghirardelli Square and Levi Plaza, esteemed the bridge ?EUR??,,????'??one of eight great works of art in the world, and tampering with it is a cultural obscenity."

Perhaps a landscape architect who thinks a barrier a good idea could come up with a design that was not a ?EUR??,,????'??cultural obscenity.?EUR??,,????'??