SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- It was May 27, 1937, the opening day for a stunning new suspension bridge across a gap in the California coastline known as the Golden Gate. Before cars were allowed on the crossing, an estimated 200,000 people celebrated between the bridge’s 4-foot-high rails, more than 200 feet above the water.
Doris Madden, 11, was there with her parents. It was one of her favorite days of her childhood, a story she told until the end of her life.
About 78 years later, in 2015, Madden’s 15-year-old grandson, Jesse Madden-Fong, was dropped off at his high school in San Francisco.
Jesse did not go to class. An hour later, he was on the Golden Gate Bridge, walking alone. The family was told that Jesse had shrugged off his backpack and went over the rail. He left no explanation, no clues, for why he had jumped.
Jesse’s mother confirmed her son’s identity with the coroner through the boy’s new corduroy pants.
“My mother loved the bridge,” said Pat Madden, Jesse’s mother and Doris’ daughter. “I’m really glad she passed away two years before Jesse.”
His was one of 33 confirmed suicides from the bridge that year, a typical number.
For nearly 87 years, it was so easy.
‘It’s About Damn Time’
The Golden Gate Bridge is a rare blend of form and function. It stands as one of the world’s engineering marvels and a symbol of Depression-era American muscle.
Connecting a sophisticated city and an untamed beyond, it is less a gate than an aperture. Everyone views something different through it.
Some see endless possibilities. Some just see the end.
About 2,000 people are known to have died by jumping off the bridge. The count has never been precise, and the true tally is certainly higher since not all jumps are witnessed and not all bodies are found.
Such tragedies, officials hope, are mostly in the past. Workers are nearly finished installing 3 1/2 miles of stainless steel nets — creating what officials call a “suicide deterrent system” — strung on both sides of the bridge, end to end.
Construction cost $217 million and the system has taken longer to build than the bridge itself did.
The nets are nearly invisible from a distance, blending into the steelwork.
But they are visible to anyone standing at the rail. They hang about 20 feet down and stretch about 20 feet out. They are stitched between 369 new struts, 50 feet apart, painted International Orange like the rest of the bridge.
These are not the soft, springy nets of a circus act. They are taut, marine-grade stainless steel nets meant to withstand the Golden Gate’s combination of rain, wind, salt and fog.
“We want the message to be that it’s going to hurt, and also jumping off the bridge is illegal,” said Denis Mulligan, the general manager of the organization that oversees the bridge.
The nets have already shown themselves to be a deterrent, but not a perfect solution.
Several people have jumped into them. Some have been rescued from there, but “a handful” had “jumped into the net and then jumped to their death,” Mulligan said.
He declined to say how many. It will take a year or two of data to fully understand the system’s effectiveness, he said.
In the decade beginning in 2011, bridge officials said, there were 335 confirmed suicides, or an average of 33.5 per year. In 2022, as the first nets were being strung, there were 22. Through October this year, as more nets have been added, there were 13.
The completion of the system, and the focused two-decade drive to get it done after decades of failed campaigns, has produced a range of emotions.
— “Part of me is just exhausted that it took this long,” said Paul Muller, president and co-founder the Bridge Rail Foundation, a nonprofit founded in 2006 with a mission of ending suicides at the bridge.
— “I’m glad I’m still alive to see it,” said Dr. Mel Blaustein, a San Francisco psychiatrist who helped push the mission to build a barrier 20 years ago, when he was in his 60s.
— “I’m excited — it will be a good tool to have,” said Lt. Michael Bailey of the Bridge Patrol, which uses surveillance to spot potential jumpers.
— “It’s about damn time,” said Ken Holmes, the former coroner in Marin County, across the bridge from San Francisco, whose office was responsible for examining the recovered bodies of jumpers.
— “I am relieved,” said Pat Madden, the mother of Jesse. “You just want to spare other people from what you’re going through.”
A Low Railing
The first confirmed suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge happened about 10 weeks after its opening. Harold Wobber, a 47-year-old World War I veteran, reportedly said, “This is as far as I go,” and jumped.
More followed — dozens a year, hundreds a decade. The unique majesty that draws tourists from all over the world made the bridge a premier destination for death.
Among reasons that someone looking to jump might choose the bridge is a near guarantee of death (about 1 in 50 have survived) and a belief that loved ones will be spared the horror of discovering the body.
But there was always something more practical: The railing is just 4 feet high.
For families affected by these tragedies, services like
www.SuicideCleanup.com specialize in providing compassionate cleanup assistance.
Almost anyone could get over it, whether after long consideration or in a moment of impulse.
“Fundamental to suicide prevention is restricting easy access to lethal means,” said Muller. “And the Golden Gate Bridge has provided easy access.”
Bridge lore has it that the original design called for the railing to be 5 1/2 feet tall. Mulligan, the bridge general manager who spent a decade as its top engineer, said that he had never discovered such plans. But the California Highway Patrol first asked for a higher railing in 1939 to deter jumpers.
That it took so much time and heartache to seriously address the issue is a source of great debate and consternation.
Bureaucratic Indifference
Those in charge of most famous tall structures moved quickly to keep people from jumping from them, often after a few deaths.
Not at the Golden Gate Bridge. Jumping off the bridge was always an option, even a dark joke.
“I grew up in San Francisco,” Mulligan said. “I grew up hearing people say, ‘Well, why don’t you just go jump off the bridge?’ That was what people said. They obviously didn’t understand suicide or mental health.”
Such nonchalance was reflected in the 19-member board of directors for the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, which oversees the operation of the bridge and a regional bus and ferry system.
For decades, decision makers ducked behind concerns over aesthetics, costs and effectiveness.
Clouding serious consideration were long-held misperceptions about suicide — mainly, that people prevented from jumping from the bridge would simply take their lives a different way.
A 1978 study by Richard Seiden, at the University of California, Berkeley, tracked 515 people who, between 1937 and 1971, had gone to the bridge intending to jump and had been persuaded not to. It found that 94% were still alive or had died of natural causes.
“Suicidal behavior is crisis-oriented and acute in nature,” Seiden concluded.
The Bridge Patrol is on the front lines of those crises. Created as an antiterrorism force after the Sept. 11 attacks, officers spend much of their energy preventing suicides. Using surveillance and roving patrols, and often assisted by others doing work on the bridge, they try to spot the potential jumpers among millions of bridge visitors every year.
A planned jump is stopped every other day, on average, bridge officials said.
Bailey, a 14-year patrol veteran, does not count the lives he saves, because then he would have to count the jumps he witnessed and could not stop.
“It’s hard not to let it affect you,” he said. “We’re all humans out here, with normal feelings like anybody else.”
A Movement Takes Shape
True momentum for the effort came in the early 2000s. A 2003 New Yorker story by Tad Friend, titled “Jumpers,” cast a bright light on the bridge’s dark history. The San Francisco Chronicle followed in 2005 with an unblinking, weeklong series called “Lethal Beauty.”
There were documentaries, including “The Bridge” in 2006, that controversially showed people plummeting into the water.
That same year, a man named David Hull turned his grief into a mission, cofounding the Bridge Rail Foundation. Hull’s 26-year-old daughter had driven two hours from Santa Cruz to jump from the bridge.
The Bridge Rail Foundation organized other families in a common effort. It wrote op-eds and monthly newsletters. It made short films to spread on social media.
Mostly, the group focused not on cold data, but on the warmth of humanity and empathy.
In 2005, finally moved, the bridge board agreed to build a barrier if the money came from outside sources. So began the slow churn of American bureaucracy.
There were environmental studies and engineering tests to ensure that the bridge could withstand any structural changes.
After all the talk of raising the rails, along came an idea borrowed from a successful suicide prevention system at a tall cathedral in Bern, Switzerland.
The nets were a compromise. To appease opponents who thought that high rails or fencing would mar the bridge’s iconic look or block the views for everyone else, nets became the chosen prevention method in 2008.
Then began years of political wrangling for money. By 2014, with an estimated cost of $76 million for the project, money was committed. There was a call for construction bids. Estimates came in much higher than expected and soon rose again, toward $200 million.
Hopes ebbed and flowed. More families joined the push. More money was found.
“Every month it was delayed, more people were lost,” Madden said.
The nets were expected to take four years to complete. It will be nearly seven. The bridge district is embroiled in legal squabbles with the contractor.
But they are nearly finished, and emotions are mixed. Exhaustion. Satisfaction. Peace.
“On the one hand, it’s been 20 years for me,” said Muller. “On the other hand, it’s been 87. Which is staggering.”
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If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
