How tall is the Golden Gate Bridge?

How tall is the Golden Gate Bridge?

The Golden Gate Bridge's two main towers rise 227 m (746 ft) above the water, the figure this site uses as the bridge's height. That number comes directly from the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, which operates the bridge, and it measures from the waters of the strait to the top of the towers. Above the roadway the towers rise 152 m (500 ft), so a driver crossing the bridge sees about two-thirds of their total height.

When the bridge opened in 1937, those towers were the tallest of any suspension bridge in the world. At 227 m they are taller than the Washington Monument (169 m) and roughly two-and-a-half times the height of the Statue of Liberty from ground to torch. You can put them side by side with other structures in the 3D height comparison tool.

The bridge's key heights and dimensions

The bridge district publishes a detailed set of design and construction statistics. The table below collects the ones that matter for understanding its height.

Why three different water levels?

Tides in the Golden Gate strait range by several feet, so the bridge district quotes heights against standard tidal datums. Clearance for ships is measured above mean higher high water, the average of the higher of each day's two high tides, which gives the conservative figure of 220 ft. The midspan roadway height of 270.9 ft is measured above mean lower low water, the average of the lower daily low tides, which is why it looks so much higher. The two figures also measure different things: the clearance describes the open space under the bridge available to ships, while the 270.9 ft figure is the top of the road surface that drivers use.

The roadway is also not flat. It arches upward from the south abutment to the center of the span, rising 84.4 ft, and the deck sags or rises with temperature and traffic load. The bridge district notes that the center of the span can deflect up to 10.8 ft downward and 5.8 ft upward, so any height quoted for the roadway at midspan is a snapshot.

Building the towers (1933 to 1937)

The idea of bridging the Golden Gate, the mile-wide entrance to San Francisco Bay, was long dismissed as impossible because of deep water, strong currents, frequent fog and high winds. The engineer Joseph Strauss championed the project and served as chief engineer. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, his firm's proposal was chosen from 11 submissions, and he estimated the bridge could be built for $25 to $30 million. Final plans were submitted in August 1930.

Strauss is the name on the plaque, but much of the engineering came from others. Leon Moisseiff, a leading theorist of suspension bridges, contributed to the design, and Charles Ellis did a large share of the structural calculations before he was dismissed in 1931; the bridge district formally recognized his role in 2007. The architect Irving Morrow shaped the look of the towers, including their stepped Art Deco profile and the vertical ribbing that emphasizes their height, and selected the famous color.

Work began in early 1933. The north tower stands on a footing near the Marin shore, but the south tower had to be founded in open water about 1,100 ft from the San Francisco side. Crews built a massive concrete fender around the site and pumped it dry to work on the foundation, battling currents and swells that repeatedly damaged the work.

Each tower is a steel structure with two legs joined by horizontal struts above the roadway. Together the two towers weigh about 44,000 tons, and they contain the bulk of the 83,000 tons of structural steel in the bridge. Under load and wind, the tower tops can move up to 22 in toward the shore, 18 in toward the channel and 12.5 in sideways, according to the bridge district.

The cables

Once the towers were complete, crews spun the two main cables in place over the tower tops. Each cable is 36 3/8 in (0.92 m) thick and 7,650 ft long, and the two together contain about 80,000 miles of wire. Spinning took six months and nine days. The cables, suspenders and fittings weigh about 24,500 tons and pass over saddles at the top of each tower before descending into anchorages that weigh 60,000 tons apiece.

Safety and the "Half Way to Hell Club"

Construction was unusually safe for its era, partly because Strauss insisted on a safety net strung beneath the work. Nineteen men whose falls were stopped by the net formed an informal group known as the Half Way to Hell Club. The bridge was not without tragedy: on 17 February 1937, a scaffold fell through the net and ten men died; in all, eleven workers lost their lives.

The bridge opened to pedestrians on 27 May 1937 and to vehicles the following day.

International Orange and the visual effect of height

Irving Morrow chose the color known as International Orange. He judged that it would blend with the warm tones of the Marin Headlands while contrasting with the blue of the sea and sky, and that it would make the bridge more visible to ships in fog. The color, together with the strong vertical lines of the towers, makes them look taller than their 227 m, especially when fog covers the roadway and only the tower tops stand above the cloud.

San Francisco's summer fog regularly rolls in at heights below the tower tops. Five foghorns installed in 1937 still operate. On many summer days visitors on the beaches see only the upper half of each tower, which reinforces the impression of two red spires rising out of the sea.

What 227 meters looks like

Large numbers are easier to grasp with familiar yardsticks. Using this site's data:

• People: a tower top is about 130 times the height of an adult of 175 cm (5′9″). Standing on the sidewalk at the foot of a tower, you would need about 87 people stacked head to toe just to reach the top of the 152 m section above the road.
• Ships: the 67 m clearance is high enough for most cargo ships and cruise liners, but some of the largest modern container ships and cruise vessels have to time their passage with the tide or cannot fit at all.
• Buildings: 227 m is roughly the height of a 70-story office tower. San Francisco's tallest building, Salesforce Tower, is only about 100 m taller.
• The bridge on its side: the main span alone, 1,280 m, is more than five-and-a-half times the height of a tower. Laid end to end, the full 2,737 m bridge would be over three times the height of Burj Khalifa.

It is this combination of height and length that makes the bridge so photogenic: the towers are tall enough to dominate the strait, yet the span between them is so long that the cables form a deep, graceful curve rather than a steep V.

The Golden Gate Bridge compared with other landmarks

A comparison with London's Big Ben shows the scale: more than two clock towers stacked on top of each other would fit under the top of either tower. The London Eye would fit comfortably beneath the tower tops too. Japan's Akashi Kaikyō Bridge, which since 1998 has had the world's longest suspension span, has towers about 56 m taller, and France's Millau Viaduct, the tallest bridge in the world by structural height, rises 343 m. The Eiffel Tower is about 1.45 times the height of the Golden Gate towers. Browse more structures on the landmarks hub.

Sources disagree about how long the Golden Gate kept the record for the tallest suspension-bridge towers: the lead of its Wikipedia article says until the Akashi Kaikyō Bridge in 1998, while another section points to Mexico's Mezcala Bridge in 1993. Either way, the towers were the tallest for more than half a century.

How long, how heavy, how much concrete

Height is only one of the bridge's records. Some of its other figures from the bridge district help explain why it was considered one of the great engineering achievements of the 20th century:

• Total weight of the bridge, anchorages and approaches was 894,500 tons when built. A new, lighter deck installed in 1986 reduced this to about 887,000 tons.
• Concrete: 389,000 cubic yards were used, nearly half of it in the anchorages, pylons and cable housings.
• Live load capacity is 4,000 lb per lineal foot of bridge.
• During winter storms in 1982 the main span bowed sideways by about 6 to 7 ft, within its design limits.

The bridge's most dramatic test came on 24 May 1987, when around 300,000 people crowded onto the deck for a 50th anniversary walk. The weight of the crowd visibly flattened the arch of the roadway. Engineers later said the cables remained well within their capacity, at about 40 percent of yield stress.

Visiting and seeing the full height

You cannot climb the towers; access is limited to maintenance crews and rare authorized visits. But the bridge is free to walk or cycle along the east sidewalk, which runs at roadway level about 220 ft above the water and passes directly beside both towers. Standing at the base of a tower on the sidewalk, you are looking up 500 ft of steel.

For the full 227 m view from water to tower top, the classic viewpoints are Fort Point, directly beneath the south end of the bridge; Crissy Field and Baker Beach on the San Francisco side; and Battery Spencer in the Marin Headlands, which looks down on the north tower. On a ferry or boat passing under the span, the 220 ft clearance above the water becomes very real.

If you want to see how the towers measure up to a person, or to a skyscraper, try the 3D comparison tool or convert the feet figures with the height converter.