The Golden Gate

“In 1976, an engineer named Roger Grimes began agitating for a barrier on the Golden Gate. He walked up and down the bridge wearing a sandwich board that said ‘Please Care. Support a Suicide Barrier.’ He gave up a few years ago, stunned that in an area as famously liberal as San Francisco, where you can always find a constituency for the view that pets should be citizens or that poison oak has a right to exist, there was so little empathy for the depressed. ‘People were very hostile,’ Grimes told me. ‘They would throw soda cans at me, or yell, “Jump!“ ‘”

The fatal grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge…