1950s Prints

A fascinating and expansive six-foot-wide 1950s copy on paper of a historically important and rare 1923 panoptic engineering blueprint titled “Proposed Highway Crossing - San Francisco to Sausalito” by John G. Little & Co. It depicts a pair of suggested solutions for bridging the world famous Golden Gate, the mile-wide strait where San Francisco Bay meets the Pacific Ocean. Both crisply rendered San Francisco-to-Sausalito crossings are meticulously drafted in full at 1” = 400’ scale, with each having a total length of 22,780 feet (4.31 miles). The proposal at top depicts a high-level bridge with three 1,100 ft. spans, and the proposal at bottom depicts a combination trestle-and-tube design that presciently evokes the similarly submerged Transbay Tube that would open fifty years later nearby. Little estimated their respective costs to be $14,000,000 and $11,000,000—or approximately $215,333,000 and $169,190,000 when adjusted for inflation. As shown in the aerial view map at top right, the proposed connection points would’ve been near where Van Ness...