What’s with the Orange Bridge? The Golden Gate Bridge was very nearly a striped one. When chief engineer Joseph B. Strauss’s great span went up across the strait in the 1930s, the Navy lobbied to paint it black with yellow stripes so ships could see it in the fog; the Army Air Corps preferred red and white. But the consulting architect, Irving Morrow, had watched the steel arrive from the East coated in a red-lead primer that glowed against the headlands, and he fought to keep something close to it — a color called International Orange. He won. When two hundred thousand people walked across the new bridge on opening day, May 27, 1937, it was already the color the world knows: the warm orange that burns through the gray when the fog pours in, chosen precisely because the fog was coming. And the name is older than the gold: John C. Frémont named the strait Chrysopylae — Greek for Golden Gate — in 1846, two years before anyone found a nugget. The gold, like everything else here, arrived after the name was ready for it.
What’s with the Principal Chief? Six years after the prison closed, Alcatraz got different visitors — and one of them was a young woman the city had raised. Wilma Mankiller came to San Francisco in 1956 as a child, when her Cherokee family was moved from Oklahoma under the federal relocation program; she grew up in the city’s working neighborhoods and studied at San Francisco State. When Indians of All Tribes occupied Alcatraz beginning in November 1969, she crossed the bay to support it and later called the nineteen-month occupation her political awakening. That road led home: in 1985 she became the first woman Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, led it for a decade, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2022 the United States Mint honored her with the Wilma Mankiller quarter in the American Women Quarters Program — her gaze resolute, wrapped in a traditional shawl beside the seven-pointed star of the Cherokee Nation.
Why People Visit San Francisco California
San Francisco offers the orange bridge in the fog, a moving landmark for a transit system, an island prison with a harbor view, Victorian rows and mission adobe, and hills that hand you a postcard at every crest. Visitors come for the Golden Gate, the cable cars, Alcatraz, the neighborhoods, the food, and the fog that is part of the architecture. On the Bay since 1776.