Launch Site
If you were to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, would it be from the west side facing the ocean, or from the east side facing the city and the bay? Compared with the decision to end your life it may seem trivial but it's a choice that you'd have to make before you could jump. In fact, over the years some individuals had been observed spending over an hour walking along both sides of the bridge before they finally dove off. Others have carefully crossed the bridge's five traffic lanes to avoid being killed by a car and reach the side from which they've chosen to jump. After all, it's the very last decision you're ever going to make and it deserves some consideration.
"Which side of the bridge?" was typical of the topics I debated with other consultants while we sat around waiting for projects. In the 1970s, I worked for a consulting firm in Culver City and when we were between assignments we were said to be "on the beach". This meant consultants were sitting around twiddling their thumbs, not being billed out to a client and not generating income; yet the firm was still required to pay our salary. George, the firm's Puerto Rican owner and salesperson, was under immense pressure to find assignments for us. George would rise to the occasion with evangelical fervor and sell assignments by (1) forecasting a doomsday scenario to clients where no problem existed; or (2), forgiving a client for their sins and agreeing to help them clean up a mess of their own making. Time spent on the beach was a welcome escape from projects that were usually ill-conceived and often humiliating to take part in.
As far as the bridge question was concerned, the group of idle consultants was split into two factions. Half of us favored the east side and felt that the view of the bay and the city would be more appealing than facing the cold and vast Pacific Ocean. The other half favored the west side and contended that jumpers would want to turn their back on civilization as it was most often the very thing that had driven them to suicide.
After a full morning debating the bridge question I thought I'd give Herb Caen a call. Caen wrote a daily column in the San Francisco Chronicle for almost sixty years and was revered as an icon by the city's residents. He was referred to as "Mr. San Francisco" and received a special Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for his decades of serving as the "voice and conscience of the city". The subject matter of his column was described as "his ongoing love affair with San Francisco". His daily eclectic 1,000 words on local matters poked fun at politicians, grieved with the unfortunate, delighted with the off-beat and captured colorful characters.
I called the number that information gave me for the Chronicle and reached someone in circulation. I explained that I wasn't calling to subscribe but that I wanted to talk to Herb Caen. In truth, I was looking for a way to pass the time and never had any real expectation that I would end up speaking to Mr. Caen. I did think there might be someone who worked for the paper that may have statistics on how many people had jumped from the west side versus the east. Circulation transferred me to someone else who listened to my question and said they would pass it along to Herb Caen.
My next call was to the Los Angeles Public Library whose research section in those days would hunt down an answer for a caller's question. I don't think many people were aware of this service but my mother was a librarian at one time and had turned me onto it. After hearing me out, the lady asked me to wait while she went off to see what she could find. She didn't put me on hold, she just put the receiver down and I waited until she returned a few minutes later. She told me that the only information she had located was the total number of jumps which was nearly 500 but there was no breakdown as to the side of the bridge used for takeoff.
Later that afternoon I was back to arguing with the other consultants about some other mental diversion. Jo Meers stuck her head inside the door and said there was a phone call for me from the Chronicle. I picked up the phone and spent an enjoyable ten minutes talking with Herb Caen. I shouldn't have been surprised that he would return my call as I found out later that he often relied on unsolicited tips for items that appeared in his column.
I explained to him that my co-workers and I had been debating which side of the bridge would be preferred by jumpers and presented the case for both sides. Mr. Caen ate it up. He said the number of jumps since the bridge opened in 1937 was nearing 500 and a recent countdown started by the bay area newspapers had created a frenzy. Television crews had staked out the bridge and managed to film bridge workers and officials dissuading fourteen people so far from taking the plunge. One man that had been turned away had arrived with "500" stenciled on the front of his T-shirt.
Caen said he knew people had gone off from both sides but he had no idea which one was the most popular. He told me that my phone message had made him curious so he had contacted the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District. Although they didn't offer an exact count they assured him that a clear majority of jumpers chose the east side. A running total was not kept but they insisted it was obvious when you scanned the records since the reports of suicide attempts always noted which of the bridge's numbered 128 lamp posts was nearest to the takeoff spot. I said goodbye to Mr. Caen and thanked him for the information. I have no idea if any of our conversation ever found its way into his column.
The number of jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge reached about 1,600 in 2012. Among the most notable victims were Pierre Salinger's son and Roy Raymond who founded Victoria's Secret. Recently, despite a thirty-year head start, the Golden Gate Bridge was overtaken by the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge in China as the world's most popular place for suicide attempts.
The number of attempts includes people observed jumping and bodies that are recovered. No one knows for certain how many have jumped unnoticed and had their body swept out to sea by the strong currents that dominate the Golden Gate Strait. From the bridge it takes four seconds to fall 245 feet (roughly twenty stories) until you reach the water. Ninety-eight percent of the known attempts have proved fatal. If you avoid hitting a boat or concrete bridge abutment, and hitting the surface of the water at 76 miles an hour doesn't kill you off, then hypothermia and drowning probably will.
Of the 34 people known to have survived the fall, nearly all have experienced deep regret as soon as they became airborne. Many survivors describe suddenly realizing that the insurmountable factors that drove them to jump could have been sorted out after all.
There are only two known individuals that jumped, survived and returned for an encore. One of these was an 18-year-old UCLA student named Sara Rutledge Birnbaum of Piedmont, California who was despondent over not having gained admission to Stanford.. On New Year's Day in 1988, Sara parked her car in a nearby lot, walked out onto the bridge and jumped. Sara survived the fall, dutifully returned a mere 34 days later on February 4th and repeated the process. It was assumed that she did not survive the second jump as her body was never recovered.
The other double jumper was Paul Aladdin Alarab, a real estate agent from Kensington, California. His first fall from the bridge was in 1988 while protesting the mistreatment of the elderly and the handicapped. He was attempting to lower himself with a rope into a garbage can that he had hung 60 feet below the bridge. Before reaching the garbage can, he let go of the rope, fell to the water below, and although badly injured, did survive. Fifteen years later in 2003, Paul returned at the age of forty-four to protest the U.S. invasion of Iraq, his father's homeland. For this protest he did without the garbage can and simply held onto a rope tied to the bridge. After reading a prepared statement he let go of the rope and fell. A rescue boat and crew quickly pulled him from the water but he had not survived the fall a second time.
In 2014 a $76,000,000 suicide-deterrent barrier was approved by the Golden Gate Bridge and Transportation District. The project will require three years to install netting that will extend twenty feet from both sides of the bridge along its full 1.6 mile length. Suicide attempts have been non-existent since a similar barrier was installed on a bridge in Bern, Switzerland.
Discussion topic: Could the barrier have stopped Sara Birnbaum or Paul Alarab?