The south tower of the bridge is 746 feet. The bridge today has a main span of 4200 feet and side spans of 1125 feet. Its golden color gives it its name. It is the world's tallest suspension bridge.

The history of the bridge starts with the city once known as Yerba Buena. Yerba Buena became an 1849 gold rush city with 35,000 people. It was later renamed San Francisco. Small towns began to rim the perimeter of the bay. They also began to settle in the peninsula on the north side of the gate. For decades travelers had to travel to the other side of the bay by ferry. But the invention of the automobile and, of course, traffic jams, soon led to people think about building a bridge. In 1916 a commuting journalist began an editorial campaign and sketched out out a plan that had an uncanny resemblance of the bridge built 21 years later. The public had different views of the project. Most objections were from the Navy and War Deprtment. They both feared the decrease of military operation in hte area. The ferry and railroad operators risked losing passengers. And the timber barons feared "an infusion of flatlanders and tourists." All of these obstacles and the 1929 stock market crash helped to hold up funding for the bridge for about 10 years. Finally, Bank of America gave a bond that helped to get the project really going. The bridge to be would have a main span of 4,200 feet and side spans of 1,125 feet. The cables were to be strung over two 746-foot steel towers, a record height that still holds. They would be secured into eyebars loaded into 60,000-ton anchorages on land at each end of the bridge. Suspenders, or hangers, would run from the main cable to the bridge floor. The south pier and tower would have to be built 1,100 feet offshore in a channel with an average depth of 100 feet and tides of about 7 knots. That was the most supreme challenge: No bridge pier had ever been constructed in the open sea before. When the tower piers were finished, Bethlehem Steel began shipping steel from the east through the Panama Canal. Fearless local iron workers were hired to do the job. The opening ceremonies were on May 27, 1937. The ceremonies began with a big pedestrian crossing. In 1987 strollers, for the first time, were permitted on the bridge.