Golden Gate Bridge: Depression, Construction, And The Rise of California (Part 1)
This Day (An America 250 History Show)
Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia
4.5 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 2026
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For the seventeeth installment of “50 Weeks That Shaped America” we travel to California in the 1930s, where San Francisco planners have a big idea — build a massive suspension bridge across the Golden Gate strait. We discuss how the project came together despite the Great Depression, the big egos involved, what the story says about how audacious projects can pull a country out of malaise… and why the bridge is the color it is.
Join our America250 newsletter community! Subscribe for free to get the latest news and analysis of how America250 is playing out. Paying subscribers get access to early, ad-free versions of the show. Plus bonus features throughout the year. To support our work and get access to everything, subscribe now.
This Day is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX.
Your support helps foster independent, artist-owned podcasts and award-winning stories.
If you want to support the show directly, you can do so on our website: ThisDayPod.com
Get in touch if you have any ideas for future topics, or just want to say hello. Follow us on social @thisdaypod
Our team: Jacob Feldman, Researcher/Producer; Khawla Nakua, Transcripts; music by Teen Daze and Blue Dot Sessions; Audrey Mardavich is our Executive Producer at Radiotopia.
Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choicesTranscript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to this day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan. |
| 0:12.0 | It is 50 weeks that shaped America, our America 250 series, looking at some of the stories that we think added up to how we got to this moment. |
| 0:19.9 | And this week, week 17, we go to |
| 0:23.1 | San Francisco, 1937, and the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge. The Golden Gate is one of the |
| 0:30.3 | seven wonders of the modern world. Listeners, I'll give you a moment to think about the other six, |
| 0:35.9 | and we'll reveal that at the end of the episode. |
| 0:38.2 | You could likely picture the Golden Gate Bridge now. It is stretching between San Francisco and the Marin Peninsula to the north, connecting the Bay Area. |
| 0:46.6 | It's an iconic suspension bridge with that iconic red color. And no surprise, when it opened, it was a very big very big deal obviously it was an engineering feat and |
| 0:56.5 | we will explain how a suspension bridge works in this episode but think about the timing of when it |
| 1:01.5 | opened 1937 the depths of the great depression the bridge had been conceived more than a decade earlier |
| 1:09.1 | before the stock market crash, before the |
| 1:11.2 | dust bowl, before the migration west that totally changed California. And the plans for it and |
| 1:16.7 | the vision for it persisted even as the country entered the worst economic catastrophe in its history. |
| 1:23.0 | So this is a story that reminds us that we can still do big things, even when it feels like everything is breaking down. |
| 1:29.5 | It is also a story about the rise of California, engineers with big egos, public financing. |
| 1:35.3 | So exciting. Public financing. All sorts of fun stuff here to discuss, as always, Nicole Hemmer of Vanderbub and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. |
| 1:44.0 | Hey there. Hello. Hey there. |
| 1:44.8 | Hello. Hey there. Ready for 50 minutes of municipal bonds and public financing. |
| 1:49.6 | No, no, no. The abundance bros are coming. Oh, exactly. Yeah, actually, it does, it does fit |
| 1:54.3 | into the abundance bro narrative a little bit for sure. But I want to start with the color. Why is it red? Do you know why it's red? |
| 2:04.0 | I mean, this is a great question because it's not the typical color of a bridge. |
| 2:08.7 | Right. And it's not exactly red either. Yeah. And it's like you would expect it to just be |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.