The Golden Gate Bridge might be said to be the West Coast version of the Brooklyn Bridge. They share the basic features of a suspension bridge, most noticeably in the parabolic sag of their main cables that support a shallow arched roadway stiffened by trusses composed of triangles. Yet they do not resemble each other in their more prominent architectural details. The staid Brooklyn is characterized by tall Gothic archways piercing its massive masonry towers, from the top of which radiate its signature diagonal stay cables. The Golden Gate has soaring art deco steel towers that are dominated by crisp horizontal and vertical planes and are painted a bold international orange color. The Brooklyn Bridge took 14 years to build and opened in 1883; the Golden Gate was under construction for three and a third years and was completed in 1937. Each bridge was record-setting for its time. The total length of the Brooklyn is a tad over 6,000 feet, or about 1.1 miles (1.8 kilometers) from end to end. That of the Golden Gate is just short of 9,000 feet, or about 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers), in total length, making it about one and a half times as long as the Brooklyn. But the accepted measure of engineering achievement for a suspension bridge is the distance between towers, which for the Brooklyn is within five feet of 1,600 (about 0.5 kilometers) and for the Golden Gate is exactly 4,200 feet (1.3 kilometers), a factor of about two and a third times as long.
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