IV
SOCIAL STUDIES
ONE AUGUST DAY in 1937, a forty-seven-year-old bargeman and World War I veteran named Harold Wobber took a bus to the Golden Gate Bridge, paid his way through the pedestrian turnstile, and began to walk across the mile-long span. He was accompanied by a tourist he had met on the bus, Professor Lewis Neylor of Trinity College in Connecticut. They had strolled across the bridge, which stretches in a single arch from San Francisco to the hills of Marin County, and were on their way back when Wobber tossed his coat and vest to Professor Neylor. “This is where I get off,” he said quietly. “I’m going to jump.” As Wobber climbed over the four-foot railing, the professor managed to grab his belt, but Wobber pulled free and leaped to his death.
Less than three months after the Golden Gate Bridge had opened to great fanfare, Wobber became its first known suicide. Since then more than twelve hundred others have jumped, making it, as one researcher observes, “the number one location for suicide in the entire world.” As with most suicide statistics, the numbers are conservative. Only those who have been seen jumping or whose bodies are recovered are counted as bridge suicides. One expert suggests that several hundred others may have leaped unseen, in darkness, rain, or fog, been swept out to sea, and their bodies never found. A leap from the bridge is easy, quick, and lethal; one merely steps over a chest-high railing. At seventy-five miles per hour, the 240-foot drop lasts four seconds. If the force of the fall doesn’t kill the jumper instantly, crushing his internal organs, the current will sweep him out to sea to drown or be devoured by sharks. Of all the people known to have fallen or jumped from the bridge since it opened, only twenty-six have survived.
The Golden Gate Bridge is not the only location to exert a particular fascination for suicidal people. Throughout history certain cliffs, churches, and skyscrapers have earned reputations as suicide landmarks: Niagara Falls, the Cathedral at Milan, St. Peter’s, the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, the cliffs at Beachy Head, and Giotto’s Campanile on the Duomo in Florence are among them. Not all settings are so grand. In 1813, in a French village, a woman hanged herself from a large tree; within a short time several other women followed her example, using the same branch. In New York’s Bowery there was a saloon in whose back room so many vagrants killed themselves, it became known as Suicide Hall. And, of course, most towns have their “lover’s leap.” In Japan, where self-destruction has found institutional acceptance, many suicides choose a spectacular natural setting for their death—“almost any place in Japan that is famous for its scenery is also famous for its suicides,” observed an American visitor in 1930.
Three years later, a Japanese place famous for its scenery—Mihara-Yama, a volcano on the island of Oshima—would provide a dramatic case study of the roles of culture, imitation, and social policy in suicide. On January 7, 1933, Mieko Ueki, twenty-four, and Masako Tomita, twenty-one, classmates at an exclusive Tokyo school, bought tickets on the small steamship that made three trips weekly to the island. After the six-hour, sixty-mile passage the young women scaled the three-thousand-foot peak. When they reached the crater, which boiled and sputtered with sulfur clouds, Mieko told Masako that she had visited Mount Mihara the previous year and been enchanted by the legend decreeing that the bodies of those who jumped into the crater were instantly cremated and sent to heaven in the form of smoke. This was a beautiful, poetic form of death, said Mieko, and she intended to jump. Masako protested but eventually agreed not to intervene. The two girls bowed to each other. Then Mieko leapt into the smoking crater.
The story of the maiden and the volcano quickly became legend. Japan was in the midst of an economic depression, and the volcano was a national attraction for both tourists and suicides. In the remaining months of 1933, 143 people followed Mieko’s example; on one April day there were six suicides, while twenty-five more were forcibly prevented. The deaths kindled a mixture of horror and fascination. The steamship company bought two new ships and made daily trips to accommodate the rubberneckers; company shareholders made a profit on their investment for the first time in four years. Along the harbor, fourteen hotels, twenty restaurants, and five taxicab companies opened within two years; the number of island photographers increased from two to forty-seven; a post office was built at the crater’s edge; three camels were imported to carry tourists across the mile-wide strip of volcanic desert that surrounded the crater; horses ferried them to the summit. And a twelve-hundred-foot “shoot the chute” was built to spice up the return trip down the slope for those who chose to make it. Suicide had become a spectator sport; on a day when several hours had passed without a death, a tourist laughingly shouted, “I dare someone to jump!” A man ran forward and threw himself into the crater.
Eventually, the embarrassed government intervened. It was made a criminal offense to purchase a one-way ticket to Oshima, and plainclothes detectives were instructed to mingle with passengers on the boat, arresting anyone who looked bent on self-destruction—their criteria are not known. Tokyo police patrolled the crater; by the end of 1934, policemen and civilian onlookers had restrained 1,208 people from jumping. A barbed-wire fence was erected and a twenty-four-hour watch was posted. The hastily formed Mount Mihara Anti-Suicide League even devised an elaborate arrangement of mirrors to give would-be suicides a terrifying view of the volcano’s interior. Despite these efforts at least 167 more men and women leaped to their death in 1934, and 29 who had been restrained dove off the steamship returning them to Tokyo. By the time access to the mountain was closed in 1935, an estimated 804 males and 140 females had found their death in the volcano. (Today, the country’s leading suicide spot is Aokigahara-Jukai, a dense forest at the foot of Mount Fuji, where about seventy people a year take their life, usually by hanging or overdose, many of them coming from far away. A study of 116 people who attempted suicide in the forest found that most believed it to be “a sanctuary where suicide was allowed,” a setting that would “purify” or “beautify” their death.)
Although the authorities acted tardily in the case of Mount Mihara, elsewhere, when certain locations seem to beckon the suicidal, steps have been taken to discourage them. In 1850 an American physician traveling in Europe wrote, “At one time there seemed to be a growing propensity to jump from the Leaning Tower at Pisa; three persons—as I learnt from my guide while on a visit to it—having thus put a period to their existence; on which account visitors could no longer ascend it without an authorized attendant.” In 1881 the column in Paris’s Place Vendôme was closed following a wave of suicides. In the early twentieth century a lake near Kobe, Japan, was drained because of the number of people who drowned themselves in its waters. Fences and barriers have greatly reduced the number of suicides at St. Peter’s, the Eiffel Tower, and the Arroyo Seco Bridge in Pasadena. In the first sixteen years after the Empire State Building opened in 1931, sixteen people jumped to their death; not until 1947, when a man landed on a woman in the street below, critically injuring her, was a seven-foot, spiked fence installed around the eighty-sixth-floor observation deck. In the nearly six decades since then, only fifteen others have jumped. In many other instances in which barriers, window stops, or emergency phones have been installed, suicides have been eliminated or greatly reduced. Nevertheless, despite more than twelve hundred deaths and six decades of debate, no barrier has been erected at the Golden Gate Bridge.
Even before Harold Wobber leaped to his death, there was concern about the Golden Gate’s potential for suicides. Although the bridge was designed to accommodate benches for pedestrians, the bridge’s board of directors feared they might be used as stiles, making it even easier for people to climb over the rail. The benches were never installed. Over the years, as the death toll mounted, various measures were considered: electric fences, barbed wire, safety nets, a twenty-four-hour motorcycle patrol, signs advising THINK BEFORE YOU LEAP, and legislation prohibiting jumping from the bridge. As early as 1953 a barrier was proposed. An engineer told the bridge board that
the existing railing could be raised to seven feet for $200,000. All of these proposals were rejected as being either too expensive, too dangerous to workers on the bridge, too foolish, or merely ineffective.
In the face of increased publicity and rising public concern, a few precautions were taken. In 1960 the bridge board ordered pedestrian sidewalks closed between sunset and sunrise. By 1970 a closed-circuit television system had been installed in the toll office, enabling workers to scan the pedestrian walkway and dispatch officers to restrain possible jumpers. A two-man tow truck roved the bridge. Patrolmen were taught to be on the lookout for women without purses, people edging away from their tourist group, or people staring intently at the surface of the water. Bridge personnel were trained in suicide prevention by a local prevention center. Thirteen telephones, from which concerned people can contact the control tower, have been placed at intervals along the span. California highway patrolmen and bridge personnel conduct random patrols by car, motorcycle, bicycle, and on foot. Over the years, bridge workers, patrolmen, toll officers, passing motorists, and pedestrians have talked down or pulled back hundreds of would-be jumpers, often at risk to their own lives. One state highway patrolman alone claimed to have prevented 217 suicides in nine years on the job. Indeed, it is estimated that for every suicide from the bridge, two others are prevented.
During the suicide prevention movement of the late sixties and early seventies, the debate over an antisuicide fence came to a head. A committee was formed to lobby for a barrier, and the argument raged in editorials and letters to the editor. The bridge battle was a microcosm of discussions about personal freedom and the value of life that have taken place around the country wherever antisuicide barriers have been proposed. How far should we go to prevent suicide? Bridge directors received hundreds of letters, about two-thirds opposing the barrier. Some argued that it would spoil the view: Why destroy the view for so many for the sake of so few? Some suggested it was a waste of money: Why spend money on someone who wants to die? Others felt the money would be better spent on free mental health care. Many defended a person’s right to suicide. “If and when I decide to die I would prefer the bridge as an exit point and I don’t want to be kept from it by a high, jail-like railing,” one woman wrote to the San Francisco Chronicle. “There are worse things than death and one should be able to make that personal choice if necessary.” A few even argued that an unfettered bridge saved lives by acting as a magnet to which disturbed people were drawn and could more easily be intercepted and delivered to treatment. The most popular argument against a barrier was that it simply wouldn’t work; common sense said that suicidal people would simply go kill themselves somewhere else.
Arguing in favor of the barrier, suicidologists pointed out that suicide is often an impulsive act, and the impulse, once thwarted, is frequently abandoned. They cited studies showing that only 10 percent of those who attempt suicide go on to kill themselves. They pointed out that 90 percent of bridge suicides jump from the side of the bridge facing San Francisco—facing what they’re leaving behind—as an indication of their ambivalence. They explained that suicidal people are apt to choose a highly personal method, and if that method is unavailable, they may abandon their plans rather than switch to another. In a suicidal crisis, people often lack the flexibility to generate alternatives when foiled. The suicidologists pointed to other locales in which barriers had decreased the number of suicides without spoiling the view. They indicated that the lethality of the method and the impulsiveness of many suicides made the bridge an especially deadly combination. “The bridge is like having a loaded gun around,” said psychiatrist Jerome Motto at a 1971 hearing. “I think it is the responsibility of those in control to unload the gun.” Although the bridge board authorized a $20,000 preliminary study and a sample of the winning design was constructed, the debate dragged on and the barrier went unbuilt.
Then Richard Seiden, a pro-barrier Berkeley psychologist, gathered the names of 515 people who had been restrained from jumping from the bridge dating back to its opening day. Checking their names against death certificates, he learned that only twenty-five had gone on to take their own life. Although his research proved that people did not inexorably go on to commit suicide using another method, critics argued that people restrained from jumping were not truly bent on death. What about those who had jumped and lived? In 1975, psychiatrist David Rosen interviewed six of the eight people known to have survived leaps from the Golden Gate Bridge. None of the eight survivors had gone on to kill themselves; the six he interviewed all favored the construction of an antisuicide fence. They all said that had there been a barrier, they would not have tried to kill themselves some other way. Their plans had involved only the Golden Gate Bridge; like those who attempted suicide in the forest of Jukai, they spoke of an association between its beauty and death. For them, Rosen said, the bridge was a “suicide shrine.”
A second study by Seiden supported the notion that the Golden Gate Bridge had a “fatal mystique.” Comparing Golden Gate suicides to San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge suicides, he found that although the two spans were completed within a few months of each other and are about the same height, five times as many people had completed suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge as from the Bay Bridge, its homely sister. Unlike the Golden Gate, the Bay Bridge does not allow pedestrian traffic. Yet even when pedestrian suicides were omitted, the Golden Gate still spawned three times as many suicides. The Golden Gate Bridge, said Seiden, had become “a suicide mecca”; while its suicides usually made the front page, Bay Bridge suicides were rarely publicized. Seiden found “a commonly held attitude that often romanticizes suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge in such terms as ‘aesthetically pleasing,’ and ‘beautiful,’ while regarding Bay Bridge suicide as ‘tacky’ and ‘déclassé.’” His statistics supported this: half of the bridge suicides who lived east of San Francisco had chosen to drive over the Bay Bridge and across the city to the Golden Gate Bridge to end their life.
Although Seiden’s and Rosen’s research seemed to put to rest the notion that if people were kept from killing themselves at the bridge, they would simply “go someplace else,” the campaign for a barrier became a moot political issue. “The bottom line is money,” says Seiden. “If it costs money, the bridge directors don’t want to do it.” Yet in 2003, a fifty-four-inch-high steel fence was built between the bridge walkway and the automobile lanes to prevent bicycles from accidentally drifting into traffic. The $5 million project was deemed a necessity—“it’s a public safety issue” was the refrain.
Clearly, more than money is involved. In one recent poll, 54 percent of city residents continued to oppose a suicide barrier. Seiden believes that San Franciscans like to think of their city as a tough-living, hard-drinking town and may take a perverse pride in the bridge’s reputation. Gray Line tour bus drivers recite the bridge’s suicide statistics in their tourist spiel; guidebooks describe its fatal allure. In 1981, workers at a local lumberyard organized a sports pool in which players bet on which day of the week the next Golden Gate suicide would take place. For many years, the city’s newspapers kept a kind of running box score in which news of each new jumper concluded with the observation that it was the bridge’s nth suicide. In 1995, as number 1,000 approached and the publicity crested, a disc jockey promised a case of Snapple to the victim’s family. Under pressure from various suicide prevention agencies, however, the local media was persuaded to downplay bridge suicides; indeed, the California Highway Patrol stopped its official public tally at 997. Lack of publicity couldn’t stem the tide. In July 1995, a twenty-five-year-old man became the bridge’s unofficial thousandth suicide. And the number continues to climb; when Seiden sends out his research papers, he pencils in the updated statistics.
But the line between pride and embarrassment is thin. In January 2005, shortly after a filmmaker shooting a documentary about the Golden Gate’s “grandeur” revealed that cameras he had set up on the bridge had captured more than a dozen
people jumping, the suicide barrier issue was rushed onto the agenda of the bridge’s building and operations committee. Two months later, the bridge’s board of directors voted to seek $2 million to study the issue. (The filmmaker says that his documentary will now focus not on the bridge’s “grandeur,” but on “the human spirit in crisis.”)
One breezy autumn morning Seiden and I drove from downtown San Francisco toward the Golden Gate Bridge. Just before the tollbooths on the bridge’s south side he directed me onto a narrow road on the right marked RESTRICTED ACCESS. About fifty yards down the road there was a deserted, weedy lot littered with ladders, broken window casings, and confusions of chicken wire. In the midst of this, like an abandoned sculpture, stood a curious metal structure, an eighteen-foot section of steel fence painted the same russet red as the Golden Gate Bridge. Its pencil-thin spires rose about eight feet into the air. On one-half of the fence the spires pointed toward the sky; on the other half they curved gently inward at the top, like the fingers of a cupped hand. Through the graceful spires there was a stunning view of the Golden Gate Bridge as it leaped more than a mile over the bay into the soft green hills of Marin County. “Winning design number sixteen,” said Seiden quietly. “It’s been sitting here for years.”
November of the Soul Page 51