No one could accuse Joseph Bazzeghin of not being ambitious. In 1938, Bazzeghin, a self-styled entrepreneur, delivered a proposal to San Francisco city officials. What their lauded Golden Gate Bridge was missing, he said, was a roller coaster rocketing across its suspension cables.
In Bazzeghin’s mind, the attraction could top out at 220 miles per hour—faster than any roller coaster in existence, with one precipitous drop of 750 feet. The infrastructure was already all there: All the city had to do was make some minor additions, and they’d have one of the biggest and best amusement rides in the country. Or, as he insisted, “[the] ride would be most thrilling experience in any person’s life.”
As crazed as it sounds, city authorities did something unexpected: They took Bazzeghin seriously.
- “Too Great an Attraction”
The Rise of Roller Coasters
Roller coasters were a somewhat recent innovation circa the 1930s. These rides built on the “scenic railways” track rides that became popular in the 19th century. Coasters that were propelled at high speeds along tracks came of age with Coney Island’s Cyclone, which could hit over 60 miles per hour.
Bazzeghin’s plan went a step further. An inventor from Hamden, Connecticut, who had peddled steam engines and an early version of a jet pack, he believed the Golden Gate Bridge could accommodate a coaster via the existing towers, thus eliminating the initial cost of building and engineering a supporting structure. But it was also a purposeful bit of promotion: San Francisco’s Treasure Island was due to host the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, a kind of world’s fair designed to draw attention to the city and its amenities. Just as Olympic cities erect buildings, San Francisco could deploy a roller coaster…