the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

Lesson #5
IGNORE THE PAST
AT YOUR PERIL
the preposterous collapse of
“galloping gertie”
The completed Tacoma Narrows Bridge stood for four
months in 1940 as a landmark of machine age design and
aesthetics—qualities that are less apparent now that it’s
at the bottom of Puget Sound.
SUCCESS CAN BE the harshest prelude to failure, because the fall
of the high and mighty seldom ends well. And it’s safe to say that Leon
Moisseiff, who helped engineer New York’s George Washington Bridge
and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge during the late 1920s and 1930s,
was at the top of his game in 1938 when the Washington State Toll Bridge
Authority hired the New Yorker as a con sultant and principal engineer for
its most ambitious bridge project ever—a suspension bridge across the
Tacoma Narrows, a half-mile gap between Washington State’s mainland
and the Olympic Peninsula.
But on November 7, 1940, a little more than four months after the
Tacoma Narrows Bridge opened as one of the sleekest, lightest, and most
beautiful suspension bridges ever built, Moisseiff’s reputation lay in a
twisted heap, much like the bridge itself. What his employers had wanted
in those money-strapped, post-Depression years was a serviceable bridge
to link the rural Olympic Peninsula to commercial and military centers
near Tacoma and Seattle. What they got was a beautiful bridge equipped