Golden Gate can refer to:

• Golden Gate (Constantinople), imperial entrance gate of city of Constantinople, present-day Istanbul, Turkey
• Golden Gate (Jerusalem), in Israel
• Golden Gate (Kiev), a historic gatetower in Ukraine
  • also the name for the nearby Kiev Metro station; see Zoloti Vorota (Kiev Metro)
• Golden Gate (Vladimir) (Zolotye Vorota), the main gate for the city of Vladimir (Russia) from 1158 to 1164
• Golden Gate (Gdańsk), in Poland

Topography of San Francisco[link]

• The Golden Gate, the strait connecting San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean in the United States, named after the Golden Gate (Latin: Porta Aurea, Greek: Χρυσή Πύλη, Chrysē Pylē) of Constantinople (now Istanbul), and also after the Golden Horn, an estuary on the Bosphorus in Istanbul
• The Golden Gate Bridge, which extends across the Golden Gate strait
• Golden Gate Park in San Francisco
• Golden Gate National Recreation Area, a national park in the San Francisco Bay Area

Related uses[link]

• Golden Gate, Oakland, California, a neighborhood
• Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in Mill Valley, California
• Golden Gate Capital Partners, a private equity buyout firm headquartered in San Francisco, California
• Golden Gate Transit, a bus and ferry operator centered on Marin County, California

Other places[link]

United States[link]

• Golden Gate, Florida, a CDP in Collier County, Florida
• Golden Gate, Martin County, Florida, an unincorporated community and the location of the historic Golden Gate Building built in 1925.
• Golden Gate, Illinois
• Golden Gate (Yellowstone National Park)

South Africa[link]

• Golden Gate Highlands National Park, in South Africa

Entertainment[link]

• The Golden Gate Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas
• The Golden Gate Quartet, a gospel quartet founded 1934 in Norfolk, Virginia

Novels[link]

• The Golden Gate, by Vikram Seth, written entirely in Onegin stanzas
• The Golden Gate, by Alistair MacLean

Films and television[link]

• Golden Gate (film), a 1994 film directed by John Madden, starring Matt Dillon and Joan Chen
  • Golden Gate (soundtrack), the soundtrack to the 1994 film
• Golden Gate (1994 film), a 1994 TV movie starring David James Elliott and Christopher Meloni
• Golden Gate (television), a Slovak television show

Other uses[link]

• The Golden Gate (train), a named passenger train operated by the Santa Fe railroad, starting in 1938
• École Golden Gate Middle School, a bilingual middle school in Winnipeg, Manitoba
• Golden Gates, Eaton Hall at Eaton Hall, Cheshire, England

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

The Golden Gate

The Golden Gate is the North American strait connecting San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean. Since 1937 it has been spanned by the Golden Gate Bridge. Technically, the 'gate' is defined by the headlands of the San Francisco Peninsula and the Marin Peninsula, while the 'strait' is the water flowing in between.

During the last Ice Age, when sea level was several hundred feet lower, the waters of the glacier-fed Sacramento River and the San Joaquin River scoured a deep channel through the bedrock on their way to the ocean.^[1] The strait is well known today for its depth and powerful tidal currents from the Pacific Ocean. Many small whirlpools and eddies can form in its waters. During the centuries Golden Gate strait with its strong currents, rocky reefs and low fog conditions has became a place of more than a hundred shipwrecks.

Before the arrival of Europeans in the 18th century, the area around the strait and the bay was inhabited by the Ohlone to the south and Coast Miwok people to the north. Descendants of both tribes remain in the area.

The Golden Gate, looking south towards San Francisco. San Francisco Bay is on the left, and the Pacific Ocean is on the right.

The Golden Gate is often shrouded in fog. During the summer, the heat in the California Central Valley causes the air there to rise. This can create strong winds which pull cool moist air in from over the ocean through the break in the hills caused by the Golden Gate, commonly causing a stream of dense fog to enter the bay. The strait was surprisingly elusive for early European explorers, presumably due to this persistent summer fog. The strait is not recorded in the voyages of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo nor Francis Drake, both of whom may have explored the nearby coast in the 16th century in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. The strait is also unrecorded in observation by Spanish galleons returning from the Philippines that laid up in nearby Drakes Bay. These galleons rarely passed east of the Farallon Islands (27 miles west of the Golden Gate), fearing the possibility of rocks between the Islands and the mainland.

The first recorded observation of the strait occurred nearly two hundred years later than the earliest European explorations of the coast; in 1769 Sgt. José Francisco Ortega, the leader of a scouting party sent north along the peninsula of present-day San Francisco, reported that he could proceed no further because of the strait. On 5 August 1775 Juan de Ayala and the crew of his ship the San Carlos became the first Europeans known to have passed through the strait, anchoring in a cove behind Angel Island which is now named in Ayala's honor. Until the 1840s the strait was called the "Boca del Puerto de San Francisco" (Mouth of the Port of San Francisco). On 1 July 1846, before the discovery of gold in California, the entrance acquired a new name. In his memoirs, John C. Frémont wrote, "To this Gate I gave the name of "Chrysopylae", or "Golden Gate"; for the same reasons that the harbor of Byzantium was called Chrysoceras, or Golden Horn."^[2]

Coordinates: 37°49′N 122°29′W / 37.817°N 122.483°W / 37.817; -122.483

The Golden Gate in local culture[link]

The name "Golden Gate" holds an important connotation in the Bay Area as a reference point for the region, and is attached to the bridge that spans the strait, a large park in San Francisco, and other local establishments.

The Golden Gate Issue of 1923

Golden Gate, 1920s[link]

In the 1920s there was no bridge spanning the watery expanse between San Francisco and Marin in California, so when the U.S. Post Office issued a postage stamp on May 1, 1923, celebrating The Golden Gate, the issue naturally portrayed the scene without a structure bridging the great span.^[3] The schooner sailing ship in the engraving is the USS Babcock which served in the United States Navy from 1917–1919, and is seen passing through the Golden Gate into San Francisco Bay, its port of call.^[4]

Golden Gate Bridge[link]

The Golden Gate in California, as seen from the Marin Headlands looking south.

The Golden Gate Bridge is a suspension bridge spanning the Golden Gate, the opening of the San Francisco Bay onto the Pacific Ocean. As part of both US Highway 101 and California Route 1, it connects the city of San Francisco on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula to Marin County.

The Golden Gate Bridge had the longest suspension bridge span in the world when it was completed in 1937 and has become an internationally recognized symbol of San Francisco and California. Since its completion, the span length has been surpassed by eight other bridges. It still has the second longest suspension bridge main span in the United States, after the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York City. In 2007, it was ranked fifth on the List of America's Favorite Architecture by the American Institute of Architects.

Golden Gate Park[link]

Golden Gate Park, located in San Francisco, California, is a large urban park consisting of 1017 acres (4.1 km², 1.6 mi²) of public grounds. Configured as a rectangle, it is similar in shape but 174 acres (0.7 km², 0.27 mi²) larger than Central Park in New York, to which it is often compared. With 13 million visitors annually, Golden Gate is the third most visited city park in The United States (after New York's Central Park and Chicago's Lincoln Park).

Golden Gate University[link]

Founded in 1901, Golden Gate University (informally referred to as GGU, or simply as Golden Gate) is a private, nonsectarian, coeducational university located in the Financial District of downtown San Francisco, California.

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Golden Gate

• National Park Service: Discovery of the Golden Gate
• Golden Gate 360 Image (QTVR)
• Golden Gate 360 Image (Java)
• Digitally Restored Panoramic Composited View of The Golden Gate, Fort Point, and San Francisco Bay as seen from "Land's End" near Sutro Heights, c. 1895.

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