A new book by Elizabeth Partridge is always a cause for celebration. I taught her Marching for Freedom for many years at my school, and her books about photographer Dorothea Lange (her godmother) are beautiful, full of archival photographs. When I got wind that Golden Gate: Building the Mighty Bridge was coming, I knew it would be special and figured it would be full of beautiful archival photographs, too. Well, it is beautiful, but no photographs. What stunning illustrations by Ellen Heck.  

In his novel The Trackers (2023), which takes place during the Great Depression, Charles Frazier has his protagonist describe the newly completed bridge:

"I sat on a bench by the water looking out at the brand-new Golden Gate Bridge, at the new configuration of landscape that it invented. I counted back and reckoned it had opened for traffic not even three months ago. It seemed timeless already, a construction our age could put up in competition against the Acropolis and not be embarrassed. A geometry of steel girders and enormous sweeping cables somehow conveying lightness and strength at the same time. It stood out from the landscape, from the city and open hills and the barrier of bay water widening into ocean, and it connected them with lines and curves, the geometry of the made thing. The force of art and imagination." 

So, how does a picture book, also a “force of art and imagination,” convey the grandeur of a bridge as great as the Acropolis? Frazier’s protagonist says, “The beauty and airy strength of the newly created bridge made me feel vastly and oddly hopeful. It was a bright counterweight to the darkness the Depression had cast over the country for so many years.” In our day, the bridge is taken for granted, a busy rush-hour means of getting to work and back. Can a book introduce young readers to the idea that a monument can be a bridge to hope in difficult times? 

Turns out, Ellen Heck’s illustrations Golden Gate are fully up to the job. Just look at the cover! It presents readers with an obvious palette choice, the reddish orange — International Orange — paint of the bridge itself. “How sad if it had been painted black or grey instead of a color in the range of cinnabar,” says Frazier’s narrator. I don’t know if it was her design choice or the jacket designer’s to inset the bridge itself inside the O in the title, but it is a genius detail. Heck has two fictional children of workers and a dog looking up at it, providing emphasis for the detail. The endpapers are, literally, riveting, and the title page has the title in cinnabar against gorgeous blues of sky and water, with nicely textured and smudgy browns and greens for the land. All of these colors are mutable, depending on weather and time of day, as the story progresses, but the reddish orange of the bridge is a constant. I can’t think of a picture book this year where the illustrations so perfectly match the subject. (Heck discusses her printmaking techniques here.)

Heck’s illustrations don’t just illustrate the story, and they don’t just do what all good picture book art does — add and interplay with the story. These illustrations are beautiful art in and of themselves, deserving pause to consider and appreciate. I sure hope someone on the committee realizes this. (I know from experience that an advocate for a book on the committee, someone who notices these things and has come to feel passionate about the book at hand, is crucial to the book’s success.) Nonfiction books are not always the typical place to find such distinctive art, but here it is.

The story proceeds with the step-by-step process of bridge construction, written in second person. Another genius design choice is the panel llustration across the bottom of the double-page spreads, showing the progress of the construction and offering another layer of detail and appeal. Fittingly for a book about a long suspension bridge, the book is mostly told with double-page spreads, often with oval inserts that add action and detail. These details demonstrate that this is not just a technical account of the building of a bridge. It is a human drama, too, and Heck parallels Partridge’s detailed and lively account of the construction with images of a boy, a girl, and a dog witnessing the progress, dizzying images of the riveting gangs risking their lives, construction divers dropping into the water “like stones,” bridgemen clinging to cables to build catwalks from tower to tower, and, of course, the painters dangling from the suspender ropes to paint every square inch of steel International Orange. 

By story’s end, it’s opening day, May 27, 1937, a little over four years from the beginning of construction. What had seemed impossible is now completed, and the bridge stands as a symbol of hope: “You feel like you’re in the middle of the whole wide world. The vast Pacific Ocean stretches out behind you. America is in front of you, with her soaring mountains and plains and rivers. And high above, where the seagulls circle, the towers touch the sky.” Such poetic writing to match the majestic illustrations. Heck writes at her website, “I am inspired by the visual message that possibility is always present, and it is people and their work that reveal it.” 

I think there is no other picture book this year better illustrated than Golden Gate. This book is a natural for the Sibert Committee, which considers nonfiction, but I hope the Caldecott Committee will give it special attention, too. It deserves it! 

[Read The Horn Book Magazine review of Golden Gate]