The Brooklyn is still better. Yes, the Golden Gate wins on approach. It is a seduction of classically Baroque persuasion, hint, tease, sudden surprise. Turn once and get a glimpse of the top of the towers, turn again, and more is revealed, another turn shows the flanks of the city rising across the bay, until finally you are on the bridge. But the bridge itself, the construction, is just a smaller version of the Verrazano-Narrows. And the Verrazano is longer, bigger, and it is blue. A blue that blurs water and sky, a blue that plays off the tiny lights necklacing its cables, a blue that makes you look for it hard off the south Brooklyn shore. But the Brooklyn Bridge is still best of all. Its approach is workaday, a 100 plus years of urban build up, a factual funneling of commerce to its endpoint. It wins in structure. It wins in closeness of steel slicing air, it wins in the soaring of solid stone arches, it wins in scale that is at once heroic and human. It wins because it never tried to be anything else but its own most excellent utility, its own best design, its own perpetuity. I can only hope to carry so much.