This Is How Highway Officials Partied in 1936

If you’d been a highway official in California in 1936, you might have wanted to bust a celebratory move. Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge had been underway for three years; it would open for public use in 1937, decreasing the growing city’s reliance on ferries. What better spot for the American Association of State Highway Officials to throw themselves a bash?

On December 9, 1936, they boogied at the hoity-toity Hotel St. Francis in San Francisco, a spot that withstood the earthquake of 1906 and later played host Hellen Keller, Charlie Chaplin, Isadora Duncan, and Cary Grant, in addition to a celebrity scandal and scuffles over wages and working conditions. (It’s now known as the Westin St. Francis Hotel.) We found a digitized program of the festivities in the New York Public Library’s collection of menus. Naturally, a gilded bridge marches across the top of each page, bisecting choppy water and rolling hills.