The Bridges of California Counties

California, with almost 40 million people, has over 400,000 miles of highways. But when it comes to bridges, most think it’s slim pickings. There’s the Golden Gate, the Bay Bridge and the Bixby Bridge near Big Sur that’s in car commercials. That’s it? Think again.

BY JIM WOOD

CALIFORNIA HAS MORE THAN 50 SIGNIFICANT bridges currently serving automobiles. Significant, meaning they’re worth talking about. These are truss, arch, beam, cantilever and suspension bridges. And the state has at least four working drawbridges — the number varies, as drawbridges aren’t always working.

One interesting drawbridge is Tower Bridge, which spans Sacramento River connecting Yolo County with the state capital. Completed in 1937, it’s a mechanical marvel that’s begs comparison to its namesake, London’s iconic Tower Bridge. Both are vertical lift bridges — meaning the roadway remains level as it rises between two towers, allowing watercraft to pass below.

But if drawbridges often malfunction, here’s a bridge in an even worse plight: It’s the Bridge to Nowhere. Built in 1936 to span the San Gabriel River between Azusa and a resort named Wrightwood in Southern California, it never felt rubber meet its roadway. A flood in ’38 washed out unfinished highways leading to and from it; now it’s only reachable via a three-hour hike where it’s used for bungee jumping.

However, that’s an exception. California bridges provide vital recreational and economic links along the state’s 400,000 miles of roadways. Here, arranged according to length — longest to shortest — are six California bridges worth talking about.

San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge

In 1849’s Gold Rush, supplies, along with hundreds of miners, arrived by ship in San Francisco. The City by the Bay was indeed on its way. But 20 years later, when the crosscontinent railroad terminated in Oakland, San Franciscans felt they’d no longer be the area’s preeminent city. In an effort to mitigate, in 1872 a civic character named Emperor Norton proposed a bridge across the bay, threatening arrest if city fathers didn’t respond.

Respond they did, but engineering studies indicated the bay was far too deep for crossing. Thus, the idea languished for nearly 50 years. A 1921 commission explored the idea of a tube between the two cities; which also proved unworkable. In 1929, a Hoover-Young Commission decided the only feasible approach was to use Yerba Buena Island as midpoint; saving considerable costs. However, the island was a Naval base requiring Congressional approval to be a public thoroughfare. Once political, designing, bonding, engineering and regulatory procedures could be completed, construction began on July 8, 1933, and 24 workers died before the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge was completed. It opened on November 12, 1936, six months ahead of the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Bay Bridge is actually two bridges of relatively equal size with Yerba Buena Island in the middle. The western bridge, named for former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, is a double span suspension bridge with traffic heading into San Francisco on its upper deck and Oakland-bound cars on its lower deck. A similar bridge arrangement between Yerba Buena and Oakland partially collapsed in the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, resulting in being entirely rebuilt as a combination causeway and self anchoring suspension bridge. All traffic on this portion is on one deck resulting in it being one of the nation’s widest bridges. Of note: The cost of seismic retrofitting the bridge's eastern portion was estimated at $250 million. After political infighting, it was decided a new bridge would be constructed. It cost $6.5 billion and took six years to complete.

Golden Gate Bridge

Credit that a Golden Gate Bridge exists largely goes to one man, Joseph Strauss, a diminutive engineer (and poet) whose early ambition was to build a bridge across the Bering Straits, connecting Asia with North America. Following the earthquake of 1906, city fathers wanted San Francisco to be the west’s most prominent metropolis and building a massive bridge sounded intriguing. So they lured Strauss west, where, in 1917, he quickly saw that wind, fog, and fierce tidal surges and currents — not to mention 350-foot deep icy water — would be major challenges. Also opposing a bridge would be ferryboat owners/operators and wary taxpayers; along with shipping and military interests fearing a collapsed bridge would corral them. And then came the Great Depression. Still, a mere two decades later, autos by the hundreds would gleefully glide across a completed Golden Gate Bridge.

Once building a bridge was approved, an exhausted Strauss mysteriously disappeared and Clifford Paine, his young engineering partner, assumed control. After several near disasters, Paine solved the immense problem of constructing piers in deep, swirling and icy water. And after bonding became the least objectionable means of financing, A. P. Giannini, father of the Bank of America, declared, “California needs that bridge, we’ll take those bonds.” On January 5, 1933, construction began and a rested Joseph Strauss reappeared, bringing with him Irving Morrow, an architect known for radical modernism. Morrow covered the bridge’s skeleton with steel Art Deco cladding and, most controversially, decided that the Golden Gate Bridge would be painted red (actually, international orange). The bridge opened on May 27, 1937, at cost slightly less than what Joseph Strauss said it would cost back in 1917: $27 million.

American civil engineers list it, along with the Panama Canal, Eiffel Tower and the Chunnel, as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. For more than 25 years following its opening, the Golden Gate Bridge was the longest and tallest suspension bridge in the world. Unfortunately, over the years, it has also been a magnet for people wanting to end their lives by jumping off it. A human jumping from 220-feet reaches 80 miles per hour during the four seconds it takes to hit the water. If that doesn’t bring death, drowning, in all but very rare instances, does. In all, over 1,600 people have possibly ended their lives by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge; so many so that bridge suicides are no longer reported by local media, fearing they cause a “copy-cat” response. A plastic-covered steel suicide-preventing net is presently being installed of both sides of the bridge. Its cost: $76 million.

Today, well over 100,000 cars, buses and trucks a day cross San Francisco Bay on the Golden Gate Bridge.

San Diego and Coronado Bridge

Building a bridge near a military base is never small potatoes. The military’s concern was an enemy could destroy it, trapping shipboard response in port. The Coronado Bridge was no exception. A bridge across San Diego Bay was proposed nearly 100 years ago, but voters nixed the idea. And in the 1950s, an admiral said the Navy would leave San Diego if a bridge were ever built. A decade later, in a turnaround, the Navy agreed to a bridge if an aircraft carrier could safely sail beneath it. That meant the Coronado Bridge had to hang 200 feet in the air; a worthy challenge seeing the distance to be spanned was less than two miles. In order to achieve a reasonable grade for traffic (4.5%) the bridge was designed to dramatically curve as it approached Coronado, thereby increasing its length to 2.1 miles. Construction started in February of 1967 and was finished in two and a half years.

Upon its opening, the Coronado Bridge had five lanes: Two in each direction and one defined by moveable cones, which varied in direction depending on traffic loads. But in 1981, a speeding drunk driver crashed through the cones killing a Coronado resident. The accident resulted in a barrier transfer machine being installed in 1993. The Coronado Bridge has no pedestrian or bike lanes and no shoulders. However, starting in 1986, a-once-a-year “Run/Walk the Bridge Day” was declared. Adding character to the Coronado Bridge is the presence of several enormous Chicano-inspired murals on the last few of the 27 girders supporting the span; the splash of color occurring as traffic exits the bridge and passes through a popular San Diego barrio. A far less celebratory aspect of the Coronado Bridge is that with over 400 deaths, it is second only to the Golden Gate Bridge in number of suicides resulting from leaps from its heights.

Carquinez Bridge

Following 75 years of cumbersome and dangerous ferry crossings, the first bridge across Carquinez Strait was completed in 1927 and it immediately became part of the famous Lincoln Highway that stretched all across the country. Prior to that, San Francisco-Sacramento traffic went south to Stockton then turned west into the Bay Area. The bridging of the Carquinez Straits, once considered impossible, created a direct route between the two areas as shaved considerable time off the journey. Seventy-five years later, there were three Carquinez Bridges; all in close proximity to each other. The Carquinez Bridge that opened in 1927 was a technologically advanced cantilever bridge that cost $8 million to construct. Just over 30 years later, due to heavy traffic use, a second bridge, costing $38 million, opened; it was also a cantilevered bridge. Then, due to the Loma Prieta Earthquake, a third Carquinez Bridge opened in 2003. Bridge #3 was a suspension bridge that cost $240 million to construct. To handle traffic while bridge #2 was being retrofitted, bridge #1 was brought into service and it wasn’t until 2007 that it was dismantled. So now there are two Carquinez Bridges.

The Carquinez Bridge that opened in 2003 carries westbound traffic along with lanes for pedestrians and bicyclists. It’s officially called the Alfred Zampa Memorial Bridge, named for an ironworker who labored on several Bay Area bridges, among them the original Carquinez Bridge as well as the Golden Gate Bridge. However, it could easily be called the International Bridge as its deck sections came from Japan; cable wire from Canada; cable bands from France; its suspender cables were fabricated in Missouri, its tower saddles in England and its steel caissons arrived from nearby Vallejo, California.

Colorado Street Bridge

At slightly more than a quarter mile long, Pasadena’s Colorado Street Bridge isn’t California’s longest bridge, and at 144-feet it’s certainly not the tallest. However, having opened in 1913, it’s possibly the state’s oldest. However, the graceful concrete arch bridge, designed by architects in Missouri, soon became known as “Suicide Bridge.” Once opened, over a dozen people ended their lives by jumping — possibly led into that desperate act by the story of a worker who fell from the bridge and died after landing in wet concrete at the bridge’s base. And as America entered the Great Depression, leaps from the bridge only increased. Another publicized suicide didn’t help Colorado Street Bridge shake its gruesome nickname. In this case, a young mother threw her child off the bridge before she leaped. The result was the woman died on impact, but the infant landed softly in a tree and survived unharmed. Soon thereafter, the original railings were raised to eight-feet, yet the suicides continued.

On the positive side, the Colorado Street Bridge was part of the original Route 66 until 1940 when the Arroyo Seco Freeway took away that designation, along with most of its traffic. Despite deferred maintenance also taking a toll, the bridge was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1981. But in 1989, the Loma Prieta Earthquake resulted in the bridge being closed until 1993. It was then that $27 million was put into retrofitting it, restoring its Beaux Arts details and reopening it. However, suicides continue to cloud the picture. Even though in the 2016 romantic musical La La Land, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling took an evening stroll across the 109-year-old Colorado Street Bridge, its sides have 10-foot tall chain-link fences in an effort to contain suicides. Now locals now say the bridge is haunted.

Tower Bridge

Mention Tower Bridge to a bridge aficionado and immediately London’s iconic Tower Bridge will come to mind. That’s OK. They’re both, in a way, vertical lift bridges and they have rather similar appearances. But the London bridge (it’s not the London Bridge) is 50 years older and more ornate than Sacramento’s Tower Bridge. However, seeing that it was built in the Art Deco-mad mid-1930s, and its architecture style is called Streamlined Moderne, Sacramento’s Tower Bridge has its share of embellishments. And it’s easily spotted approaching California’s state capital. Sacramento’s Tower Bridge opened on December 15, 1935, with Governor Frank Merriam releasing 1,000 white doves to spread the news. Originally, it had a large middle lane for trains to pass across, but in 1963 rail was eliminated and now only cars, bikes and pedestrians cross on it.

Also of note: The span that’s lifted when ships approach that weighs over 1,000 tons. However, thanks to an equal amount of counter weights hidden in each of the towers, two measly 100-horsepower electric motors appear to do all of the, well, heavy lifting. Then there’s the matter of the Tower Bridge’s color. For years it was painted silver — and locals complained it was too glaring. Then in 1976, it was painted gold — and locals complained it faded fast and looked blah. So in 2001, a vote was taken: Should Tower Bridge be painted gold and green; gold and silver; gold and burgundy; or all gold. All gold won — and locals complained it wasn’t as gold looking as it was promised to be. But the paint job was guaranteed for 30 years; so it won’t be repainted until 2032. Stay tuned.