Bay Bridge: History and Design of a New Icon

INTRODUCTION

THE TITAN

OF BRIDGES

The January 1933 issue of Popular Mechanics featured a new engineering marvel on the West Coast: an innovative bridge that would become the largest suspension bridge in the world upon its completion. With the sobriquet The Titan of Bridges, the new San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, shortened to the Bay Bridge, would be an engineering and transportation wonder solving the problem of increased population and automobile traffic between the East Bay and San Francisco. Through rapid planning—it took only two years to design and three to build—the new link between Oakland and San Francisco would quickly prove to be a vital element in the economic growth of the area.

Longer than its competitor, the Golden Gate Bridge, which would be inaugurated six months after the Bay Bridge opened in November 1936, the Titan remained continuously in use from 1936 until 1989, when the Loma Prieta earthquake caused a fifty-foot roadway section to collapse, closing the bridge for one month and causing widespread concern over its safety.

Surprisingly, this $77 million public works project, undertaken during the Depression, was approved, designed, and built both without a popular vote and with great speed. Indeed, political and social consensus supporting the bridge was a unique feature of an exceptional structure, actually two bridges: the West Span, a double suspension bridge linked by a giant anchorage between San Francisco and Yerba Buena Island, and the East Span, a cantilevered truss bridge between Yerba Buena Island and Oakland. But the purposeful construction of the 1936 bridge is in sharp contrast to the delays, wrangling, and cost overruns of the new East Span. Called the White Span because of its distinctive 525 ft. white tower and roadway, the new bridge did not begin construction until 2004 and will not be completed until September 2013, twenty-four years after the 1989 earthquake.

How all this this came about and how the world’s longest single-tower self-anchored suspension bridge became the choice for the new East Span is the story of this book, co-authored and illustrated by Donald MacDonald, the architect who designed its signature structure.

1

WHAT’S

IN A NAME?

Yerba Buena Island is a natural outcropping in San Francisco Bay, approximately one and a quarter miles from San Francisco, and is the touchdown for the East and West spans of the original Bay Bridge. First known as Sea Bird Island, it became Goat Island about 1836 when a Captain Gorham Nye placed goats imported from the Sandwich Islands on the small landmass for sale to trading vessels. He moved them to the island because they had been destroying the flowers in his San Francisco home, but they reproduced so rapidly—by 1849 there were nearly a thousand—the name Goat Island seemed appropriate. Wood Island was the next designation, and sometime later it became Yerba Buena, the name originating from a nearby town because of an aromatic trailing vine that covered the slopes of the town and the island. The plant, whose common name is an English form of the Spanish hierba buena, meaning good herb, is related to the mint family.

The first legislature of California officially established Yerba Buena as the island’s name in February 1850—but it didn’t stick. By 1895, the U.S. Geographic Board changed it back to Goat Island, which lasted until June 1931. The Geographic Board then reversed itself, restoring the Spanish Yerba Buena in response to demands to return to its official, legislatively approved name.

Centuries before the settlement of the Bay Area, Ohlone Native Americans fished in the area and explored the island, traveling there in either canoes or tule barges (Figures 1 & 2). They established a fishing station, as well as a kind of Turkish bath called a temascal in Spanish, considered a remedy for many ailments. Birds, as well as fish, provided food. Once Europeans started to arrive, the island also became a gathering place for fisherman and sailors because of its position in the middle of the uncharted bay; it offered limited shelter and resources, with its highest point some 344 feet above the low-water mark. When William Bernard from the ship Edward Everett arrived on the island in 1849, he found nothing but a few goats, although the remains of an extensive Native American village appeared on the east shore (Figure 3). The buildings ranged from the ruins of old houses to bones, shells, and cremating pits. Bernard later returned to live on the island for a short time.

Figures 1 & 2

Figure 3

The island has had its share of mystery, notably a legend of buried treasure, as smuggling was a particularly successful business in the 1830s, with goods taken from ships arriving in the harbor and hidden on the rocky outcroppings; the alleged items included opium and silver. In 1837, a Spanish sloop returning to Spain with the wealth of the Mission Dolores crashed on the island in a storm. It was likely wrecked on the northern point, with most, but not all, of its treasure saved. Survivors apparently buried much of the church plate and silver on the island, although they never returned to claim it. Coupled with stories from the California Gold Rush of 1849, numerous prospecting parties headed for the island, but rarely with any luck.