Missing Link: Travolator Bridge Is Torn Down : Trail-Blazing Span No Longer Needed After Motel Sold

San Diego’s opulent elite once pranced across the enclosed Travolator bridge. At another time in its checkered, 27-year history, the city’s poor used it to wander over 7th Avenue between the El Cortez hotel and the Travolator motel.

The sturdy 112-foot arched, concrete-and-steel bridge, the first overhead moving walkway, came down Saturday as new owners of the Travolator motel began renovations. Bare gears from the two-way pedestrian conveyor belt and decorative tiles were the last fragments of the bridge’s former self.

“The bridge has served the gamut of people,” said Carol Brown, manager of El Cortez Associates, which sold the motel and bridge for $4.5 million in April. “It not only spanned the street, it spanned society.”

El Cortez owner Harry Handerly built the bridge, dubbed the Travolator, to connect the hotel with his new motel across the street. One of Handerly’s many novelties, the span was linked with an elevator on 6th Avenue to help guests up Ash Street’s “cardiac hill” to the hotel, at 7th Avenue and Ash.

Celebrities and politicians met in the Sky Room and Starlite Room as the El Cortez grew to be one of the West Coast’s finest. Its outdoor glass elevator, reportedly a bellboy’s idea, was the world’s first in 1956.

The Travolator bridge’s moving walkway also was a first in 1959. The Otis Elevator experiment, basically a flat escalator, later was used in airports in London, Atlanta and Los Angeles.

“We had a lot of fun designing it,” architect Clarence J. Paderewski said.

The El Cortez was sold in 1978 to World Evangelism Inc., a ministry based on faith healing that intended to set up a school for evangelists in the complex. The school never materialized, and the buildings slipped into disrepair. The overhead walkway was shut down in 1981 and the city’s homeless started sleeping on the bridge at night.

The Travolator motel, between 6th and 7th avenues at Ash Street, was most recently used as a temporary shelter for the homeless by the St. Vincent de Paul Center. It’s new owner, JBL and Associates of San Diego, is turning the 60,000-square-foot building into a Howard Johnson’s motel with 350 parking spaces. It will open in August. The El Cortez is still awaiting a new owner after numerous near-deals.

JBL president Jack Howard said he frequently crossed the moving bridge as a youth and was sorry his company had to tear it down.

“When it was all one operation (the hotel and motel), the bridge made sense,” he said. “But now they’re breaking up the block, and it’s just not possible to keep it all together.”

Penhall Co., a San Diego construction-services company that specializes in bridge demolition, dismantled the 226,000-pound bridge Saturday at a cost of $16,500.

It took the combined efforts of three tractors, two cranes, three 33-foot-long hauling trucks and several men to bring down the bridge. A welder began cutting through the 2-inch-thick steel reenforcement bars late Friday night, painting the night with an umbrella of sparks.

The last chunk was lifted away from the El Cortez at 12:40 p.m. Saturday by the large cranes. Only the busy demolition workers and a handful of curious passers-by on the closed street were there to see the last vestige of this man-made umbilical cord.

“It was built to stay, that’s for sure,” said Floyd Phillips, a truck driver who helped haul away the debris. “It’s taken a little longer to bring down than people thought. Just look at how thick that rebar (steel reenforcement bar) is.”

In its heyday, some called the bridge the “Travel-eater.” Others objected to its garish orange exterior.

But the breakup of the El Cortez complex saddens those who remember its former splendor.

Brown, of El Cortez Associates, said, “It’s one of the things that people won’t miss until it’s gone, like when people shave their beards. I think it will tug at people’s heartstrings to see something of the past vanish.”

Times staff writer Armando Acuna contributed to this story.