Pasadena Bridge Reopens: It Got Through the Quake

Any despairing stockbroker who may have felt driven to jump off Pasadena’s venerable Colorado Street bridge after the recent market crash would have had to drive a little farther.

The nine-arched span that has stepped elegantly across the Arroyo Seco for 74 years has been closed for a month--since the 5.5 aftershock to the Oct. 1 earthquake, which measured 6.1 on the Richter scale.

Today the 1,468-foot span is scheduled to reopen. County engineers have apparently determined that the temblors did no damage to the stately bridge, and the 5,000 cars that cross its curving length at leisure every day can abandon the freeway detour and return.

“We’ll just quietly take the barricades out,” said Mitsugi Hino, Pasadena’s administrative engineer for public works and transportation.

But the creeping erosions of time have accomplished what seismic suddenness did not. For some years now, the bridge has been showing its age, dropping chunks of concrete as old as the Titanic to the riverbed 160 feet below.

One of those chunks “spalled”--worked its way loose--and dropped after the earthquake. Its plummet was spotted by a passer-by who called Pasadena police, Hino said, setting in motion the closure and month-long safety inspection.

Hino already knew why the concrete was falling: Rusty stains on the bridge indicated that, over the decades, water has seeped in through cracks in the concrete, corroding the steel reinforcement bars in the pillars and arches.

If the quake itself did no damage to the structure, it dramatized how much in need of surgery is the dowager bridge, across which Eddie Cantor drove a chariot in the 1933 film “Roman Scandals,” and under whose span a biplane flew, with a young woman hanging from each wing, for a newsreel on Flag Day, 1926.

“I think everyone’s anxious to get it open, but it also underlines the fact that we need to get this bridge restored,” said Claire Bogaard, executive director of the Pasadena Heritage group, which sells posters and writing paper featuring the bridge, which also serves as the letterhead logo for an Arroyo homeowners’ group.

“After City Hall, this is probably the most beloved landmark in Pasadena,” she said.

Although the state has three times proposed tearing down the bridge, which is on the National Register of Historic Places as well as the Register of Civil Engineering Landmarks, Pasadena has resisted.

Pasadena Heritage and the state’s Office of Historic Preservation squawked at one proposal that would have saved the arches and two-lane roadway but removed from the top of the bridge all the ornamental niceties in favor of thick concrete barricades to withstand 60-m.p.h. crashes on the bridge, where 25 m.p.h. can be giddying.

Now, a city plan is moving forward that would reinforce its arches, temporarily “scalp” the bridge of its picturesque concrete bench-alcoves and light standards so it could be widened by two feet, and then “replicate” the alcoves and refurbish and replace the lamps.

Would Preserve Name

“The upper part of the bridge would be removed so seismic work can be done underneath on the arches,” said Bogaard, who is on a committee overseeing the restoration. “Then the top of the bridge would be replaced, so the bridge will look as it is today.”

And one more thing will be preserved: its name. It is a bit of Pasadena arcana that it is called the Colorado Street bridge, from the days when Colorado wasn’t yet big enough to have earned the title “boulevard.”

(For years, its grimmer nickname was the “Suicide Bridge.” About 95 people jumped to their deaths, more than half of them during the down-and-out 1930s, until a palisade of eight-foot steel spikes with inward-curving tips replaced chicken-wire barriers.)

The $10.7-million restoration plan could add 50 to 75 years to the life of the bridge, which originally cost $202,000. It could also reimburse the city for 80% of the restoration costs, from a federal fund to rehabilitate bridges and highways.

So there may be a future for the bridge with a past, once a working bridge that spanned real torrents, before the waters were dammed up and things like the Rose Bowl were built in the arroyo. A small stream still meanders stubbornly along the riverbed.