Built in 1913, the Striking Span Draws Artists and, Unfortunately, the Despondent, Making It ... A Bridge With a Past

For all its elegant lines and its historic importance to the growth of Pasadena, the Colorado Street Bridge is best known for a tragic reality: It is the city’s most conspicuous place to die.

More than 100 people are believed to have leapt from the classical-looking span since it opened in 1913. Many of them jumped during the Great Depression--31 in a single three-year period. The installation of barbed steel fencing atop the original balustrade greatly curtailed the problem, but even now, in nearby schools, neighborhoods and government offices, the bridge retains an unshakable notoriety.

“We never called it the Colorado Street Bridge--it was always the Suicide Bridge,” says Alex Wallace, a Long Beach attorney who spent weekends during his childhood in Pasadena and now keeps an oil painting of the majestic bridge on his office wall. “Anybody who lived in Pasadena or had to commute to that area always referred to it as the Suicide Bridge.”

Pat Hensley, a secretary in the federal courthouse at the east end of the bridge, first heard it called that while attending nearby Sacred Heart Academy in the early 1960s. “I remember many times that the bridge was closed . . . [because] people jumped off,” she said. “I can remember standing [in the schoolyard] and looking down and it was always kind of quiet--and you’d say a prayer for the person.”

Few who see the bridge fail to notice its striking geometry. It was the longest and highest bridge of its time, extending 1,468 feet across the dry riverbed of the Arroyo Seco. Its sidewalks and narrow, two-lane road are a ribbon running 150 feet above the arroyo floor.

The road is still illuminated by grape-like clusters of oversized electric globes. Beneath the deck are enormous, tapered double arches, each pair joined by thin bands. The main arches support an array of columns that rise to meet in smaller arches, creating the effect of an intricate ivory carving. The off-white concrete enhances that impression.

Artists situate themselves to try to capture its grandeur. Arthur B. Egeli is one of the more devoted, having produced about 40 paintings in a dozen years. He has painted the bridge from the arroyo wash, from clearings on the rim and from beneath the span itself. He has painted it in morning light and evening light, in summer and in winter.

Like a celestial body, the bridge moves into a new phase this month: The sun will catch only the south edge, a look different enough, he says, that he has begun a new piece.

“I could probably paint this bridge until the end of my life and have new and exciting compositions,” said Egeli, 37, who sells his work through the Tirage Art Gallery in Pasadena. “In the middle of winter, you have a dramatic view against the mountains because the sun hits it straight on. I just finished a night [painting]. It’s a whole another thing at night.”

The bridge is considered particularly difficult to paint because it is not straight. The arches are angled to follow a slightly S-shaped line, the result of a struggle to find solid footings on the arroyo alluvium.

Engineer John Alexander Waddell and contractor John Drake Mercereau collaborated on what was then--a quarter-century before the Golden Gate--a herculean feat of design and construction. It was a vital traffic link connecting the resort town of Pasadena with developing communities to the west and south, including Eagle Rock, Glendale, Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles.

“Before you had the bridge, you had to descend a steep bank into the arroyo, cross a little bridge that often got washed out, and go up a steep bank on the other side,” said Sue Mossman, head of the preservationist group Pasadena Heritage.

People did reach Pasadena from the south, she added, along the route that became the Pasadena Freeway, but the bridge provided by far the best means to travel east and west.

4-Foot Railings

As originally built, the bridge railings were but 4 feet high, making it easy for luckless investors of the 1930s to leap into the arroyo.

“Rather than detract from the appearance of the structure by adding a fence, the city considered having a nine-man police team stationed on the bridge, or policemen disguised as ice cream vendors,” noted a report commissioned by the city in 1988, before a massive refurbishment. “[Then] in 1937, a woman threw her small child over the edge of the bridge and jumped off herself.” The mother died, but the child “fell into a tree and survived, and the city immediately instituted measures to provide a fence.”

At the time of the report, the number of deaths totaled 96--a terrible figure, though only a fraction of the toll at the Golden Gate, the world’s acknowledged No. 1 spot for committing suicide. The number there has surpassed 1,000, and authorities have installed crisis hotline phones and begun regular patrols by public safety officers.

Exactly why the despondent take their lives by leaping from bridges is unclear. Some experts suspect that a spectacular setting is itself a draw, though suicide scholar Alan W. McEvoy says he has never seen a study of the question.

McEvoy, author of “Preventing Youth Suicide,” speaks with the caveat that suicides--and suicide bridges--should not be glorified. Those afflicted with suicidal thoughts should find someone to talk to, he says, or seek professional help. Antidepressant medications are available. “If they feel hopeless, it’s critical they understand that other people have endured similar circumstances and gotten through it. The belief that no one cares is mistaken. Most of those left in the wake are devastated.”

Seeing the drama unfold also is anguishing. U.S. Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has a commanding view of the Colorado Street Bridge.

He recalls watching a man who had scaled the 8-foot fence, moving back and forth on the outer ledge. Eventually, police coaxed the man to safety, but the ordeal lasted hours. Kozinski tried in vain to keep his mind on the law.

“You never knew if he would let go and jump,” he said.

A party is held on the bridge and bluff top park each July to celebrate the successful refurbishment and seismic retrofitting. About 4,000 people show up for an evening of food and music, said Mossman of Pasadena Heritage, which organizes the bash.

Two years ago, she got a phone call she will never forget. The middle-aged woman said she wanted information about attending “because she had survived a dive off the bridge when she was an infant,” Mossman said. “That was just shocking to me.”

If she was that child from 1937, Mossman can’t be sure. They never met face-to-face.

“I hope she came and had a great time.”