Activist Pursues Bright Vision

Louis Dominguez imagines it this way: tens of thousands of visitors waiting at dusk throughout San Pedro, at balustrades and restaurants, atop cliffs, aboard sailboats rocking gently in the harbor.

All at once, the Vincent Thomas Bridge emerges from the shadows. Tiny blue lights outline the massive cables of Southern California’s longest suspension bridge. Finally, the bridge -- and San Pedro -- get the attention they are due.

For 15 years, Dominguez and his neighbors have stubbornly pursued that vision, through fund-raising problems, civil strife, the energy crisis and even a cutting-edge ornithological debate. Now the bridge lighting could be less than a year away. But Dominguez knows better than to count on it.

“Every time we’ve gotten this close, something has happened,” said the 56-year-old San Pedro teacher, whom some now call “the father of the bridge.”

The story of Dominguez’s vision says much about the nature of the harborside community that has long felt detached -- geographically, aesthetically, sociologically -- from City Hall, not to mention glitzier areas like Hollywood.

The Vincent Thomas Bridge is the manifestation of all that. The industrial-strength bridge that carries cars and trucks across Los Angeles Harbor is the third-longest suspension bridge in the state, after the well-lighted Golden Gate and Bay bridges in the Bay Area. The 1,500-foot-long bridge opened in 1963 and is credited with helping spur the growth of the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex.

Yet many Angelenos have never heard of the late state Assemblyman Vincent Thomas, or the bridge he lobbied to have built. Even fewer have crossed it. The bridge graces few tourist postcards. Some mistakenly call it the “St. Vincent Bridge.”

So San Pedro residents began raising money in the late 1980s to pay for lights, dropping their spare change in cups on store counters earmarked for the bridge fund.

Thousands walked across the bridge in an event intended to launch a major fund-raising drive. A few days later, the 1992 riots erupted, placing the bridge cause on a back burner.

The original concept was a modest one -- lights tracing the bridge’s cables and roadways.

In time, City Hall officials saw a bridge lighting as an ideal event to celebrate the millennium. A high-powered design evolved, with 120 floodlights as well as fixed-beam “Skytracker” lights aimed at the sky.

That alarmed local environmentalists familiar with studies suggesting that such lights could disorient birds, causing them to crash. The bridge sits in the Pacific Flyway, the path traveled by birds from Alaska to South America.

Astronomers feared the floodlights would intensify the sky glow caused by the port complex, already one of the largest sources of so-called light pollution in the region. With more light, the astronomers said, residents would lose sight of even more stars.

The project was “electrical overload,” said Catherine Rich, executive officer of the Urban Wildlands Group.

Critics called on the California Coastal Commission in November 1999 to reject the project, and the panel obliged -- to the dismay of light proponents.

“I just watched 12 years of my life thrown away,” Dominguez told the Daily Breeze at the time.

But eventually, compromise prevailed.

Light proponents began working with environmentalists on a less obtrusive plan. They were helped by Lighting Design Alliance, the Signal Hill-based company hired for the original project. The firm has worked on the bridge plan on a volunteer basis ever since, said principal Charles E. “Chip” Israel.

“We’re donating the time, just because we want to see it done,” Israel said.

The project narrowly averted another pitfall with the California energy crisis, which threatened to dim bridge lights throughout the state. In search of a less energy-hungry design, supporters came up with the idea of using light-emitting diodes instead of traditional bulbs.

What evolved is a design much like the one Dominguez envisioned 15 years ago: no floodlights, no Skytrackers, just 160 blue lights tracing the outline of the bridge.

“It’s going to be interesting and pretty -- much more tasteful,” Rich said. A recent study found that light in the blue-green spectrum is least destructive to birds, she said.

Installation costs of $870,000 will be paid with funds from the community, the city, the port, Caltrans and other agencies.

In the years that residents have sought to light their overlooked bridge, the port has swelled in all directions, surrounding the span with high-rise cranes and stacked containers. At night, the bridge’s outline is blurred in the yellow glow of the port’s many lights.

But on a celebratory evening next year -- barring another pitfall -- someone will flick a switch, and the bridge will snap into focus, a blue outline against the yellow background -- visible from the ocean, the freeways and from jetliners headed for LAX. Maybe then Angelenos will learn they have a bridge.