A Bridge to the Future in Redding

A few days ago, he was in the Netherlands, surrounded by Dutch royalty and assorted European culturati, for the gala dedication of three new spans he designed.

But it was nothing, Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava said, compared to the stirring Fourth of July bridge opening here Sunday. Local boosters are hoping the soaring new $23.5-million Calatrava-designed footbridge across the Sacramento River will represent a dramatic break with this city’s image as a rough-hewn Northern California backwater.

At the Sundial Bridge dedication, Calatrava beamed as Native Americans prayed for the bridge’s spirit and scattered ceremonial tobacco to the four winds. The 53-year-old architect glowed as a choir performed a medley of American patriotic tunes and ponytailed Vietnam vets marched in a somewhat ragged color guard.

He jumped to his feet and waved his arms with joy when 100 homing pigeons were released to the skies and circled the bridge as though they were a performing part of the bridge design. “The birds! The birds!” Calatrava exclaimed. “I think they like my bridge. They went and then they came back again.”

After 10 years, countless debates and spiraling cost increases that often tested the public will, Redding finally got a chance Sunday to celebrate what many here consider a kind of new beginning for the city of 85,000.

Maybe, assistant Mayor Mary Stegall hopefully told filmmakers who documented the bridge’s complicated construction, people will now “remember Redding other than as the place where their car broke down on the freeway when it was 120 degrees.”

If not a new beginning for Redding, the white bridge, which looks like a boned fish with a giant dorsel fin, is certainly a major cultural coup. Calatrava is one of the world’s hottest architects, designer of the Olympic Stadium complex in Athens and the planned transportation hub on the grounds of the World Trade Center in Manhattan.

Most of his works are in major European cities. The Redding bridge is just his second work completed in the United States, preceded by the critically heralded addition to the Milwaukee Museum of Art.

For Redding to commission a Calatrava bridge long before his international fame had crested is the equivalent of a suburban home builder contracting with a young Frank Lloyd Wright before his fame was established.

For this achievement, most people credit Redding native John Mancasola, executive director and general counsel for the McConnell Foundation, a well-funded local philanthropic organization founded by the late insurance and real estate millionaires Carl and Leah McConnell.

In 1993, Mancasola recalled, the foundation sought to link properties it owned on both sides of the river to expand its investment in a museum, arboretum and nature walks flanking the Sacramento River.

After a city committee on which he was a member failed to agree on the architect for a proposed footbridge across the river, Mancasola called Calatrava at his office in Zurich, Switzerland, forging the first link.

Calatrava, a short, intense Mediterranean who speaks in staccato bursts, visited Redding twice in 1995 and became enraptured with the river setting amid oaks and cottonwoods in the shadow of the Shasta Cascade and Trinity Alps.

“The greatest capital this city has,” said Calatrava after the Sunday bridge dedication, “is this nature and these landscapes.”

Although Mancasola grew up in Redding and recalls a childhood spent sliding along the banks of the Sacramento, he said he didn’t realize the river’s importance to the city until he saw it through Calatrava’s eyes.

“I think for many years we have literally turned our back on our greatest amenity -- the river,” Mancasola said. “I didn’t fully understand this until I walked out on the bridge.”

As the price escalated for the bridge, built largely from heavy steel parts constructed in Vancouver and Seattle, the McConnell Foundation took on more of the burden. This was a blessing unique to Redding, as most other struggling cities in Northern California lack this kind of resource for artistic-cultural investments.

In the end, the foundation provided all but $8 million of the $23.5-million price tag. But the project was not built without public investment. In addition to the money for the bridge, said California State Parks official Ruth Coleman, who spoke at the ceremony Sunday, $24 million in state bond money was used to help build Turtle Bay Park.

Although opposition to the bridge appears to have lessened now that it is finished, not everyone is in love with it.

To some, the 1,600-ton finned structure, paved with translucent glass and veined with granite, is an incongruous frivolity that insults the independent, frontier spirit of a place where the preferred mode of transportation is still the pickup and where concealed weapons registration is the highest in the state.

They point out proudly that Redding is the adopted home of outlaw country and western singer-songwriter Merle Haggard, the man who wrote “Okie from Muskogee” and who served time in prison before becoming a songwriter.

Haggard, who wrote the lyrics “And I turned 21 in prison doing life without parole,” lives on a 200-acre ranch just south of the city.

For some who grew up here, the modern bridge design does not fit with the mining, timber and outdoor tourist industry that dominated this northern country of lakes and roaring trout streams.

“I just hate the thing,” said Brian Church, 48, wrestling with a giant steak at Jack’s Grill and Cocktail Lounge, a downtown Redding institution since 1938. “Why do we need this cultural piece in Northern California?”

A younger Redding resident, 19-year-old college student Joel Grogan, seemed inclined toward the bridge but worried that “if it doesn’t work, we could end up with a really fancy bridge in a not-so-fancy town.”

When he hears this kind of talk, Bob Warren smiles patiently. Warren is manager of the Redding Convention & Visitors Bureau. The Redding these people discuss, Warren says, is not the one that is emerging today as hordes of retirees and “equity refugees” flood north searching for housing bargains and demanding high cultural values.

“Our housing prices went up 22% last year,” Warren said. Although Redding’s downtown remains largely moribund, the city recently completed a new $25-million City Hall.

The state of Oregon, through its ownership of public radio stations that serve this area, renovated the city’s Art Deco Cascade movie theater at a cost of several million dollars. Actor Clint Eastwood, who lived here as a child, threw in $25,000. The city also recently completed a new softball complex.

The point of all this, said Warren, is that Redding is not standing still. The screening of the Sundial Bridge documentary at the Cascade theater on Saturday night was preceded by a 12-player harp concert that included a local composition. Local ballerinas danced at the bridge inaugural.

“This place is more than just an outpost in the wilderness,” Warren said.