Colorado Street Bridge (Pasadena, California)

Where it sits. The Colorado Street Bridge carries Colorado Boulevard west out of Pasadena across the Arroyo Seco, the deep seasonal canyon that runs down from the San Gabriel Mountains to the Los Angeles River. It is 1,467 feet long and stands about 150 feet above the arroyo floor, immediately south of the Ventura Freeway crossing and a short distance downstream of the Rose Bowl. Below it, the arroyo holds oak and sycamore, a golf course, a stream that runs only in winter, and the Colorado Boulevard bridge's much larger and plainer freeway neighbour, which makes the older structure look, from the canyon floor, like a piece of a different century.

The story behind it. Pasadena's earlier route into the arroyo was a punishing descent to a low crossing and a climb back out. In 1912 the city commissioned a high-level bridge from Waddell and Harrington, engineers from Kansas City, with construction by the Mercereau Bridge and Construction Company. The problem was geological: the best bedrock for the piers did not lie in a straight line across the canyon. Rather than accept a weaker foundation, the engineers curved the bridge, swinging it downstream and back — the reason for the graceful bend that distinguishes it from every other concrete arch of its generation. Eleven reinforced-concrete arches carry the deck, and the Beaux-Arts detailing on top of them is unusually complete: balustraded railings, pedestrian alcoves that project over the drop, and tall lamp standards on each pier. It opened on 13 December 1913 and within a decade carried the traffic of U.S. Route 66, making it for many travellers the first sight of the Los Angeles basin.

The dark side and the rescue. The bridge acquired a grim second name early. Suicides began in 1919, and the toll since is generally put at around 150 deaths, enough that the structure has been known locally for a century as Suicide Bridge. The arches also aged badly: by the 1980s spalling concrete and seismic vulnerability closed the crossing entirely in 1989. A restoration costing about 27 million dollars rebuilt the deck, retrofitted the arches, reproduced the original railings and lamps, and returned the bridge to traffic in December 1993. Suicide barriers were added at the same time and have been raised and extended since, and crisis telephones now stand in the alcoves. The bridge was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1981.

On screen. Pasadena has been a production town since the silent era, and the arroyo district is one of its most-used quarters — but the bridge's own screen life is mostly aerial and atmospheric rather than dramatic. It is a structure directors shoot rather than stage on: helicopter passes along the arch line, second-unit inserts of cars crossing at dusk, establishing shots that want a piece of period infrastructure without a period set. Closing a working boulevard bridge for a scene is expensive, and the alcoves and railings are narrow, so extended action sequences tend to be built elsewhere and cut in. The neighbourhood around it carries the heavier credits: a few hundred yards south-west, the Gamble House of 1908 — the finest surviving Greene and Greene Craftsman house in California — served as Doc Brown's residence in Back to the Future (1985), and the streets of Old Pasadena along Colorado Boulevard have stood in for small-town American main streets in more productions than anyone has counted. Seen in that context, the bridge is the district's silhouette rather than its stage.

What you actually see today. Pavements run along both sides of the deck, so the bridge can be walked end to end in about twenty minutes, stopping in the alcoves for the view up the arroyo to the San Gabriels. The better photograph, though, is from below: paths in the Arroyo Seco off West Holly Street and around the Rose Bowl loop give the arches in profile, stacked and receding, with the freeway bridge behind. The Colorado Street Bridge Party each July closes the deck for an evening of music and food, and is the only occasion on which the structure can be experienced without traffic.

Getting there and timing. Pasadena is reached from downtown Los Angeles on the Metro A line to Memorial Park or Del Mar, each about a fifteen-minute walk from the eastern end of the bridge. Street parking is available on Grand Avenue and around the arroyo. Late afternoon lights the arches from the west and is the standard hour for photography; winter, after rain, is when the arroyo runs green and the mountains behind carry snow. The deck is level and step-free, and combining a walk across it with the Gamble House, the Norton Simon Museum and Old Pasadena makes a full day within a mile's radius.