Colorado Street Bridge

Pasadena sits on a mesa that drops without warning into the Arroyo Seco, and until 1913 getting west meant descending into the ravine, crossing a trestle at the bottom, and hauling back up the other side, which horses disliked and early automobiles could barely manage. The Colorado Street Bridge solved it in one gesture. Designed by the engineering firm of Waddell and Harrington and built by John Drake Mercereau, it runs 1,467 feet on a row of open concrete arches, the longest spanning 233 feet, carrying the roadway about 150 feet above the canyon floor. It opened on December 13, 1913, and Pasadena decorated its cars and paraded across. The style is Beaux-Arts and the details were not an afterthought: balustrades, alcoves set into the railings, and tall lamp standards that still light the deck. It curves, unusually, because the sound bedrock lay at an angle to the ravine and the builders followed it. For a stretch of its life the bridge carried Route 66 across the arroyo, feeding the route onto Colorado Boulevard, which Pasadena widened in 1929 by shearing the fronts off its own buildings, and which the Rose Parade has marched down every New Year since long before that. Closed in 1989 as an earthquake risk, retrofitted, and reopened in 1993, it is on the National Register and remains open to cars and to walkers. From the park below, the arches are the whole show. West of here the route runs its last miles to the Santa Monica Pier.