Of the eight major bridges that facilitate travel around the Greater San Francisco Bay Area, six are known mainly by the local commuters who drive across them regularly. Then you have the undeniably iconic Golden Gate Bridge. And the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge? Although it is an absolutely vital transportation link between San Francisco and the East Bay cities of Berkeley and Oakland, the Bay Bridge has never had the Golden Gate’s rock star appeal — until now. More on that in a minute.
The Bay Bridge opened to traffic in November 1936, approximately seven months before the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge. And like the Golden Gate, it supplanted ferries as the primary means of travel across San Francisco Bay. Bridge construction posed several formidable engineering challenges: inaccessibility to bedrock, proximity to two major fault lines and the sheer difficulty of erecting something that had to arch across 8 miles of often-choppy water.
The Bay Bridge’s west span comprises two suspension bridges, which allow easy passage for ships sailing to and from San Francisco. The east span connects Yerba Buena Island and Oakland. During construction, pilings had to be dug hundreds of feet beneath the bay floor in order to anchor the bridge. The east and west spans are connected at Yerba Buena Island, approximately halfway across the bay, by a 76-foot-wide, four-story-tall tunnel that bores right through the island.
In 1989 the Loma Prieta earthquake caused major damage to a section of the east span. It necessitated a seismic retrofit that required a complete rebuilding of the span — an effort just as, if not more, ambitious than construction of the original bridge. (In fact it is the single largest public infrastructure undertaking in California history.) This enormous project finally comes to fruition on Labor Day weekend 2013, when the new span is scheduled to officially open.
While the Golden Gate Bridge’s distinctive International Orange color makes it instantly identifiable as well as visually striking, that’s not to say that the Bay Bridge, with its streamlined curves, doesn’t also have a certain sense of majesty. This soaring bridge is best appreciated by boarding an Oakland- or Alameda-bound San Francisco Bay Ferry at the Ferry Building terminal, located on The Embarcadero at the foot of Market Street. As the ferry pulls away from the dock there’s a picture-perfect view of the downtown skyline, and you also get a great look up at the bridge when the ferry passes beneath it.
One of the many pleasures of the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market at Ferry Building Marketplace is the location right on the water. Browsing for fresh organic produce is so much more fun when you take a break to sit on a bench and watch the gulls come and go with the gigantic bridge as a backdrop. For landlubbers, there are nice views of the bridge from The Embarcadero. Here’s another tip: Walk to the end of the pier just south of the Ferry Building for an even better view.
What gives the Bay Bridge its newly anointed rock star appeal — at least for the next two years — is The Bay Lights project. This massive light sculpture was created by Leo Villareal, a pioneer in the use of LED lights and computer-driven imagery. Villareal’s work is displayed at major museums like the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and now he’s applied his wizardry to the Bay Bridge. Inspired by the bridge’s 75th anniversary in 2011, he designed 25,000 individually programmable, white LED lights to create complex patterns across the west span.
The lights are mounted in single strands on the bridge’s vertical cables, each individual light 12 inches apart. If laid end to end they would stretch 1.8 miles, the length of 26 football fields. And the total cost to illuminate the bridge for the installation’s two-year run? About $11,000 per year, or $4.25 per hour. How’s that for energy efficiency?
The grand lighting ceremony took place March 5, and the lights will shine nightly from dusk until 2 a.m. until March 2015. I’ll be back in San Francisco in July, and I can’t wait to see the bridge all lit up.
If you’re not going to be visiting the city any time soon, take a look at The Bay Lights site. It has lots of information, like the best locations to view the lights and live video streaming of the nightly illumination, plus a video archive that includes the Grand Lighting broadcast and interviews with the artist and others instrumental in creating the project. You can also get the inside scoop on Facebook and Twitter.
And don’t forget the Labor Day weekend Bay Bridge Celebration; you’ll be able to bike, run or walk along the east span during its grand opening, before traffic takes over. At least that’s the plan, although Bay Bridge officials recently announced that because inspectors had discovered cracks in some of the new span’s steel rods, necessary repairs might require the celebration to be pushed back. If you’re interested in attending, sign up at the Bay Bridge Celebration site to receive specific updates.
