Sixth Street / Whittier Blvd over the Los Angeles River
Photos
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6th Street - Whittier Bridge Looking South 3rd Street Bridge www.bridges-of-los-angeles-county.com |
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6th Street - Whittier Blvd. Bridge The bridge actually connects sixth street on the west bank of the LA River to Whittier Blvd in East Los Angeles. http://www.youtube.com/user/bridgesoflosangeles |
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Construction Plans City of Los Angeles Bureau of Engineering |
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Sixth Street / Whittier Blvd over the Los Angeles River Under Construction (CHS-44656) USC Digital Library |
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Sixth Street / Whittier Blvd over the Los Angeles River View from Boyle Heights (CHS-37193) USC Digital Library |
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Sixth Street / Whittier Blvd over the Los Angeles River (1936) View from the riverbed (00077619) Los Angeles Public Library |
Bridge design sparks clash in Los Angeles
Written by Cara Mia DiMassa and Corina Knoll (Los Angeles Times)The bridges that span the Los Angeles River offer a history lesson of how Los Angeles became a modern city.
There's the Cesar Chavez Bridge, with its colossal porticoes, embellished with spiral columns and a replica of the city seal. The bridge, decorated with elements of the Spanish Baroque style, is an architectural nod to the historic El Camino Real, of which it is a part, and to the city's Spanish heritage.
The beaux-arts North Broadway Bridge, originally named the Buena Vista Viaduct, is one of the river's older structures and was the state's longest and widest concrete arch bridge when it opened in 1911.
Then there is the 6th Street Viaduct, a streamline-moderne monolith of steel arches and concrete towers built in 1932.
The city wants to replace the span with a spare, modern cable-stayed bridge. Officials released new design plans for the bridge in recent days that were met with criticism from those who say that the modern look has no place amid the ornate spans.
"I said as far as I am concerned, if you are going to put this bridge with cables there, you might as well not put a bridge there at all. I would rather not see one there," said Victoria Torres, a board member of the Boyle Heights Historical Society. "It's very disappointing when the city is trying to push something on you that you didn't agree with."
At two-thirds of a mile long, the Sixth Street Viaduct is the largest and longest span across the Los Angeles River. Known for its two sweeping steel arches and a rather notable curve in the middle, the viaduct is punctuated at either end by decorative pylons with fluted, zigzag designs. Railroad tracks run underneath on both banks of the river.
When the viaduct was built, masons used concrete from a plant that had been constructed on site at the river's edge for the building of the bridge. The practice was revolutionary at the time -- but an aggregate used in the making of the concrete caused it to have a high alkali content. As water has seeped into the concrete over time, the concrete has begun to erode. The rare degenerative condition is called alkali-silica reaction, and officials say it has weakened the viaduct to the point that officials say it has a 70% chance of collapsing in a major earthquake within 50 years. It is the only span along the river to have such a condition.
"It is an irreversible chemical erosion," said Department of Public Works spokeswoman Tonya Durrell. "We describe it as a pretty sick bridge, like a cancer."
City officials have been debating what to do about the bridge for several years, weighing three options: retrofitting it, replacing it or doing nothing. The latter made little sense, they said, because of the severity of the erosion.
After a series of public meetings over the last two years, city engineers decided that replacing the bridge was the only viable option, because retrofitting would yield a life cycle of only about 30 years. Outside of exact replication, they considered four possible designs, said Durrell, two that were modern and two that included more historical features, before recommending the cable-stayed bridge.
"Once you take down a monumental structure like the 6th Street Bridge, it was our opinion that we ought to build something state-of-the-art as opposed to a replica," said DPW engineer John Koo. A replica, he said, would cost an extra $30 million.
Philip Richardson, program manager of the DPW's bridge improvement program, said officials worry that delays over the design could result in a loss of state funding.
At the meeting where the new design was unveiled, City Engineer Gary Moore said he thought the replacement should have a "wow factor." A model of the proposed span shows two rectangular towers in the middle of the bridge, with cables running down from both sides.
City officials said the tight curve on the current bridge would be straightened, and the bridge would run from one bank to the other with a much more gentle curve.
But critics said the design was a direct affront to the direction that advisory committee members had suggested to the city.
Torres, who has been a member of the 6th Street Viaduct community advisory committee, said she and others had voiced overwhelming support for an option that recreated the bridge exactly as it is now, with modern technological construction.
Los Angeles City Councilman Jose Huizar, who represents the communities on both sides of the viaduct, said he favored keeping some of the historical aspects of the original bridge -- though he said he was waiting to hear community reaction about the proposed design.
"We have very few iconic structures to begin with, but if you look at these bridges, they represent Los Angeles," he said.
Huizar used to have a paper route and would ride his bike along the 6th Street Bridge from Boyle Heights to pick up Japanese newspapers in Little Tokyo.
"I would ride my bike over the bridge beginning in the fifth grade all the way to the ninth grade, and I'd pick up the newspapers and go distribute them in Boyle Heights," he said. "I know these bridges well."
Mike Buhler, director of advocacy for the Los Angeles Conservancy, said his organization had not yet conceded that the viaduct necessarily needed to be replaced -- though he quickly added that the organization would never advocate for an alternative that would jeopardize public safety. The organization has not yet taken a stand on the new design.
The cost of replacing the viaduct with the proposed structure is estimated to be about $345 million, city officials said.
The bridges are throwbacks to a time in Los Angeles before sprawl, when linking the city center on the west side of the Los Angeles River and the bustling neighborhoods on the east side was of key importance. The spans across the river have become treasured historic structures and celebrated in scores of movies, including "Grease," "Devil in a Blue Dress" and "Terminator 2."
Each bridge tells a piece of L.A. history. An example is the 7th Street Viaduct, whose very construction tells of the complicated relationship Angelenos have with methods of transportation. The first span across the street was built in 1910 exclusively for trolley cars; 16 years later, an elegant span decorated by balustrades was erected atop the first, this one to serve the cars that were increasingly clogging the area's roads.
For Huizar, the 6th Street Viaduct has a special meaning. Boyle Heights, on the east side of the river, has long been known as the "Ellis Island" of Los Angeles, where for more than a century immigrants from Europe, Asia and now Latin America entered into the city.
"People of all races and creeds would come to Boyle Heights -- these bridges represented access to the rest of Los Angeles," Huizar said.
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cara.dimassa@latimes.com
corina.knoll@latimes.com
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
Facts
- Overview
- Steel arch bridge over Los Angeles River on Sixth Street in Los Angeles
- Location
- Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California
- Status
- Open to traffic
- History
- Built 1932
- Builders
- - J.P. Knapp
- Merrill Butler
- Design
- Steel arch
- Dimensions
-
Length of largest span: 149.9 ft.
Total length: 3,546 ft.
- Recognition
- Eligible for the National Register of Historic Places
- Approximate latitude, longitude
- +34.03722, -118.23028 (decimal degrees)
34°02'14" N, 118°13'49" W (degrees°minutes'seconds") - Approximate UTM coordinates
- 11/386432/3766965 (zone/easting/northing)
- USGS topographic map
- Los Angeles
- Inventory numbers
- CA 53C-1880 (California bridge number)
BH 11009 (Bridgehunter.com ID) - Inspection (as of 08/2006)
- Deck condition rating: Fair (5 out of 9)
Superstructure condition rating: Fair (5 out of 9)
Substructure condition rating: Fair (5 out of 9)
Appraisal: Functionally obsolete
Sufficiency rating: 52.4 (out of 100) - Average daily traffic (as of 2000)
- 38,900
Update Log
- February 19, 2009: Essay added by David Kimbrough
- January 3, 2009: New photo from David Kimbrough
- December 19, 2008: New photo from David Kimbrough
- November 3, 2008: New photo from David Kimbrough
- June 6, 2008: Updated by David Kimbrough
- May 5, 2008: Updated by David Kimbrough
Sources
- David Kimbrough - kimbrough-photo [at] charter [dot] net