The Vicodin Thieves. Chip Jacobs
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Suicide Bridge
Come December 13th, it will be exactly ninety years since the Colorado Street Bridge’s ceremonial ribbons were cut and the praise gushed. Ninety years since the bridge was first lionized for its breathtaking arches, dreamy curve and goblet lampposts. Functionally, its opening gave Pasadena an automotive gateway to reach Los Angeles, the cowtown metropolis with all the banks. Equally important, it provided access to the region’s most stylish suburb.
Forget that redolent New Year’s Day parade. Pasadenans were bananas about their motorcars before Henry Ford was a name-brand icon. With an estimated 5,000 cars in 1913, many owned by East Coast magnates with vacation estates here, there were more tailpipes per capita in the Crown City than anyplace in America. At the Huntington Hotel, where luxury came standard, the garage had room for 150 cars. (To keep the hired help rested—and segregated from their class-conscious masters—there was sleeping quarters for forty chauffeurs.)
The car culture exploded in ensuing years. The bridge was nearly detonated. Government engineers classified it obsolete before it hit adolescence. What traffic wear-and-tear did not undermine, structural questions and eroding floodwaters from the Devil’s Gate area nearly accomplished. The state wanted it dismantled in 1935. And 1951. And 1977. Finally a decade ago, a $27.3 million overhaul spearheaded by a local preservation group wrapped up, ensuring the span would not be tomorrow’s trivia stumper. It rests today protected on the National Register of Historic Places.
The bridge’s aesthetic shimmer certainly stirred the imagination. Creative types have worn out pens and paintbrushes trying to capture the soul of the 1,468 foot long viaduct. Elegant and functional, a hearty endorsement of man’s capacity to tame nature with geometrical élan, there is a singular magnetism about it that still rivets the eye.
Less celebrated, though just as enduring among the masses, the bridge has also nurtured a macabre alter ego its prim designers never asked for. Well over a hundred people have killed themselves by leaping from “Suicide Bridge,” roughly a third of them during the Great Depression. One of the first jumpers was the ill wife of a Los Angeles tie-maker. One of the last may have been a guilt-ridden freshman bible student from the now-closed Worldwide Church of God.
Not surprisingly, the urban mythology that has flowered around bridge-related deaths has fostered ghost stories and cultish twaddle. A pervasive rumor was that an immigrant construction worker lost his balance and tumbled into a drying concrete forms. According to legend, the foreman did not notice the man’s absence until it was too late, and his body was left there entombed. Betrayed in life, the worker’s spirit supposedly has haunted the bridge from the netherworld, beckoning the lost and dejected to join him. Researchers who have combed into this story have concluded it was a campfire tale fanned in the dark alleys of the Internet.
Little interest, conversely, has been devoted to the events of August 1st, 1913. There has been almost nothing written in depth about the incident that took the lives of three, possibly four men since the calamity itself. It is a throwaway line in coffee-table books, an historical afterthought in a city giddy about its nostalgia.
But thumb through the old newspaper accounts and one might conclude the forebears of the Colorado Street Bridge wanted people to forget. The span had been a hard sell even if had been a practical one.
One Man’s Dream
Before the bridge was up, crossing the Arroyo had been a sweaty, unreliable affair that bogged down horses, buggies and crank-started cars. After 1892, the roads descending toward the only east-west crossing over the streambed, the privately owned Scoville Bridge, were winding and prone to mudslides. People got hurt, an indeterminate number killed, on the zigzagging passage from Orange Grove Boulevard, site of Millionaire Row, to the rugged hills of Annandale and San Rafael.
Even so, it was not the politicians or the growing car industry agitating for a street-level conduit. It was the chief of Pasadena’s Board of Trade, forerunner of the Chamber of Commerce. Edwin Sorver, a curly-haired, East Coast transplant, was the young go-getter who ran the group. He craved big progress, and could stomach righteous battles. For a city trying to flourish beyond being an address for blue bloods and health resorts, the basics were required. It needed its own water supply, its own electricity free of Edison’s grip and, naturally, freedom of movement.
Well, Sorver’s bridge vision was polarizing. One band of citizens was spitting-mad about the cost. Effected homeowners along the Arroyo were upset too about its eyesore potential. NIMBYism in a pocket watch world was not much different than NIMBYism in the digital one.
But Sorver and his minions stumped exhaustively. They ran pro-bridge ads, printed posters and guided naysayers on tours. “Modern roads, not horse trails!” was the campaign slogan. Case made for them, Pasadena voters overwhelming approved a $100,000 bond measure to pay for a fair chunk of it. The county and the three cities involved (Pasadena, L.A. and the now-defunct town of San Rafael) chipped in the balance.
Construction had gone well. The only serious commotion had predated it. For chief designer, Sorver had handpicked John Alexander Low Waddell, a decorated, globetrotting Kansas City engineer with a passing resemblance to Teddy Roosevelt. Waddell, known for lift bridges, devised the eleven-arch superstructure that stands today. Its proposed budget just happened to be $6,000 over budget. When Sorver pressed him to shave expenses, the proud Waddell said he already had, and he knew his business better than some booster.
Feeling squeezed, Sorver went around Waddell. He consulted with the man who had built three L.A.-area beach piers, a handsome contractor named John Drake Mercereau. He did some technical thinking and suggested the unorthodox. Mercereau concluded they could save the money by curving the eastern side of the bridge fifty degrees to take advantage of firmer substrate than where Waddell’s foundations would have been sunk. It would make the roadway longer but less complicated. Sorver agreed happily. Waddell did not. He went ape, lampooning the idea as unsound engineering, yet still stayed on board.
This was not just any roadbed; the Colorado Street Bridge was national news, and its state-of-the-art assemblage fascinated both the gentry and commoners.
Forty to seventy workers employed by Mercereau hammered, poured and sawed at any one shift. Horse-drawn wagons schlepped timbers for scaffolding and the forms down the Arroyo. Sand and gravel were brought in by truck and later mixed with cement by a gasoline-powered turbine. The resulting concrete slurry was then poured directly into receiving hoppers, like steel dump cars, running on a specially designed tramway where the road would eventually be. It was not efficient to blend ingredients on the ground and have to pulley it up fifteen stories when you could mix it directly over the forms. This was not the 1800s. Gravity and machines were allies.
But Not Always
Visco and Johnson had been on the track near one of the hoppers when the rumbling began at 5:00 p.m. Collins, a concrete finisher, was in the center of scaffolding nearby. The men who escaped had been on the edge of it. One accident theory floated was that somebody had goofed by forgetting to set the brake on one of the dump-cars. The rolling bin might have accidentally struck a post holding the arch’s wooden cast in place. When it gave way, it sent the dump-car, the scaffolding and all those tons of liquid concrete hurtling downward in a lethal avalanche.
Nobody knew for sure. At the dawn of the Progressive Era in California politics, there were no industrial workplace investigators or worker’s compensation funds. Personal injury lawyers did not skulk around, at least not just yet. And muckracking journalism was only emerging. (The progenitor of it, writer Upton Sinclair, relocated to the Pasadena good life in 1915.)
Neither were there any leadership declarations about getting to the bottom of the incident. Sorver, Mercereau, and Waddell said zero publicly. The same went for Mayor Richard Lee Metcalf and the rest of the Pasadena City Council. At the two Council meetings following the accident, the top city business was a citizen protest about flat-wheel trolley cars and denial of a Maple Street sidewalk extension. The members of the County Board of Supervisors who traveled to the accident site on August 2nd to inspect it stayed mum, too.
Officially, the compelling news was the cost to repair the lost arch and scaffolding: $1,500. The safety worry