San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge (Additional Documentation)

About this property

The San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, commonly referred to as the Bay Bridge, is a complex of bridges spanning San Francisco Bay in California. As part of Interstate 80 and the direct road between San Francisco and Oakland, it carries about 260,000 vehicles a day on its two decks. It includes one of the longest bridge spans in the United States. The toll bridge was conceived as early as the California gold rush days, with "Emperor" Joshua Norton famously advocating for it around 1855–1860, but construction did not begin until 1933. Designed by Charles H. Purcell, and built by American Bridge Company, with construction directed by the chairman of the engineering committee Edward Hansen Connor, it opened on Thursday, November 12, 1936, six months before the Golden Gate Bridge. It originally carried automobile traffic on its upper deck, with trucks, cars, buses and commuter trains on the lower, but after the Key System abandoned its rail service on April 20, 1958, the lower deck was converted to all-road traffic as well. On October 12, 1963, traffic was reconfigured to one way traffic on each deck, westbound on the upper deck, and eastbound on the lower deck, with trucks and buses also allowed on the upper deck. In 1986, the bridge was unofficially dedicated to former California governor James Rolph. The bridge has two sections of roughly equal length; the older western section, officially known as the Willie L. Brown Jr. Bridge (after former San Francisco Mayor and California State Assembly Speaker Willie L. Brown Jr.), connects downtown San Francisco to Yerba Buena Island, and the newer east bay section connects the island to Oakland. The two sections are connected by Yerba Buena Tunnel through the island's central hill. The western section is a double suspension bridge with two decks, westbound traffic being carried on the upper deck while eastbound is carried on the lower one. The largest span of the original eastern section was a cantilever bridge. During the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, a portion of the eastern section's upper deck collapsed onto the lower deck and the bridge was closed for a month. Reconstruction of the eastern section of the bridge as a causeway connected to a self-anchored suspension bridge began in 2002; the new eastern section opened September 2, 2013, at a reported cost of over $6.5 billion; the original estimate of $250 million was for a seismic retrofit of the existing span. Unlike the western section and the original eastern section of the bridge, the new eastern section is a single deck carrying all eastbound and westbound lanes. Demolition of the old east span was completed on September 8, 2018.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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