No one expected the squiggle.
In a room crowded with weary engineers, designers and executives, architect Michael Maltzan had grown frustrated with the debate. For hours, he had been arguing to build a bridge that was more than just a link between two disparate parts of the city, but no one understood him.
So he stood up, grabbed a red pen and drew a long looping line on an easel pad.
This, he said, is the shape of the future: the new 6th Street Viaduct, crossing the Los Angeles River, connecting downtown and Boyle Heights.
Months earlier, the city had decided that the old viaduct — a bridge by any other name — had to go. Los Angeles’ most recognized and most decrepit piece of infrastructure was a hazard, victim of an arcane chemical reaction taking place within the concrete.
But replacing an icon is not easy. Its supporting role in hundreds of movies, videos and commercials has imprinted the structure upon the civic imagination.
A raceway for car chases, a backdrop for crime dramas, a blank slate for automotive ads, it is the city’s most subtle Rorschach, a subliminal presence on the edge of the urban consciousness.
To find a design worthy of its legacy, the city of Los Angeles opened a competition in the summer of 2012.
The winner would secure a $25-million contract for one of the most prestigious construction projects in the region. The engineering firm HNTB wanted in and brought Maltzan in on a contract.
His work near the city core includes the great but lamented Cornfield state park (drawn but never funded) and the admired apartment megaplex by the river, One Santa Fe.
Innovative and forward-thinking, Maltzan was a hotshot. Only now, a squiggle didn’t seem so promising.
Some engineers in the meeting believed that this wavy line, which translated to a succession of arches rising above and below the roadway between Santa Fe Avenue and the 101 Freeway, was outlandish, expensive and far too risky a concept to win a competition.
They had their own idea: a single, signature span over the Los Angeles River. The rest would be an elevated roadway, just as it has been with the existing structure.
Maltzan pushed back.
The new design had to do more than merely cross the river, the railroad tracks and the warehouses and streets lying in its shadow, he said. It should integrate the city.
The squiggle — more than just a bridge, he argued — represented a new way to think about Los Angeles.
Three years later, Maltzan’s sketch is a $428-million public works project for the city of Los Angeles. It is expected to open in 2019.
Demolition begins this summer. The city is making intersection improvements to improve traffic flow in the Arts District and in Boyle Heights for the 13,000 daily drivers who will no longer be able to take this route.
An estimated 48,000 cubic yards of concrete, 1,245 tons of structural steel and 4,200 tons of rebar will be hauled away as construction begins on the replacement.
Until then, the old bridge stands as a nostalgic wreck. Wooden planks span broken balustrades. Graffiti tags mark the high iron arches. Pigeons befoul the crevices.
Since winning the competition, Maltzan’s design is no longer controversial among HNTB engineers, who have come to accept it as a welcome departure for an infrastructure project.
Roads, bridges and tunnels are mostly content to be ignored. Usefulness is their claim to fame, and embellishment is often a distraction for engineers who find elegance in their functionality, economy and efficiency. Taxpayers, who foot the bill, tend to agree.
When the 6th Street Viaduct opened in 1933, it mirrored the city’s aspirations. The roadway was broad and inviting like a runway, with its promise of a far-off destination.
Never mind if the destination was Montebello or Downey or Newport Beach. The bridge was a means to an end, and the end was to move beyond it, not to linger but to speed away into some suburban future.
But with time, as that future grew murky (congestion, smog), the bridge looked less to the future than to the past.
Cast as a cinematic backdrop, it provided noirish overtones for pot-boiled dramas.
“Them!,” the 1954 movie featuring giant mutant ants, might have been its debut, followed by such hits as “Grease,” “Devil in a Blue Dress” and “Terminator 2,” as well as music videos by Madonna and Kanye West and television episodes of “Lost” and “The Amazing Race.”
Little did its builders know that the structure’s cement and aggregate were at war, creating a gel that in the presence of water expands and causes the concrete to crack. And water is ever-present in concrete.
The 6th Street Viaduct is alone in this malady because it was the only structure — of the eight other bridges built before 1933 — to use imported pebbles and sand.
Preservationists asked for a fix, but none was available. Some
suggested the replacement be a replica of the old. Others called for something entirely new.
Staking the middle ground, the Los Angeles Conservancy argued that the new bridge should complement the others, that it “should fit in with the collection, not stand alone.”
The city’s Bureau of Engineering studied different types of bridges for the site. Community meetings were held, feedback and opinions were gathered, and, given the location and length of the bridge — its signature aspects — City Engineer Gary Moore opened up a competition.
Of the nine submissions, six were shortlisted and three were eventually given a stipend for development.
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