Redding: Railroad Town and the Bridge That Tells Time

Redding, California is where the Sacramento Valley narrows toward the mountains, and for most of its history it existed simply because the railroad needed a terminus. The California and Oregon Railroad, a division of the Central Pacific, pushed its tracks north to this point in eighteen seventy-two and stopped, using the head of the Sacramento River canyon as a natural break before tackling the grades into Oregon. The town that grew around that railhead was incorporated in eighteen eighty-seven and named for Benjamin Barnard Redding, the land agent who had helped the Central Pacific acquire its rights-of-way across California. It is one of the few American cities named for a railroad company bureaucrat.

For the next century Redding functioned as a timber and supply hub for the rugged country surrounding it: the Trinity Alps to the west, the Cascades to the east, Mount Shasta forty miles north. The construction of Shasta Dam in the late nineteen thirties and early nineteen forties, the second largest dam in the United States at the time of its completion in nineteen forty-five, after Hoover Dam, brought federal money and workers, and the resulting Shasta Lake became the region's biggest recreational draw.

The most surprising chapter in Redding's story came in two thousand four with the opening of the Sundial Bridge. The bridge was designed by Spanish architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava, whose soaring white structures have reshaped skylines from Seville to Milwaukee. Calatrava's firm was commissioned in the mid-nineteen nineties after Redding budgeted three million dollars for a pedestrian crossing over the Sacramento River. Costs escalated dramatically after the city selected Calatrava's design, reaching twenty-three and a half million dollars, and the project became deeply controversial locally.

The finished structure is a cantilever cable-stayed footbridge with a two-hundred-seventeen-foot-tall inclined pylon on the north bank. Because the bridge runs precisely north to south, the pylon functions as the upright element of a working sundial, casting a shadow on a granite clock face embedded in the plaza below. It opened on the Fourth of July, two thousand four. The river at that point is a salmon spawning reach, and Calatrava has said the spawning fish were part of his design inspiration. Whatever its origins, the bridge gave a blue-collar railroad town one of the most photographed pieces of public infrastructure in California.