The Bridge and the Community It Cut

The San Diego-Coronado Bridge curves eighty degrees in a sweeping arc as it crosses the bay, two point one miles from shore to shore, two hundred feet above the water at its highest point. The curve was not purely aesthetic. Engineers designed it partly to force drivers to reduce speed. It is, by most measures, one of the more beautiful highway structures on the California coast. It was also built at a cost that did not appear on any budget sheet.

Construction ran from nineteen sixty-seven to nineteen sixty-nine. The bridge's on-ramps and approach roads drove through the middle of Barrio Logan, a working-class Mexican American neighborhood south of downtown San Diego. Houses were demolished. Streets were severed. Roughly five thousand residents were displaced. The community was promised a park on the land that remained under the bridge pylons, as partial compensation for what the infrastructure had taken.

Governor Ronald Reagan dedicated the bridge in August nineteen sixty-nine. The ferry service that had connected Coronado to downtown San Diego since the eighteen eighties ended within days of the bridge opening to traffic in early August of nineteen sixty-nine.

The park that was promised to Barrio Logan did not materialize. On April twenty-second, nineteen seventy, residents learned that the land under the bridge had been designated for a California Highway Patrol station. They arrived that morning, formed human chains around the bulldozers, and refused to move. They held the site for twelve days. The city eventually relented. Chicano Park was established on that date.

The murals that community artists painted on the bridge's concrete pylons constitute the largest collection of outdoor murals in the United States. They are painted on the infrastructure that displaced the people who painted them. The bridge stands above the murals. The murals answer the bridge.