The Sacramento River and the Tower Bridge

The gold bridge you are looking at, the vertical-lift span over the Sacramento River, was completed in nineteen thirty-five. It is a mechanical structure: when a large vessel needs to pass, the entire center roadway section rises on cables between its two towers, creating a clearance that the river traffic of the thirties required. It was the first vertical-lift bridge in the California state highway system, and it is painted a gold that is not accidental, given that it connects Sacramento to the west bank of the river that made the city what it is.

The Sacramento River made everything. The agricultural wealth of the valley floor, the natural terminus for overland emigrants crossing the Sierra, the route by which gold-rush goods moved upriver from San Francisco, all of it ran through this water. Sacramento became inevitable as California's commercial capital and eventually its political one because the geography left no other option. The river was the reason.

The river also tried, repeatedly, to destroy the city it had made. Sacramento flooded catastrophically in eighteen fifty, eighteen fifty-two, and eighteen fifty-three. The city's decision to raise its entire downtown by ten to fifteen feet of fill was driven by those floods. The hydraulic mining debris pouring down from the Sierra foothills in the eighteen-sixties and seventies raised the riverbeds and made the floods worse. What engineers eventually built to manage the Sacramento River, the levee systems and bypass channels that protect the valley today, is one of the largest hydraulic engineering projects in North American history.

The bridge was completed more than eighty years after the floods that nearly ended the city. It connects the two halves of a place that survived by making a decision to stay and build higher instead of abandoning the water that had tried to drown it. That is a specific kind of stubbornness. Sacramento is, in some respects, built on it.