half an hour, hundreds of townsfolk drawn by the concussive sound had hurried into the Arroyo Seco to rubberneck or volunteer assistance. On this dusky Friday, the parlors and clinking shops could wait, and police sweated to work crowd control. Businessmen asked what had gone wrong. Women sobbed. Those closest to the accident perimeter could see one of the gruesome results: John Visco, an Italian-born carpenter with an infant at home, had died instantly. If his broken neck hadn’t killed him, his crushed skull had.
James “C.J.” Johnson, a native Missourian who earned his pay stubs raking concrete through the forms, was still breathing. The devout were convinced his survival transcended dumb luck. They believed it was a God-given miracle. The timbers that had swept off the twenty-eight year old married man from his perch had cushioned his thump and then crisscrossed over him so he was not struck by falling wreckage. It took twenty minutes to dig him out. Transported by ambulance to Marengo Avenue Hospital, he was one torn-up fellow. Doctors said his arm was mangled, he would probably lose an eye and that he had suffered head trauma and internal bleeding.
Up To His Neck
The sole Pasadenan among the casualties was a wire technician identified as Harry Collins of Delacey Street. He had been buried alive underneath an estimated twelve feet of soupy concrete and muck. Groaning in pain, consumed in darkness, he begged for someone, anyone to help him.
Groveling was not required. While one group attended Johnson, another focused on Collins. Led by the shift foreman, people grabbed crowbars, jacks, saws, and axes to extricate him from what one observer called “the death pile.” Space was cramped, and the rescue party winnowed to eight men. After three or four hours, the last part digging by lantern, they had made real progress. A Los Angeles Times reporter on scene said the men “burrowed into the heap like prairie dogs, sawing their way as they went.” When Collins whimpered he could not last, a chum reassured him he could. “Never mind, old man,” he said. “We’ll have you out soon.”
Upon reaching him through a makeshift hole, the rescuers found their victim covered up to his neck in hardening concrete that he moaned was stinging his eyes. He was in unbearable pain. R.H. Newcomb, an area physician who had come to assist, begged to do something to numb the man’s suffering. So, a rope was tied around Newcomb, and he was lowered into the hole by a jury-rigged hoist. The doctor gave Collins a sleep-inducing hypodermic shot right into the forehead because that was only part of him exposed. Eventually he was carried to Pasadena Hospital in critical condition.
All Clear
The rescue in the gorge was as dramatic as the collapse was shocking. A buzz pierced the 30,000-plus-town of eccentrics and scions, housewives and haberdashers. In-the-know company men tried pedaling the bright side to the most shaken. Had the top of the arch fallen an hour earlier instead of at knock-off time, a dozen men might have perished. See, it could have been worse.
As it were, charges of the Mercereau Bridge & Construction Company, the job contractor, recounted white-knuckled escapes that made for vivid reading. The competing newspapers were going at it to play up the drama, but going at it without riling the status quo.
One worker told of the experience that almost splattered him in the dirt. He had been preparing to climb down the superstructure to grab some chow at the mess-tent when the scaffolding snapped and the floor beneath him literally vanished. About to drop, he threw his arms around a steel brace jutting from one of the dried forms and hung mid-air until he could whip his torso over a beam. A co-worker and his relative who swung right next to him used the same escape: they grabbed strips of reinforcing metal rebar in the concrete and held on for dear life. Apparent Hispanics, their last name was the same as the street—Colorado. Once they pulled themselves up, they shimmied down the bridge and helped yank out Collins.
During the next several days, general disbelief and puzzlement about the collapse gelled to fuzzy anger about the cause. Muttering aloud, average folks asked how all hell had broken loose with no warning from safety inspectors and no inkling of prior trouble? The previous fourteen months of construction had seen nothing much go wrong. Sure, the grunts earned crackerjack wages—$2 to $4.50 a day, in part because of the hazards—but they had trusted the engineers to return them to their families intact.
For the brain trust of the Colorado Street Bridge, another question dominated. Would the $234,000 project be delayed past its expected October premiere date? Schedules and reputations were at stake. If completed, this would be the tallest concrete overpass of its kind anyplace in the world and certainly the finest in Southern California. It would be a legend from birth.
A post-accident inspection squelched that uncertainty.
“From my observations this morning, I can say there is no injury to the arch of the bridge, although it had a very severe test,” proclaimed City Councilmember and Public Works Commissioner T.D. Allin. “The opening of the bridge probably will be delayed [just] thirty days. If there is traffic over it by Thanksgiving, I will be satisfied.”
Suicide Bridge
Come December 13th, it will be exactly ninety years since the Colorado Street Bridge’s ceremonial ribbons were cut and the praise gushed. Ninety years since the bridge was first lionized for its breathtaking arches, dreamy curve and goblet lampposts. Functionally, its opening gave Pasadena an automotive gateway to reach Los Angeles, the cowtown metropolis with all the banks. Equally important, it provided access to the region’s most stylish suburb.
Forget that redolent New Year’s Day parade. Pasadenans were bananas about their motorcars before Henry Ford was a name-brand icon. With an estimated 5,000 cars in 1913, many owned by East Coast magnates with vacation estates here, there were more tailpipes per capita in the Crown City than anyplace in America. At the Huntington Hotel, where luxury came standard, the garage had room for 150 cars. (To keep the hired help rested—and segregated from their class-conscious masters—there was sleeping quarters for forty chauffeurs.)
The car culture exploded in ensuing years. The bridge was nearly detonated. Government engineers classified it obsolete before it hit adolescence. What traffic wear-and-tear did not undermine, structural questions and eroding floodwaters from the Devil’s Gate area nearly accomplished. The state wanted it dismantled in 1935. And 1951. And 1977. Finally a decade ago, a $27.3 million overhaul spearheaded by a local preservation group wrapped up, ensuring the span would not be tomorrow’s trivia stumper. It rests today protected on the National Register of Historic Places.
The bridge’s aesthetic shimmer certainly stirred the imagination. Creative types have worn out pens and paintbrushes trying to capture the soul of the 1,468 foot long viaduct. Elegant and functional, a hearty endorsement of man’s capacity to tame nature with geometrical élan, there is a singular magnetism about it that still rivets the eye.
Less celebrated, though just as enduring among the masses, the bridge has also nurtured a macabre alter ego its prim designers never asked for. Well over a hundred people have killed themselves by leaping from “Suicide Bridge,” roughly a third of them during the Great Depression. One of the first jumpers was the ill wife of a Los Angeles tie-maker. One of the last may have been a guilt-ridden freshman bible student from the now-closed Worldwide Church of God.
Not surprisingly, the urban mythology that has flowered around bridge-related deaths has fostered ghost stories and cultish twaddle. A pervasive rumor was that an immigrant construction worker lost his balance and tumbled into a drying concrete forms. According to legend, the foreman did not notice the man’s absence until it was too late, and his body was left there entombed. Betrayed in life, the worker’s spirit supposedly has haunted the bridge from the netherworld, beckoning the lost and dejected to join him. Researchers who have combed into this story have concluded it was a campfire tale fanned in the dark alleys of the Internet.
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