On August 3, 1969, the San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge opened to traffic. For the first time, a driver could leave downtown San Diego and reach Coronado without waiting at a ferry slip or taking the long road around the Silver Strand. The toll was 60 cents. The span was about 2.1 miles long, and it did something few bridges of its size do: it turned. Partway across the bay the roadway swings through a curve of about 80 degrees. Seen from a boat, it reads as a long blue arc.
The bridge had taken decades to arrive. The curve came from the same problem that had held it up for so long.
Coronado sits across the bay from downtown on a low peninsula that people have always called an island. Through most of the twentieth century its link to the city was the ferry. Cars and foot passengers crossed on the boats, and the island kept a separate, slower character that its residents valued.
The Navy was the island's largest neighbor. Naval Air Station North Island occupies the northern end of the peninsula, and the deep water of San Diego Bay served the fleet. The Navy's concern was simple: any bridge across the bay could block ships, and in wartime a fallen bridge could trap a fleet behind it. For years the Navy objected to any crossing at all, and as long as it objected there was no bridge.
When the objection finally gave way, it came with a condition that shaped everything after. The bridge had to leave room for the largest ships the Navy then sent up the bay. That meant aircraft carriers, and it meant 200 feet of clearance above the water at the navigation channel.
Two hundred feet is a height of about twenty stories. A road cannot climb that high in a short distance. Every highway engineer works within a limit on grade, the steepness of the climb, because trucks have to haul loads up it and every driver has to come down it safely.
On the San Diego side the land and the approaches gave the engineers some room. On the Coronado side they had less. A straight line drawn across the bay from Coronado would have reached the channel too soon. To hit 200 feet over the shipping lane, the road would have had to climb at a grade no one would accept.
The answer was to make the bridge longer without moving its ends, and the only way to do that was to bend it. The curve gives the roadway the extra distance it needs to rise gradually. Coming off Coronado, the deck sweeps around and climbs as it turns, so by the time it crosses the channel it has reached its full height. The best-known feature of the bridge comes from that grade limit.
Drivers who cross it for the first time often notice the moment when the road leans into the turn and the whole bay comes into view, with downtown on one side and the open water toward the South Bay on the other. That view is a side effect of the climb.
The bridge carries its deck on steel girders painted blue, a color chosen to sit against the water and sky. The girders rest on concrete piers that march across the bay in a long line. Their cross-section is rounded at the ends, a profile that people around San Diego have long described as a hot dog shape. Seen end-on from a boat, each pier looks like a tall rounded column. Seen from the side, the row of them follows the curve overhead.
The spans are longest and highest over the channel, where the carriers needed room, and they step down toward each shore as the deck descends. Most of the structure is approach. Only a short stretch near the middle actually reaches the full 200 feet the Navy required.
The opening of the bridge in 1969 ended the Coronado ferry service. The boats had carried people and cars across the bay for generations, and almost overnight they had no work. Coronado was now reachable in a few minutes by car, and the old slips went quiet.
The ferry did return. In the 1980s passenger service across the bay came back, aimed at people who wanted to make the crossing by water. It runs alongside the bridge today rather than in place of it.
The bridge was built on bonds, and the 60-cent toll was there to retire them. Over the following decades the toll stayed on the books while the debt was paid down. In 2002, with the bonds paid, the toll was removed. The San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge became the first toll bridge in California to go free.
Since then the crossing has cost nothing, and for many people in San Diego it has become a fixed part of the skyline. It shows up on postcards and in the background of countless photographs of the bay, usually framed from the water or from the downtown shore, where the curve shows best.
The bridge looks best from the bay itself. A sailor heading south past the downtown skyline watches it come into view as a line of blue rising out of the water toward the channel, with the piers standing in their long curving row beneath it. From that low angle the climb is easy to read: the deck lifts from the Coronado shore, turns, and reaches its highest point over the deep water where the carriers once passed. Beyond it, the South Bay opens toward Chula Vista. The bridge is one of the landmarks on a San Diego Bay history sail, and from the water you can see why it curves.
Sources: California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) records on the San Diego-Coronado Bridge; Wikipedia, "San Diego-Coronado Bridge"; San Diego History Center; Coronado Historical Association; Wikipedia, "Naval Air Station North Island."
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