When the eastern span of the Bay Bridge was deemed seismically unsafe after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, its fate was certain. Demolition crews tore it down, and a construction team replaced it with the lighted white suspension bridge we see today. But when a group of residents heard that the iconic steel that had helped shuttle people across the bay since 1936 would be recycled like any other material, they saw an opportunity.
That opportunity morphed into public art and park benches in the Bay Area, an elaborate gate in the desert, and even a train platform in a small mountain town. And even more of the distinctive steel may be up for grabs — and a new life.
Keeping Bay Bridge steel in the state
As workers drew up plans to take down the mighty structure, word spread among the Bay Area artist community. A group rallied together to gather signatures and create a proposal to the Toll Bridge Program Oversight Committee requesting 600 tons of cleaned and salvaged steel for distribution among artists for the creation of public art. The organization approved the proposal, requiring that the projects pay tribute to the history of the bridge and the works be publicly displayed within California. That the projects remain accessible, as opposed to, say, a company commissioning a sculpture for its private office, was a crucial part of the program, said Karin Betts, a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which was part of TBPOC at the time.
Oakland Museum of California facilitated the program, while a selection committee chose the awardees from 39 applicants. TBPOC would remove the steel and clean it (it had to be stripped of lead paint), but that was it. Artists had to find their own way to transfer and store the steel, in addition to incurring any expenses that came with creating the art itself.
For Michal Kapitulnik of San Francisco’s Surfacedesign, a landscape architecture firm, getting to travel over the eastern span in a van and pick out the steel components directly from the bridge as part of the application process was thrilling. “It was a trip,” she said of the 2015 journey. “A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be some of the last people other than the construction workers out on that eastern span and experiencing the view and the actual steel.”…