It could have been a trestle bridge. It might have been a tunnel. And for a time, some of the powers that be wanted to paint it red.

On August 3, the San Diego-Coronado Bridge enters middle age, turning forty years old. In honor of the bridge’s anniversary, the city of Coronado held an early birthday party of sorts on June 10 at the Coronado Community Center, necessary from a timing standpoint to round up all the school kids who had created paintings of the bridge in art class (See accompanying story, page 54).

A highlight of the evening was the debut of a documentary produced by the Coronado husband/wife team of Patrice Makovic and Arturo Sbicca of Village Videography. A special award was presented to the bridge’s original architect, Robert Mosher, now retired from the firm of Mosher Drew Watson Ferguson.

Sbicca is a native of Assisi, Italy whom Makovic, a graduate of San Diego State University, met while visiting the country 25 years ago. Together the couple has been producing videos on historic landmarks and events throughout the region of Umbria for over two decades.

Last year, the couple decided to relocate to Coronado (where Makovic’s mother grew up) to allow their children to experience schooling in the United States. Shortly after arriving, Sbicca, with an eye for historic milestones that might be captured in a documentary, noted the upcoming bridge anniversary. When Mayor Casey Tanaka told them he’d welcome their help in commemorating the event, “They took on the task and followed through on everything,” the mayor testified.

Their bridge documentary shares rarely seen video, housed in CalTrans vaults all these years, that includes a very enthusiastic Governor Ronald Reagan at the opening ceremony, extolling all that’s good in the world:

“May I just simply say, let’s all try to use this occasion as encouragement that we can build what has to be built; we can re-build that which needs rebuilding,” said the ebullient Reagan, “our great capacity, everything that needs to be done to right all that is wrong in this land of ours.”

Whew!

Like many landmarks, the bridge has gathered its fair share of stories in its forty years—some true, some not. CaTrans’s Director of Public Information Steven Saville said a popular myth about the bridge is that the middle section would float if it were to fall into the sea. The steel and concrete superstructure “was not designed with that in mind,” Saville corrects. “It would float like a stone.”

Though that story is only myth, the bridge was, in truth, once home to an endangered species, peregrine falcons. The falcons still nest on the bridge but were removed from the endangered species list in 1999, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “They get rid of pigeons, which is great,” said Caltrans equipment operator Gerald Browning. Browning once helped rescue a falcon that had gotten caught in a bridge grate. “It took about everything to get it loose,” Browning said. But once it was, bridge maintenance called the “bird people” who “did a bit of patching up and he was fine.”

The bridge’s 90-degree curve allows the bridge to reach a height of 200 feet, room enough for an empty aircraft carrier to pass underneath its mission-style arches. Drivers have an unobstructed view of navy vessels and all of San Diego bay, the little-less-than-three-foot railing built intentionally low so bridge travelers can enjoy the breathtaking views.

At the Coronado ceremony, Mosher was saluted for designing a bridge that has been honored for its beauty and functionality with national awards. The bridge, sometimes called “the necklace,” is arguably San Diego’s most recognizable landmark, appearing in opening splashes for newscasts and in San Diego ConVis promotional pieces.

In accepting an award honoring his achievement of some 40 years ago, a bemused Mosher shared some inside information with the crowd, beginning with the fact that he never wanted to see a bridge come to Coronado.

“I opposed the bridge,” Mosher told the officials who interviewed him over four decades ago as a candidate to design it. “I saw what happened to Staten Island after they built the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. But I wanted to see that if we did build it, that it was the best bridge we could possibly conceive of.”

Toward that end, Mosher used San Diego’s Laurel Street Bridge, which crosses over highway 163 in Balboa Park, as inspiration. “I loved that bridge’s graceful arches, and Mosher used that design motif in the 30 pillars that hold up the suspended highway.

The architect says he is often asked how he designed the curve on the bridge. “Well, it was really very simple,” he said with a little gleam in his eye. “We knew that the bridge had to terminate at this point in Coronado and this point in San Diego, which was a little over a mile apart. But if it had been a straight shot, it would have been too steep for vehicle travel, so we had to make it 2.12 miles long. We took two pins and affixed them to the terminus points and then used a string and our fingers to figure out an angle. And then we transferred that design into a computer program.”

The bridge wasn’t always a sparkling necklace. When it first opened, the bridge was dark. No lights.

Mosher had originally designed lights into the low side railings of the bridge, designed to illuminate the road. But his overall design was deemed too expensive a proposition by the state’s civil engineers, and they proposed a more traditional, if unsightly, trestle bridge, and it could have been painted a rust-inhibiting red. “Mosher threatened to raise all sorts of hell if they proceeded with that plan,” Makovic said. “They heard him, and said, ‘Ugh, yeah, give us a couple of weeks and we’ll see what we can do.’

“Two weeks later they said they’d proceed. And they did. They approved his call for a blue to blend with the sky and the way. But the lights were sacrificed to keep the costs within the allocated budget.”

Long-time Coronado resident Dr. James Cahill remembers when the bridge was under construction. His late wife Carol owned a boutique called The Import Hut, and would often talk with bridge engineers who came to the nearby Mexican Village restaurant for lunch. She learned from them that lights were not part of the bridge’s design and thought that didn’t seem safe. Carol flew to Sacramento, talked to the right public officials and got lights added to the bridge, albeit from tall polls. She had gone to Sacramento for political reasons before, Jim Cahill explained, and knew her way around bureaucracies. Cahill remembers that in the early days of the bridge’s operations that “Once in a while the phone would ring and someone would say, ‘Hey, Carol, one of your lights is out on the bridge!”’

Makovic reckons that had CalTrans’ engineers realized that the bridge would have been paid for 17 years ahead of schedule (from toll revenues), they would have stuck with Mosher’s entire plan.

Now the Port of San Diego and Caltrans are planning to add artistic lighting to the bridge, with concepts to light the span from the water up.

The search for artistic lighting designs began April of last year; last August the selection panel of the bridge’s artistic lighting project chose three finalists: The Bideau Co. of Ballan-Mire, France, the Peter Fink team of London and the team of Ned Kahn/Patrick McInerney Associates/Jason Edling of California. The three teams have worked as far away as Dubai and as close as San Francisco. Videos of the three finalists’ concepts will be posted on the Port’s website, www.portofsandiego.org, later this summer.

Port Commissioner Mike Bixler, who now heads the bridge lighting design committee, says the project resulted in many, many entries that were “enthusiastically received by both the artistic and technical communities. The concepts presented are both iconic and utilize some very cutting edge technology.”

Bixler said that most world-class ports, including Singapore, Hong Kong, London, and Sydney realize that there is an enduring value to doing something that creates enthusiasm and excitement. “Of course, our bridge is already iconic for the region and recognized worldwide. The lights will certainly be a brand new dimension, and we’re not talking about taking an Edison bulb and screwing it in,” he said. “We’re talking about LED highly efficient lighting. And everybody knows that the more light you have, the more you protection you have. So it satisfies aesthetically, environmentally and adds to the bridge’s security.”

While the lighting project will add even more beauty to Coronado’s entryway, in the eyes of some residents the bridge has taken away a little of the city’s original magic. Coronado is undoubtedly a busier place since the bridge. With an average of 73,000 vehicles crossing the span daily in 2008 and more expected with the arrival of a third carrier, the bridge has a moving population of vehicles that is more than triple the number of residents. Long-time resident Patty Schmidt remembers that Coronado was a “sleepier community” before the bridge, when the ferryboat was the main mode of transportation between Coronado and San Diego. “People could go on the ferry in the morning with curlers in their hair,” Schmidt reminisces, “because everyone knew each other.” Cahill also remembers the ferryboat days fondly, saying that on sunny weekends people could ride all day and have picnics on the upper deck. The ferryboats were shut down when the bridge opened, but passenger and bike ferry service came back in 1986 when the bridge was paid off.

Cahill, like Schmidt, believes Coronado has lost some of its “village atmosphere” with the building of the bridge, but, Cahill adds, “It’s a splendid bridge.”

The Coronado Bridge documentary is now available on DVD for $20; order at www.villagevideography.com.