Now that an appeals court has thrown out the challenge to Caltrans’s plans to replace the Green Bridge at the south side of Point Reyes Station, I’m not going to pussy-foot around on where I stand on this contentious issue. I’m aware that many friends and neighbors are strongly in favor of somehow salvaging the bridge. Not me. The sooner this relic from a 1920s Erector Set gets replaced, the better, I say.
Overriding all else in my view is that this butt-ugly (there, I said it!) structure is a dangerously unsafe derelict, a disaster waiting to happen. The clock is ticking for the Green Bridge: Unless it gets replaced in the nick of time, its almost assured destiny is to collapse one day, or to get knocked down by an earthquake (or an overloaded truck), or to get washed away by floodwaters. It’s not a matter of if, but of when. We can only pray that folks aren’t taken down with it.
The bridge was built just short of a century ago by Marin County’s road department, back when this then quite isolated county’s population was under 40,000. We’re told that no plans, drawings or specifications for the bridge still exist. Alarmingly, no one is sure what the anchorages are attached to or what is holding them in place. Caltrans has determined that the portions of the anchorages that can be inspected are already heavily compromised by corrosion.
For almost 100 years, whatever is holding this anachronism in situ has been under direct assault by the flows of Lagunitas Creek (a.k.a. Papermill Creek), as well as by the ravages of time and the daily rumblings of hundreds of motor vehicles. No one knows how this manmade structure has withstood all that pummeling. Do we need to find out the hard way?
I also reject as risible that the Green Bridge somehow represents West Marin’s heritage. Did the Miwoks build truss bridges? Did the Spanish and Mexican land-grant grandees pepper the landscape with ferrous metal infrastructure? Did the early European ranchers and dairy farmers throw up metal spans so they could get their product to market?
The only thing that makes the bridge historic is that it predates the arrival of virtually everyone who lives here today; in other words, like a wart on the nose, we’ve become used to it. In truth, it reflects nothing more than a design chosen by some unknown person for some unknown reason back in the 1920s. Is it credible that this incongruous design was chosen because someone back then thought it showcased the culture of early 20th-century West Marin?
Caltrans’s current construction plan eliminates the use of the front parking area of Dr. Whitney’s vet clinic for equipment staging and reduces other intrusive impacts on the neighborhood. Yes, a two- or three-week closure of the bridge will be maddeningly inconvenient. But such a shutdown could stretch to three or more months of local economic devastation if the bridge is destroyed unexpectedly by a winter flood flow or because a heavily laden truck crashes into it or because it just gives up with a sigh one day and plunges into the creek.
Let me pose this scenario: Suppose that the Highway 1 crossing over Lagunitas Creek has been a standard Caltrans concrete bridge for decades now. And suppose that Caltrans comes along today and says the bridge needs to be replaced. And suppose their proposed replacement is an industrial span of the Green Bridge’s design? Can’t you just hear the howls of outrage?
Turning to another issue of public infrastructure in town, is anyone else appalled by the county’s recent remodeling of the public safety building at Fourth and B Streets? I understand why the building’s wood-shingle siding had to be deep-sixed: fire safety and all that, although last time I looked there didn’t seem to be much of a forest fire threat in downtown Point Reyes Station.
But an industrial-gray façade better suited to a Detroit factory? I first assumed this must be protective insulation or some such, and that it would be covered soon with a well-chosen exterior finish appropriate to its setting in the hub of West Marin. In time, it dawned on me that this was the finished product. This was the crapola that someone consciously selected for the building, aesthetic considerations be damned.
I’m particularly nettled by this outcome because my hackles had been raised when the Board of Supes approved an expenditure in the high five digits for the nascent project. Oh, wait! That wasn’t for any of the project work itself. It was only to pay for consultants to tell the county what improvements were needed. In my simplistic view, I think they could have gotten just as good advice, for free, from any firefighter or sheriff’s deputy who works out of the building. But you can’t do anything without consultants, right?
So here we are stuck for decades to come with a once-lovely public building whose gray-brown façade now looks like a blend of battleship and dog poop.
Wade Holland wonders how many times he has made the roundtrip between his home in Inverness and Point Reyes Station, the shopping and cultural mecca of West Marin, during the 53 years he has lived here.