Santa Cruz County, California Bridges: Water Street Bridge across the San Lorenzo River

December 2009 (36.97778 Degrees, -122.02389 degrees) Water Street Bridge

A nice thing about urban waterways is they usually have a footpath along them that makes it easier to photograph bridges. As we continued walking along the San Lorenzo River footpath we came upon a badly stained four span footbridge, and a little beyond it was the Water Street Bridge.

The Water Street Bridge (36C0089) looks almost exactly like the previously studied Laurel Street Bridge, except it doesn't have a drop-in span. Both bridges were built in the late 1960s and retrofitted and refurbished in the late 1990s.

The Water Street Bridge is a three span, 320 ft long bridge with a 170 ft main span and a 73 ft wide deck. The northern side of the bridge was two arch bridges that were built in 1908 and 1914. In 1967 the bridge was widened with a reinforced concrete box girder bridge on the south side. In 1997 the northern bridges were removed and replaced with a bridge that matched the bridge on the south side.

Like most of the other bridges across the San Lorenzo River, the Water Street Bridge had several antecedents including a through timber arch bridge from 1882 shown below (photo courtesy of the Santa Cruz Public Library). Another photo in the library's collection shows an even older bridge that was the scene of a grisly lynching.

Santa Cruz County, California Bridges: Water Street Bridge across the San Lorenzo River by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.