Sacramento Tower Bridge
— — a gold lift against a slack river.
Not only on a wall.
“The vertical-lift bridge across the Sacramento River at the western end of Capitol Mall, opened December 15, 1935. Two square towers carry a 209-foot lift span on counterweights of about nine hundred and twenty tons each, raised when a barge or a tall sailboat needs through. The bridge was silver for most of the twentieth century. In 2002 the City of Sacramento put the colour to a public vote and the bridge came back gold; it has stayed gold since. Old Sacramento sits to the north, the Tower Bridge Gateway to West Sacramento to the west. At sundown the towers throw the colour back across the slack water. — from the studio
Sacramento Tower Bridge, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Tower Bridge spans the Sacramento River at the western end of Capitol Mall, linking the City of Sacramento to West Sacramento in Yolo County. It opened to traffic on December 15, 1935, replacing the 1870 M Street railroad bridge that had served the same crossing. The State of California built it, and the structure currently carries California State Route 275 along with a pair of sidewalks and a Capitol Corridor passenger rail track on the deck. The bridge was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 as a representative example of mid-Depression-era vertical-lift design.
The bridge is a vertical-lift design: the 209-foot centre span rides between two 160-foot steel towers on cable counterweights of roughly nine hundred and twenty tons each, so the deck lifts straight up rather than swinging open. The clear vertical height of the raised deck is about 100 feet above the river, enough for the masted river traffic that still uses the lower Sacramento. The lift mechanism dates to the original 1935 build, designed by the California Division of Highways under state highway engineer Stewart Mitchell. The deck carries two lanes of road traffic plus the Capitol Corridor rail line.
The bridge was silver for most of the twentieth century. In 2002 the City of Sacramento put the colour to a public vote, and gold beat out the other candidates by a wide margin; the structure has been ochre-gold ever since, repainted on a roughly twenty-year cycle. At sundown the western face of the towers takes the warm light directly and throws it back across the river to the Sacramento side. The lift span is internally lit after dark, and the towers join the city's holiday lighting programme in December. The walkable river path on both banks gives several elevations of view, from deck level up to the Pyramid Tower.