Lefty O’Doul Bridge needs work
Here is a look at the past. Items have been culled from The Chronicle’s archives of 25, 50, 75 and 100 years ago.
1992
June 1: Plans are in the works for an overhaul of one of San Francisco’s more obscure landmarks — the Lefty O’Doul drawbridge, which carries Third Street across the waters of the China Basin Channel on the southern waterfront. The bridge, which turned 59 last month, is at that stage of life where it needs a change — and more than just a coat of paint. The job will cost $5 million and take 10 months. It will mean closing Third Street for a while and the channel will be closed for at least a month. It is a pretty big deal for a bridge that is only 193 feet six inches long, 86 feet high and has the grace of a huge black moveable lawn chair.
But the bridge is important — 20,000 cars use it on a busy day — and it is also historic, having been designed by Joseph B. Strauss, the man who also did the somewhat better known Golden Gate Bridge. It is, in fact, a fine example of a Strauss-patented trunnion bascule bridge, a kind of mechanical marvel that made Strauss a rich man before his work at the Golden Gate made him immortal. For years the bridge, which moves four times a day on average, had no name. About 10 years ago it was named for Francis (Lefty) O’Doul, the noted baseball player and longtime manager of the old San Francisco Seals. The bridge got O’Doul’s name when O’Doul Street was renamed to honor a Filipino patriot.
— Carl Nolte
1967
June 3: If you work on the Golden Gate Bridge and you feel the call of nature, the Painters union complained yesterday, there’s only one place to go: over the side. Bridge managers insisted that portable toilets “are available at all times.” But for 30 years, the union charged, workmen have been pulling down their britches and perching on the rail, polluting the bay and creating a hazard for who knows how many tourists, sail boaters and yachting dignitaries. The only john is at the toll plaza. It takes 40 minutes to walk there and back to the job, assuming one had enough advance warning. The union raised its complaint in connection with a battle to reinstate a union shop steward, Paul Powell, who was fired by bridge General Manager James Adam for alleged incompetence. The union asserted, but Adam denied, that “one of the main charges against Paul as an excuse for firing him is that he picked the wrong place to sit on the rail. “The foreman said he soiled the struts below.”
1942
May 28: New charges that Mayor Rossi and former Supervisor James B. McSheehy attended an October 1938 meeting in “the German House” (California Hall) at which San Francisco Nazis celebrated the German invasion of Czecho-Slovakia were made yesterday to the Tenney commission investigating un-American activities. The accuser was Harry Bridges, California director of the CIO and president of the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union. Baron Manfred von Killinger, Consul General predecessor of Captain Fritz Wiedemann, was the moving spirit according to Bridge’s testimony.
Some of the longshoremen who put a protest picket line around the place were beaten by police, Bridges testified. Bridges also told the committee that on several occasions in 1935, German vessels coming into this port disgorged “German storm troopers in uniform,” and that once the storm troopers began traveling on Nazi ships crewmembers no longer conversed with local mariners. Members of the ILWU, Bridges testified, trailed the storm troopers to find out where they went and with whom they came into contact. Most of them, he said, went to ‘the German House.” Records of their movements were kept and Bridges said he would supply them to the committee. This condition continued, the witness declared, until German ships ceased running to American ports “shortly after Germany declared war on England.”
1917
June 1: It was 9 o’ clock in the Colonial ballroom in the St. Francis last night. Out front, a hushed audience, a little group of more or less serious thinkers sat and waited for the curtain to rise on the first of four “Little Theater” playlets to be presented by the Arthur Maitland Players. Behind the scenes the leading lady in three of them was having hysterics. It is impossible to present a playlet as playlets should be presented when the leading lady is having hysterics; there was no vampire in any of these playlets and hysterics were completely out of place. The curtain was brushed aside and a Roman captain dressed in ancient clothes of steel appeared before the audience. His name was Arthur Maitland and he looked as if his army had just been licked. “Miss Myrtle Gayetty has had an attack of hysterics. We are unable to produce three of our four playlets. What shall I do?” he asked. “Put on the other one,” suggested one spectator. Maitland said he would if they’d give him time to shift the scenery some twenty centuries.