Santa Clara County, California Bridges: Alum Rock Park Bridge (1)

May 2014 (37.39452 Degrees, -121.81178 Degrees) Alum Rock Park Bridge

Santa Clara County is interesting because of its diverse population. San Jose, Silicon Valley, and Stanford University all thrive within its borders. I recently returned to Santa Clara to photograph more interesting bridges. For some reason, most of these bridges are in parks. Does that mean that bridges are better preserved in parks than on highways? 

The first bridge I photographed was in Alum Rock Park, which had half a dozen nice bridges. Most of these are intricately-shaped stone arch bridges, but the Alum Rock Park Bridge is a concrete closed spandrel arch bridge with a stucco-like appearance. This bridge is so big, that I had trouble getting the whole structure into a single photo. The bridge has several parts including a long arch over Penitencia Creek and a 'T' girder span over Alum Rock Avenue. The arch has a large superelevation at one end that gives it a highly distorted appearance. We'll take another look at this interesting bridge tomorrow. 

Santa Clara County, California Bridges: Alum Rock Park Bridge (1) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.