Alameda County, California Bridges: High Street Bridge across the Oakland Estuary

June 2014 (37.76449 Degrees, -122.22494 Degrees) High Street Bridge

Continuing south along the Oakland Estuary we arrived at the High Street Bridge (33C0026), which is a diminutive version of the previously studied Park Street Bridge. It has only two traffic lanes and carries less than 20,000 vehicles a day. 

The first bridge at this site was an iron swing bridge built by the Harrison Bridge Company in 1894 for $25,000. Like the Park and Fruitvale Bridges it was built by the USACE in exchange for permission to dredge the channel. The current bridge was paid for by the WPA, designed by the Alameda County Surveyors office, and built by MacDonald and Kahn for $750,000 in 1939.

The High Street Bridge is 507 ft long, 24 ft wide, and provides 15.9 ft vertical clearance above the deck. Like the Park Street Bridge, it has counterweights in pits under the deck that help the rack and pinion system (shown above) raise and lower the two bascule leafs. The bridge has been renovated several times including in the late 1990s when 25,000 lbs of paint was removed and the bridge lift mechanism had to be re-calibrated.

Alameda County, California Bridges: High Street Bridge across the Oakland Estuary by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.