Sixth Street Bridge

Sixth Street Bridge The Sixth Street Bridge is an historic structure in downtown Los Angeles. The new design has several green spaces built under and around it.

The Sixth Street Bridge is a viaduct bridge that connects the downtown and Boyle Heights areas of Los Angeles, California. It spans the Los Angeles River, the Santa Ana Freeway (US 101), and the Golden State Freeway (I-5), as well as Metrolink and Union Pacific railroad tracks and several local streets. The viaduct is composed of three independent structures: the reinforced concrete west segment,

the central steel arch segment over the river, and the reinforced concrete east segment. In 1986, the Caltrans bridge survey found the 6th Street Bridge eligible for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places. During the construction of the original viaduct, an on-site plant was used to supply the concrete for construction. However, the quality of the concrete turned out to have a high alkali content and led to an alkali-silica reaction which created cracks in the concrete and sapped the strength of the structure. Estimates were that the viaduct had a 70% probability of collapse due to a major earthquake within 50 years. Despite its historical status, the bridge was closed for demolition and replacement in January 2016 due to concerns over seismic instability. The new not yet completed bridge is designed by architect Michael Maltzan and the HNTB Design-Build team and contractors Skanska and Stacy and Witbeck. The latest completion date is set for March 2022.

05/22/2026

Michael Maltzan founded Michael Maltzan Architecture in 1995 and has worked on many projects, including the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, MoMA QNS, the UCLA Hammer Museum, and the Sixth Street Viaduct.

From the article:The 1932 6th Street Bridge was the queen of the river, with its huge size and movie history, but it was...
05/15/2026

From the article:
The 1932 6th Street Bridge was the queen of the river, with its huge size and movie history, but it was made from nerfed concrete and began crumbling just decades after its completion.

I was on the Citizens’ Advisory Committee (CAC) for the redesign, and we voted to recreate the original design using modern standards. Instead, we got a design that breaks up the rest of the set. The 6th Street Bridge is a complete mismatch with the classic styling of the previous viaducts. In retrospect, I see that the CAC was enacted to fill a requirement but was never taken seriously by anyone outside of it.

But the new bridge is safer and should stay up in an earthquake. This viaduct has massive base isolators, giant rubber doughnuts at the base of each arch that literally give the bridge wiggle room. The central pylon of the old bridge is gone, as well as any connection to the river below, including an old entrance on the west bank that’s been locked for at least ten years now.

The 1932 6th Street Bridge was famous for its hundreds and hundreds of film appearances and car commercials, from Terminator to The Dark Knight Rises. The new bridge has been open for several years now, but I haven’t noticed many movie or commercial shoots featuring it. The reopening made the bridge a media darling, and people came from all over to walk on it, spray paint it, do burnouts on it, and then finally, steal all seven miles of copper wiring from it.

At Night, a Photographer Turns His Lens on These Marvels of Infrastructure

05/13/2026
05/04/2026

The copper wire is gone, the lights are out, and graffiti is everywhere, but the grass is also in the ground for the new L.A. River-adjacent park space below the Sixth Street Viaduct.

Scene from the movie Point Blank released in 1967
04/24/2026

Scene from the movie Point Blank released in 1967

12/22/2025

Los Angeles (CNN) — Often strung from utility poles or buried beneath our feet, copper wire has played a critical role in powering America’s electrical grid for more than a

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