There was a fifty foot wooden bridge from Ocean Beach to Mission Beach.

From 1915 to 1950 you could get from Ocean Beach to Mission Beach without going inland. You rode a streetcar over the water.

The bridge ran fifteen hundred feet across the mouth of the bay, north off West Point Loma Boulevard between Abbott and Bacon Streets, to the southern tip of Mission Beach. It was fifty feet wide. It carried a trolley line, two lanes of cars, and a sidewalk on each side.

The city closed it in 1950 and tore it down the following year.

Three things before the story runs. A railroad company built it, to sell lots at the far end. The sidewalks were for fishing, and people spent whole afternoons on them. And when the city took it down, Ocean Beach petitioned to keep it, was promised a fishing pier instead, and waited fifteen years to get one.

1887: the lots come first

Ocean Beach was a real estate play before it was anything else.

The railroad reached San Diego in 1885 and the number of new subdivision maps filed in the county went from none in 1884 to four, then nineteen, then fifty one in 1887. A twenty three year old named William H. Carlson and his partner Frank J. Higgins bought six hundred acres out of three pueblo lots and cut it into eighty four blocks.

The blocks were six hundred feet by three hundred. Each one held forty eight lots, twenty five feet wide and a hundred and forty feet deep, with a twenty foot alley down the middle. The avenues were named after resort towns. No water system was provided and no sewer system either.

They filed it as map number 279 on May 28, 1887. They had been running ads since April 24 claiming that over two thousand lots had already sold without advertising.

1915: a bridge to sell the other end

Mission Beach was the next subdivision up the coast, and it had the same problem Ocean Beach had: it was hard to get to.

The Bay Shore Railroad Company built the bridge in 1915, in the city's words, "to provide access to and promotion of the new subdivision of Mission Beach."

That is the whole business model stated plainly. The bridge was not infrastructure that a growing place needed. It was a sales tool, built by a railroad, pointed at lots that had not sold yet.

It worked.

The thing about the sidewalks

Fifty feet of width is a lot of bridge for 1915.

The trolley got its line. Cars got two lanes. And both outside edges got a sidewalk, which the city's history says were there for pedestrians and for those wanting to spend an afternoon fishing in Mission Bay.

A bridge with fishing built into the design is a different kind of object than a bridge you cross. Between 1915 and 1950 it was somewhere Ocean Beach went, not just something Ocean Beach used.

1925: it carries the town away

Belmont Amusement Park opened at Mission Beach in 1925.

The city's account of what happened next is short and it does not flinch. The popularity of the new resort town to the north eventually drew visitors away from Ocean Beach. By 1930, Ocean Beach's resort era was over.

The bridge did exactly what the Bay Shore Railroad Company built it to do. It made Mission Beach reachable, and the traffic ran north.

1950 and 1951

The bridge was permanently closed in 1950 and demolished the next year. A replacement went in half a mile to the east.

Ocean Beach petitioned the city to keep it. The city said no and promised a fishing pier instead.

The pier was built fifteen years later, at the foot of Niagara Avenue.

In the same decade, the dredging of Mission Bay and the street changes forced by Interstate 5 cut Ocean Beach off again. The city's own history is clear eyed about how that landed: many residents appreciated the isolation, which protected the character of the place, and the same inaccessibility drew the people who turned it into the co-ops and independent businesses of the 1970s.

What is there now

The bridge, partly.

When crews were monitoring construction in Ocean Beach they found it: the deteriorated wooden supports, the rock retaining wall and the cross beams from the southern side of the 1914 to 1915 bridge. The city determined that this was a significant resource and noted that other portions of the support system may still be down there.

It is not a ruin anybody visits. It is a thing you hit when you dig.

What this means if you are looking in Ocean Beach

In 1972 San Diego voters passed Proposition D, which limited new structures in the coastal zone west of Interstate 5, outside Downtown and Little Italy, to no more than thirty feet.

The ballot argument said the purpose was to preserve "the unique and beautiful character of the coastal zone of San Diego," and to prohibit buildings that obstructed "ocean breezes, sky and sunshine."

That is the single most important structural fact about property in Ocean Beach, and it has nothing to do with the market. It governs what can be built, how many units fit on a lot, and therefore what any given parcel is actually worth to a builder. Anyone evaluating a property here starts with the height limit and works down from it.

Current numbers are in the Ocean Beach market report, and the wider area is in Coast and Peninsula.

Sources

1. City of San Diego, Ocean Beach Community Plan and Local Coastal Program, Appendix C, Historic Context Statement. Source for the 1915 construction of the bridge by the Bay Shore Railroad Company and the quoted purpose, the 1,500 foot length and 50 foot width, the trolley line and two lanes and the sidewalks for pedestrians and fishing, its location off West Point Loma Boulevard between Abbott and Bacon on the 1921 Sanborn Map, the 1925 completion of Belmont Amusement Park and the drawing away of visitors, the end of the resort era by 1930, the 1950 closure and 1951 demolition and the replacement bridge half a mile east, the residents' petition and the promised fishing pier built fifteen years later at the foot of Niagara Avenue, the 1950s isolation from the Mission Bay dredging and Interstate 5, the Carlson and Higgins subdivision and its dimensions and the May 28, 1887 filing of map 279 and the April 24, 1887 advertisements, the archaeological identification of the bridge's wooden supports, rock retaining wall and cross beams and the finding that the resource is significant, and Proposition D of 1972 with the quoted ballot language.

1. Douglas Gunn, Picturesque San Diego, with Historical and Descriptive Notes, Chicago: Knight and Leonard Co., 1887. Source of the 1887 photograph.

Four points stated rather than buried

One image, and it is not the bridge. No photograph of this bridge has been found in a collection that permits publication. The photograph on this page is Ocean Beach in March 1887, two months before Carlson and Higgins recorded the subdivision map and twenty eight years before the bridge was built. It shows the place, not the structure, and it is labeled that way.

Two dates for the same bridge. The city's document says the bridge was built in 1915 in its history section and calls it the "1914-1915 Mission Bay Bridge" in its archaeology section. Both appear here as the source gives them.

Who ran the cars. The Bay Shore Railroad Company built the bridge. The city's account does not say which company operated the trolley service across it, and this piece does not fill that in.

The pier is not named. The city says the promised fishing pier was built fifteen years later at the foot of Niagara Avenue. It does not give the year or the name, and neither does this piece.