If you don’t live in the San Francisco Bay area, you may not be aware that the culmination of a major infrastructure project is underway this holiday weekend. The Bay Bridge, one of 5 major Bay-area bridges, is in the middle of a 5 1/2 day closure as it’s transitioned over to its replacement. (The other 4 major bridges, in case you’re wondering, are the
Richmond–San Rafael Bridge, the San Mateo Bridge, the Dumbarton Bridge, aaaand… hmmm… oh, right, the Golden Gate bridge)
The Bay Bridge was originally built in the 1930s, and after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 it became clear it needed to be replaced. One of the flashbulb memories many people have of the quake — in addition to it interrupting the ’89 World Series and the collapse of the double-decker Cypress Street Viaduct — is the failure of a span on the Bay Bridge, with cars driving over it. Since then, the western half of the Bay Bridge has been retrofitted to be earthquake-safe, but the eastern span of the bridge has taken longer to completely replace. This weekend’s work is to transition the connection points, so that tomorrow people will be driving over a completely new bridge that’s been 11 years and $6.4 billion in the making!
(I’m getting to the part where Mozilla ties into this.)
Last Friday @BurritoJustice tweeted a link to a slideshow that dove into the engineering history of the Bay Bridge, complete with photos taken during the construction.
It’s some fantastic engineering porn, and I spent my lunch reading through all of it. I happened to notice that the building in the background of one of the photos looked familiar…
Mozilla’s San Francisco office, in the historic Hills Brothers Coffee building at 2 Harrison Street, is literally next-door to where the western span of the Bay Bridge lands in S.F. It makes for some really great views of the bridge from our top-floor patio:
As well as a first-row seat beneath the giant “HILLS BROS COFFEE” sign atop the building.
It’s this sign that made it easy to spot our building in the engineering history slideshow. The building was constructed in 1926, and the Bay Bridge wasn’t built until 1933-1936, so I was curious to see if the sign was visible in other contemporaneous photos. I started digging though some online resources, and got lucky right away by finding a highres version of that picture at the Library Of Congress:
I skimmed through the other 415 photos in this collection and another 1160 from UC Berkeley (So You Don’t Have To™), and found some other nice shots with the Hills Coffee sign peeking out from the background:
So there you have it. Pics of the Mozilla San Francisco office from both ends of an 80 year span of history.
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