The Don B. Huntley Gallery

"Positively Fourth Street" | D.J. Waldie Essay Published in BOOM California

May 26, 2018

black and white portrait of D.J. Waldie

About D.J. Waldie

D. J. Waldie is a renowned essayist, memoirist, translator, and editor who has lent his writing skills to the Positively Fourth Street Exhibition. The essay he wrote about the Fourth Street Bridge was published in BOOM California. He is the author of six books of non-fiction dealing with aspects of everyday life, including Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. His commentaries on California history and politics have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times.

"A Traveler Comes to a Bridge" by DJ Waldie

A traveler comes to a bridge. As the traveler starts to cross, one foot is still earthbound. Empty space is beneath the other. The next step requires trust. The traveler is uplifted less by concrete or masonry and more by forces kept in balance with the void waiting below. The bridge seems static, but every footfall must be absorbed, its effects distributed by tension or resisted by compression. The bridge responds. Its span springs to the traveler’s step in order to seem unmoved.

The Fourth Street Viaduct bears desires across railroad tracks, across access roads, across the blank surface of the Los Angeles River channel, and across time. Some are desires you may not recognize today or want anymore. But the viaduct cannot do otherwise, or be other than what it is, so well made was it, with skill and an eye toward the effect of its repeating elements of arch and trefoil, pylon and spire, light and shadow. These elements, which framed the city’s aspirations in 1931, are still available today as a borrowed elegy for a city full of anxieties about its place.
The drawings and paintings accompanying this essay are by Roderick Smith and Richard Willson, and are part of the exhibition, “Positively 4th Street: An Encounter with Los Angeles Viaduct,” on display at the Don B. Huntley Gallery, Cal Poly Pomona, through April 12, 2018.

The Fourth Street Viaduct bears desires across railroad tracks, across access roads, across the blank surface of the Los Angeles River channel, and across time. Some are desires you may not recognize today or want anymore. But the viaduct cannot do otherwise, or be other than what it is, so well made was it, with skill and an eye toward the effect of its repeating elements of arch and trefoil, pylon and spire, light and shadow. These elements, which framed the city’s aspirations in 1931, are still available today as a borrowed elegy for a city full of anxieties about its place.
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In 1998, the Fourth Street Bridge was retrofitted to improve the lateral stability of its arches in an earthquake. In 2014, the National Bridge Inventory of the Federal Highway Administration determined that the entire Fourth Street Viaduct met the “minimum tolerable limits to be left in place as is,” although the geometry of its roadway deck is “basically intolerable.” The report added that the viaduct is “functionally obsolete."
Roderick Smith, LA Improv II, 2017, Charcoal and oil on paper, 18 x 22” (with frame). Courtesy of the artist.
Roderick Smith, LA Improv II, 2017, Charcoal and oil on paper, 18 x 22” (with frame). Courtesy of the artist.
Full Essay on "A Traveler Comes to a Bridge" by D.J. Waldie