the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 52
much a part of design and architecture in machine age America of the
1920s and 1930s. In that new era of streamlined airplanes, cars, and massproduced
everything, the nation dreamed of greatness and wanted its
structures to reflect that vision. “Even after the stock market crash of 1929
and the hard times of the Great Depression that followed, the dream of
greatness persisted,” wrote Hobbs in his comprehensive narrative of the
Tacoma Narrows Bridge on a Washington State Department of Transportation
Web site. “Skyscrapers came to symbolize the strengths of American
civilization. The soaring towers represented America’s vision of
greatness, efficiency, elegance, power, courage, and even rebirth.” The
phrase “frozen fountain” was bestowed upon those high-rising structures
that celebrated what architect Louis H. Sullivan in 1896 had described as
“the force and power of altitude.”
In that era, building a utilitarian train trestle or a merely functional
passenger-car bridge across a spot as magnificent as the Tacoma Narrows
would have seemed like putting yard gnomes on the White House lawn.
The site—a divide that featured picturesque bluffs topped by tall
evergreens—was a blank canvas in need of an artist.
As luck had it, Moisseiff’s design aesthetic meshed perfectly with
the times for several reasons. Bridges, he believed, needed to be “safe,
convenient, economical in cost and maintenance, and at the same time
satisfy the sense of beauty of the average man of our time.” Engineers
should strive for “the pleasure of good form,” and continuously “search
for the graceful and elegant.” As luck also had it, “graceful and elegant”
usually meant thinner and lighter, which also meant cheaper—an appealing
notion to taxpayers and government accountants during the scarcemoney
years after the 1929 crash.
When the state of Washington applied to the federal Public Works
Administration for money to build the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the feds
decided that the safe and practical preliminary design by state bridge engineer
Clark Eldridge was, at $11 million, too expensive. The precise rea-