Cabrillo Bridge

This guide to Cabrillo Bridge in San Diego starts at the blunt iron spikes crowning its railing, bolted on in a single hurried week in June nineteen fifty, and works backward to the bridge's grand opening in nineteen fifteen as the entrance to the Panama-California Exposition. It follows the span's early years without a real railing, and a nineteen thirty-four newspaper count of how many people had already jumped to their deaths from it. You'll hear what happened in nineteen fifty that finally forced the city's hand. Rest your fingers on the spikes and look down at Highway one sixty-three threading the canyon below.