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Located in Lower Arroyo Park, the Parker-Mayberry Bridge, located below the taller, longer, reinforced-concrete-arch Colorado Street Bridge (1913) crossed the Arroyo Seco and replaced the earlier timber truss Scoville Bridge built c. 1887. (A flood washed out the aging Scoville Bridge in 1914.) Curving gently, the Parker-Mayberry Bridge originally connected Arroyo Drive with a road on the opposite San Rafael side of the Arroyo. Designed by the noted local architect, Myron Hunt (1868-1952), it had a shallowly-pitched arch, composed, like its looming neighbor, of reinforced concrete. Following the flood in 1914, Chicagoan William Smith Mason, who owned orchard property on the Arroyo, sought the construction of another bridge to ease transportation around his land. He hired Hunt, who served officially as an agent of the Assets Realization Company, a Chicago-based financial firm formed in 1898, that funded many real estate and railway construction projects across the US. (See "Commercial Paper Market Less Active," The Commercial West, 02/28/1914, p. 12.) While some in the city felt that the new bridge would clutter views of the Colorado Street span and the Arroyo, the Assets Realization Company carried the city government vote, and the bridge was erected to replace the fondly-remembered Scoville Bridge. It was to cost in between $30,000-40,000.

The Parker-Mayberry Bridge was closed to auto traffic, but was still accessible to pedestrians in 2012.

PCAD id: 18056