Six Engineers and Their Namesake Structures

Along the ridge of hills separating the San Fernando Valley from the Los Angeles Basin runs a winding, two-lane road featuring some of the best views of Los Angeles. Even in a city filled with famous streets—Sunset Blvd., Rodeo Drive, Hollywood Blvd., Melrose Place—its name stands out: Mulholland Drive. It wasn’t named for a famous politician, or a military hero, or even a movie star. It was named after an engineer, William Mulholland, who from 1902 till 1928 was the head of the Los Angeles Water Department and its successor agency, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Angelenos clearly regarded this particular city employee highly: They honored him by naming one of the more spectacular urban roads in America after him.

Mulholland had nothing to do with designing Mulholland Drive, but it made me think about other structures that were named after their designers. Most structures are named after their locations (Golden Gate Bridge, Panama Canal), politicians (Hoover Dam, Eisenhower Tunnel), private donors (Disney Concert Hall, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion), individual owners (Edith Farnsworth House), corporate owners (Sears Tower), major tenants (Willis Tower), or corporate sponsors (Staples Center, Crypto.com Arena). Sometimes they are known only by their nicknames (the Gherkin, the Shard). I can think of just six structures that were named after their engineer-designers: a bridge, a tunnel, two towers, and two dams. [1] [2] And before we’re done, we’ll return to Mr. Mulholland.

John Buchanan Eads (1820–1887)

If you stand below the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, facing the Mississippi river, and look to your left, you’ll see one of the world’s more beautiful bridges (see Image 1 above). Completed in 1874 and consisting of three graceful long-span arches, the bridge was the first large steel structure built in America. It’s named after its designer, James Buchanan Eads, although calling Eads an engineer may be stretching things. Eads grew up in St. Louis and eventually became a leading figure in the city. His first profession was running a salvage company, using a boat of his own design to locate and salvage sunken boats in the Mississippi, often doing his own diving in the river. During the Civil War, Eads designed and built a fleet of ironclad boats that played a key role in defending the Mississippi River for the Union, earning Eads the respect and gratitude of General Ulysses Grant, which would come in handy when he was building his bridge.

After the Civil War, Eads led a group of St. Louis, New York, and Philadelphia investors to design and build the first bridge to span the Mississippi as far south as St. Louis. The self-educated Eads developed the design concept for the bridge, with a central span of 520 feet (the longest-spanning arch in the world at the time) and two slightly shorter side spans.

The project endured numerous delays and cost overruns, partly because of Eads’s insistence on using chrome steel for the structure [3], and partly due to the unprecedented technical challenges the builders faced. These included the deep, mid-river pneumatic caisson foundations supporting the massive masonry piers. These were the deepest underwater foundations ever built, and resulted in the deaths or permanent injuries of countless workers due to the builders’ lack of experience with working in highly pressurized underwater chambers.

Because of the low profiles and enormous spans of the arches, and the necessity of keeping the river constantly navigable, Eads developed a method of construction that required no substructure to support the arches during construction. Instead, the arches were supported by cables from towers built on the masonry piers. The superstructure was fabricated and erected by Andrew Carnegie’s construction company, Keystone Bridge Company, before Carnegie got into the steel business.

The arches’ low profiles cause another problem. As the bridge neared completion, a competing bridge project team noted that Eads’s bridge didn’t provide the vertical clearances required for the full width of the spans, and that the low points of the arches would create shipping obstacles. This was a valid accusation, even though Eads had played a role in developing the regulations he was violating. The issue was elevated to the office of the U.S. president, who, fortunately for Eads, happened to be Ulysses Grant. After reviewing the situation, and no doubt remembering Eads’s contribution to Grant’s Civil War successes on the Mississippi, determined that the bridge came close enough to compliance.

The Eads Bridge is remarkable for many reasons, not least because it was designed by a self-taught engineer who never designed another bridge. After the bridge’s completion, Eads designed a railroad across the 124-mile-wide Isthmus of Tehuantepec, at the narrowest part of Mexico, to transport ocean-going ships between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It was never built.

Gustave Eiffel (1832–1923)

Since the first world’s fair, the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, Paris had hosted fairs in 1855, 1867, and 1878, each bigger, in area, cost, and number of visitors, than the previous one. And the proposed fair of 1889 was going to be the biggest yet, covering 32 acres and ultimately serving 32 million visitors. One way that a world’s fair could outshine its predecessors was by featuring an extraordinary structure. The 1851 fair set the “Wow”-factor standard with the Crystal Palace, and Paris responded with the Palais d’Industrie in 1855, the Champ de Mars main building in 1867, and the Palais du Trocadero (and the Statue of Liberty’s head) in 1878. So the 1889 fair needed something really big.

A competition was held for a 300-meter-tall tower, which would be the tallest structure in the world. The winning submission was by Gustave Eiffel, whose firm would design and build the structure. Eiffel was already a noted engineer, having designed numerous outstanding iron bridges, as well as the internal structure for the Statue of Liberty. Eiffel’s team included engineers Maurice Koechlin and émile Nouguier and architect Stephen Sauvestre. Although Eiffel called the structure the 300-Meter Tower, it seems to have been called the Eiffel Tower from the time he won the competition.

The tower was a great success at the fair, despite the Otis Elevator Company’s inability to complete the custom sloped elevators to the first platform in time for the fair’s opening. But it wasn’t generally loved by the artistic elites of Paris, and Eiffel had only a 20-year contract to operate the tower and its restaurants, observation deck, and other facilities, after which it was to be demolished. But when Eiffel installed a radio transmitter in the top of the tower, its sudden usefulness allowed it to survive until a new generation of Parisians came to love it.

Following the tower’s completion (see none of the images above because, after all, we all know what the Eiffel Tower looks like), Eiffel became involved in the French attempt to build a sea-level canal across the Isthmus of Panama, and was dragged into the financial scandal, legal difficulties, and technical failure of that effort. He was one of many accused of misusing funds, and was sentenced to prison before being exonerated. In his subsequent work he avoided designing large structures and instead became a pioneer in the study of aerodynamics, designing and building the first wind tunnels for testing structures for wind loads.

Vladimir Shukhov (1853-1939)

Vladimir Shukhov was born in tzarist Russia and spent most of his career as a mathematician, inventor, and engineer there. In the late 1800s he invented diagrid structures―highly efficient structures made of diagonal grids of lightweight steel members. Modern diagrid structures include the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing and 30 St. Mary Axe (a.k.a. “The Gherkin”) in London. Shukhov continued to develop the concept into rotated hyperboloid towers. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Lenin initiated a competition for a radio tower. Shukhov won the competition with a design for a 350-meter hyperboloid tower, shaped like a steeple but consisting of nothing but a delicate yet strong steel grid structure. The young Soviet Union was in the midst of a civil war, so a tower higher than the Eiffel Tower wasn’t affordable, but a still-tall 148-meter tower was built in Moscow, completed in 1922 (see Image 5).

Shukhov was a survivor. He lived through the Bolshevik Revolution, was favored by Lenin, and survived Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, dying of natural causes in 1939 at age 85. Meanwhile, the tower that acquired his name fell into disrepair and was on the verge of demolition in 2014. Fortunately, preservationists stepped up and saved the structure.

Michael O’Shaughnessy (1864–1934)

O’Shaughnessy Dam may not be a name you’re familiar with. But when I add two other words―Hetch Hetchy―you probably know where this story is heading.

Running east-west through the Sierra Nevada are two valleys, both carved during the last ice age by large glaciers that left vertical walls of rock on the sides of the valleys. Both valleys have several high waterfalls pouring into them, and, before 1912, they both had mountain-fed rivers meandering through lush meadows covering the flat valley floors. The northern valley, Hetch Hetchy (see Image 3), became part of Yosemite National Park when the park was established in 1890. The other, more famous valley is Yosemite Valley, which, along with the Mariposa Sequoia Grove, had been established in 1864 as a reserve overseen by the State of California before being merged with the national park in 1906.

In 1913, Congress passed and President Wilson signed the Raker Act, which authorized the City of San Francisco to build a dam at the narrow west end of Hetch Hetchy, creating a reservoir of fresh water to serve the city’s water and power needs for the foreseeable future. That act and the resulting reservoir have been controversial ever since. How could part of a national park, supposedly set aside to serve the people of the entire United States, be converted into something that serves only the people of a single city? Well, times and people were a little different back then.

During the Progressive Era at the beginning of the 20th century, “conservation” didn’t mean what it does now. To the progressives, conservation meant getting the best use for the most people from a natural resource. For Yosemite Valley, its best use even then was as a scenic wonder to be enjoyed by everyone. Hetch Hetchy, however, was seldom visited, not surprising since no roads led to the valley and no amenities were built within it. Today we might consider the politicians of the day short-sighted. But consider things from their viewpoint. They weighed, in one hand, a beautiful valley enjoyed by almost no one against, in the other hand, a valuable source of fresh water needed desperately by San Francisco’s growing population. For them it wasn’t a hard decision.

Those times were also a period of urban imperialism. Cities were growing faster than the readily available resources needed to run them. So major cities looked beyond their borders, sometimes far beyond, to solve their resource problems. New York created reservoirs in the Catskill Mountains, from which aqueducts brought fresh water to the city. Los Angeles brought its water from the Sierra Nevada far north of the city, without worrying too much about the legality of it. Chicago had the opposite problem. Lake Michigan provided all the water the city could ever need, but thanks to the city’s dumping raw sewage directly into the lake, the water was no longer what we’d call fresh. The solution? Reroute the flow of the Chicago River so instead of emptying into the lake, it would flow south, taking the city’s sewage through the Des Plaines, Illinois, and Mississippi Rivers all the way to New Orleans. Problem solved, except for all the people living downriver from Chicago. So a city doing whatever it took to get the resources it needed was not unusual.

As a result, immediately after the Raker Act became law, the city began the design and construction of a complex and expensive water system, including not only the Hetch Hetchy dam but also a network of pipelines, tunnels, reservoirs, and power stations between the valley and the city. The dam itself was a marvel of its day, being the highest dam in the country (until Hoover Dam was completed a 13 years later; it’s now the 31st highest U.S. dam). Overseeing all aspects of this project was City Engineer Michael O’Shaughnessy. Born and educated in Ireland, he immigrated to the U.S. in 1885 and immediately settled in San Francisco. Prior to Hetch Hetchy, his career included engineering a railroad, designing irrigation systems for Hawaiian sugar plantations, and overseeing the construction of the Morena Dam near San Diego.

In response to the preservationists who opposed the dam’s construction, its supporters suggested the presence of a lake would enhance the valley’s beauty, since the cliffs and waterfalls would still be there and a charming lake would be just the thing to make the valley even more lovely. I visited Hetch Hetchy 20 years ago and found it depressing. Reservoirs, with their lack of shorelines, vegetation, and marshes, do not look like lakes. The place felt arid and desolate, and recreational boating has never been allowed on the reservoir. A growing number of people are proposing removing the dam and returning the valley to its natural condition. They claim San Francisco has other options to meet its water needs. Maybe yes, maybe no, and I’m not competent to know which. But even if the dam were removed, it would still take many decades, maybe centuries, to restore the valley to its previous beauty (after all, it’s been sitting under 300 feet, or more than nine tons per square foot, of water for a hundred years).

And what of Michael O’Shaughnessy? He had spent 20 years, from 1912 to 1932, overseeing all aspects of the monumentally complex project. Even though the dam was named for him in 1923, he made few friends among politicians along the way. He had one friend, however, an important one―James Rolph, the mayor of San Francisco. But when Rolph resigned to become California’s governor, O’Shaughnessy was left vulnerable. In 1932, the board of supervisors created a revised city charter, one in which the position of chief engineer didn’t exist, leaving the 68-year-old O’Shaughnessy without a job (although the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission then hired him as a consulting engineer). On October 24, 1934, when the Hetch Hetchy water system was officially turned on, O’Shaughnessy wasn’t present for the ceremony; he had died 12 days earlier.

Clifford Holland (1883-1924)??

In the early years of the 20th century, New York City had a problem. While several bridges spanned the East River connecting Manhattan with Brooklyn and the Bronx, Manhattan had no physical connections to New Jersey, despite most of the city’s food and fuel coming through New Jersey. During most times of the year, ferries were able to transport people and goods across the Hudson River, but when the river froze, New York was in trouble. This was especially true in the winter of 1917–1918, when an unusually long cold streak froze the Hudson to the point where Manhattan and the rest of New York was suffering from severe food and coal shortages. Something needed to be done.

The states of New Jersey and New York took joint action to build a tunnel under the Hudson. Several designs were considered, including a single, double-level tube with three lanes in each direction, proposed by Panama Canal chief engineer George Goethals [4]. In the end, the preferred design consisted of two two-lane tubes (see Image 2), proposed by Clifford Holland, who became the project’s chief engineer. Building the tunnel was not simple. Such a long underwater tunnel presented unprecedented challenges, the biggest being ventilation (no one had ever built such a long underwater vehicular tunnel). Four ventilation towers were built above the tunnel, one within the river, requiring deep pneumatic caissons (similar to those used on the Eads Bridge, but by the 1920s, builders knew how to build them safely).

The project was enormously stressful for Holland and probably killed him. He died at age 41 after five years leading the project, but three years before it was completed. The tunnel was named in his memory. His successor, Milton Freeman, also died before the project was complete. All that was named in his honor was the toll plaza at the New York side of the north tunnel.

William Mulholland (1855–1935)

We return to the man we started with. William Mulholland was a self-educated engineer who dedicated his career to ensuring that Los Angeles had enough water to become a major city. As the chief engineer for the water department, he devised the ethically devious and legally questionable plan to obtain water from the Owens Valley in the Sierra Nevada. When the 233-mile-long aqueduct was completed in 1913, Mulholland, in the city’s eyes, could do no wrong.

Once the water started flowing into the Los Angeles region, Mullholland needed places to store it, so he designed and built a series of dams and reservoirs, including Mullholland Dam (1924) and its Hollywood Reservoir (see Image 4). The dam is a concrete-arch gravity dam and originally was a highly visible triangle of white concrete looming―no, not looming, not yet―above highly populated Hollywood.

The Mulholland Dam’s fate became linked to another of Mr. M.’s dams, the St. Francis Dam located in the San Francisquito Canyon at the northern edge of Los Angeles County. This dam was considered a sister to the Mulholland Dam, as it was also a concrete-arch gravity dam of similar design. The St. Francis Dam was completed in May 1926 and by March 1928 the reservoir was filled to capacity. Just before midnight on March 12, 1928, the dam failed, resulting in a catastrophic flash flood. The water rushed through the canyon and followed the Santa Clara River to the ocean near Ventura. Everything in its path was destroyed, including much of the towns of Fillmore, Bardsdale, and Santa Paula. No one knows exactly how many people died, but it was more than 400. All that remained of the dam was the central portion, which became known as “the Tombstone” until it was demolished several years later (see Image 6).

With the St. Francis Dam failure, the Mulholland Dam came under scrutiny. After all, it was a similar design, and its failure would result in far more deaths. Analysis of the St. Francis Dam showed that the failure was due to the poor quality of the rock in the canyon walls, which was not the case for the Mulholland Dam. Nevertheless, the water level of the Hollywood Reservoir was significantly lowered to reduce stress on the dam, and the dam’s gleaming white surface facing Hollywood was backfilled with dirt and landscaping, to reinforce the dam and to hide it, making it a less looming presence to the people living below it. It still serves the city, 100 years after its completion, but the reservoir continues to be filled well below capacity.

The St. Francis Dam ended Mulholland’s career. He took responsibility for the disaster and resigned from the Department of Water and Power in November 1928. However, his name lives on in Los Angeles, with Mulholland Dam, Mulholland Drive, Mulholland Fountain (in the Los Feliz neighborhood), and the movies Mulholland Falls (1996) and Mulholland Drive (2001) [5].

Six Engineers, Six Structures

These six projects named after their engineer/designers spanned a period of around 60 years, from the initiation of the Eads Bridge in 1866 to the completion of the Holland Tunnel in 1927. [6] I’m not aware of any major structures named after their designers in the nearly hundred years since then (except for John Roebling; see footnote 1). While we live in an era of “starchitects,” with the public aware of individual architects by name, no buildings have been named after them. [7] Were the late 1800s and early 1900s a period when the public was generally more aware of engineers as individuals? Has the engineering field become so corporate that individual engineers are no longer public figures? And if that’s the case, is it bad or good?

Remarkably, the structures themselves are all still standing. Two of them were slated for demolition: the Eiffel Tower in 1909 and the Shukhov Tower in 2014, but both were saved, one because it turned out to be too useful, the other for its historical significance. And there’s an increasing number of people who would like to see the O’Shaughnessy Dam gone, but that’s unlikely to happen soon.

Footnotes:

[1] I disqualified a seventh structure due to the belated recognition of its engineer. The six engineers we’ll talk about here had their names attached to their structures either during or soon after construction was complete. However, John Augustus Roebling, despite being perhaps America’s most famous bridge engineer (with his son Washington his only competition), had no structures named after him during or even close to his lifetime. It wasn’t until 1983 that the Covington-Cincinnati Bridge, completed in 1867, was renamed the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge.

[2] I considered including the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio in Oak Park, Illinois. After all, Wright did design the building―several times, in fact. But instead, I feel that the house follows a different naming tradition, that of being named after its first resident rather than its designer. Besides, I’ve already written about the house in a LinkedIn article (https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/sad-coincidence-engulfed-cathedral-delicate-art-schmalz-faia-csi-/).

[3] In the 1933 movie King Kong, as well as the 2005 remake, the character Carl Denham, standing on stage in front of a gigantic ape, confidently reassures the packed theater audience, “Don’t be alarmed, ladies and gentlemen. Those chains are made of chrome steel.” We all know what happens soon after.

[4] Goethals, by the way, was doubly honored by having not one but two bridges named for him. However, the two bridges were built in the same place, connecting Elizabethtown, New Jersey, with Staten Island (the first Goethals Bridge was built in 1928 and demolished in 2017, after being replaced by the new Goethals Bridge) and Goethals was not involved with the design of either.

[5] Mulholland Drive is a beautiful if baffling movie by David Lynch. A couple of key scenes (at least I think they’re key, but I might be wrong) take place on Mulholland Drive. In the most recent (2022) Sight & Sound poll of international film critics and filmmakers, Mulholland Drive came in ninth place, ahead of such long-recognized classics as Persona, Singin’ in the Rain, Apocalypse Now, The Seven Samurai, and Casablanca. Speaking of relevant movies, Chinatown (1974) is a highly fictionalized telling of Los Angeles’s water shenanigans. The events are moved 30 years forward, from the 1900s to the 1930s, and William Mulholland is a combination of two characters, Hollis Mulwray, the ethical city engineer, and Noah Cross, the not-so-ethical head of the water department. Chinatown, by the way, is #140 in the Sight & Sound survey.

[6] Most of these structures have multiple books written about them. The ones I’ve read (and recommend): Rails across the Mississippi and Highway under the Hudson by Robert W. Jackson; Floodpath by John Wilkman; Dam! by John Warfield Simpson; Gustave Eiffel by Henri Loyrette; and Eiffel’s Tower by Jill Jonnes. Only the Shukhov Tower seems to be lacking a definitive book, at least in English. ?

[7] If I’m wrong about this, I’m sure I’ll hear about it. Actually, I’ll welcome any additions to this list.