Historical Reconstruction: Balloon Bridge is a project that seeks to recall the forgotten history of San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood. Once a series of rocky bluffs and bay inlets separated from the city by Mission Bay, the neighborhood has seen tremendous changes in its geographical, residential, and economic makeup. By the late1860s this area had developed into the city's most dense and important center for heavy industry, employing thousands of workers. To accommodate this, San Francisco’s first major transportation artery, the Long Bridge, was constructed in 1867.This wooden causeway connected present-day Bayview-Hunter’s Point to Downtown and closely mirrors the route serviced by thenewly constructed Third Street Light Rail. After World War II,the Dogpatch neighborhood, and the Central Waterfront in general, began a slow, but steady decline, the ruins of which you can still see today along the bayfront.
Much of this history has been forgotten—a necessary casualty of the always-shifting narrative of progress. By reconstructing aportion of the Long Bridge at Warm Water Cove, the project attempts to unearth and re-contextualize the history of the neighborhood. Not only is the reconstructed bridge recalling this past, but just as importantly, it serves as a reminder of the changing fortunes of urban neighborhoods as industry and people migrate. Recreating the bridge out of balloons necessarily meansthat the structure will eventually and inevitably deteriorate over the course of the two days, evoking the transient nature of historical memory.
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