Why the Sixth Street Viaduct went dark, and why it’s been so hard to protect

By 6:15 pm, the Sixth Street Viaduct was nearly swallowed in darkness.

Downtown’s towers shimmered beyond the river. But the bridge — once celebrated as the “Ribbon of Light” — sat largely in shadow. Headlights briefly washed over the arches before fading. A few cyclists moved by in silhouette. Along the sidewalk leading onto the span, crushed cups and plastic bags gathered against fencing and concrete barriers, while a small encampment dotted the grassy slope nearby.

“I can’t really walk past 6 o’clock because it’s too dark,” said Rafael Rojas, a resident of nearby Boyle Heights, who had been jogging on the bridge earlier Thursday afternoon. The 31-year-old said he runs the bridge a couple of times a week and walks his German Shepherd, Edison, in the area.

“ It was nice when the lights were still on,” Rojas said. “You could show up at 7, 8 o’clock, and there’d be people around here. Not anymore.”

This week, Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, who represents the district that includes the bridge, announced that the city’s Bureau of Engineering has selected global engineering firm Tetra Tech to fortify and relight the structure — an effort aimed at restoring its signature illumination while preventing vandalism and copper theft that has left it in near-complete darkness at night for almost two years.

The announcement revives a stubborn question: How did L.A.’s most celebrated new public works become so difficult to protect — and what will it take to keep it bright?

A landmark under strain

When the Sixth Street Viaduct opened in July 2022, it was framed as more than a replacement for a deteriorating, seismically unsafe bridge. The $588 million project, selected through an international design competition and funded by federal, state and city dollars, was billed as the largest bridge undertaking in Los Angeles history.

Yet its significance stretches well beyond engineering.

For decades, the original structure had served as a daily crossing for working-class families traveling between Boyle Heights and jobs west of the Los Angeles River.

Carlos Lucero, a Los Angeles photographer who has documented both bridges for more than 25 years, said the old span carried deep cultural significance for many Eastside residents.

“The Eastside is mostly a Latino community, and it means a lot,” he said Friday. “Working people crossed the bridge every day to work on the Westside, to bring a better future for the kids.”

He saw the new viaduct as “a new start” for new generations— an attempt to honor that legacy while reimagining what civic infrastructure could represent.

That hope was palpable on opening weekend. Its debut on July 9 drew an estimated 15,000 people, capping six years of construction. For a brief moment, the arches glowed and the city celebrated.

Then the bridge began to take on a different kind of life.

Within days, drivers staged street takeovers, spinning donuts across the deck. Onlookers scaled the arches. Viral videos showed a man getting a haircut in the middle of the roadway while traffic crept by. Police shut the bridge down more than once in its first weeks.

By late 2023, a new problem emerged: copper wire theft. Sections of the bridge’s signature LED lighting system began to go dark, stripped and sold as scrap. In June 2024, thieves removed roughly seven miles of copper wiring that powered the illuminated arches, plunging much of the span into darkness at night.

Most recently, on Jan. 27, an illegal commercial-grade fireworks display shot sparks into the sky and rained debris across the roadway, again forcing emergency responders onto the bridge.

On Thursday, Feb. 19, many of the utility boxes lining the bridge sat pried open, their copper wiring stripped. Nearby, soggy fireworks tubes lay flattened against the asphalt — remnants of the display days earlier.

What had opened as a symbol of renewal had, in less than four years, become a recurring headline.

A landmark—and a target

“It’s been a hundred years since we actually made a bridge into a great public work,” Dana Cuff, a professor at UCLA and director of cityLAB, an urban research and design center, said Thursday.

Los Angeles’ earlier iconic river bridges were built during an era when cities invested heavily in public infrastructure, she said — a tradition that largely faded as development shifted toward private interests and residential expansion.

The Sixth Street Viaduct stood out for two reasons, Cuff said.

“One is that it’s a very beautiful architectural and engineering solution,” creating “a real landmark in the city,” she said. The second is what it represented: “A demonstration of a public investment in the public infrastructure, which we haven’t had as long as anyone alive in L.A. can remember.”

That visibility may also be part of its vulnerability.

Landmarks create shared focal points, Geoff Boeing, a professor at USC who studies urban form and city planning, said Thursday.

“When we create our mental maps of cities we’ll often use landmarks as these kinds of focal points that we use to try to structure space,” he said.

When a city invests heavily in a new bridge with distinctive design and lighting, Boeing said, it produces not just transportation infrastructure but a “focal point for the city that becomes part of identity.” And for the same reasons, visible landmarks can become stages for protest, spectacle, street racing or vandalism.

Over time, the Sixth Street Viaduct has become a magnet for all of it.

Rojas said the chaos has felt cumulative.

“I wish they would’ve done something about it sooner because it just kept getting worse and worse,” he said. “It’s about time.”

Securing a public landmark

Cuff said the bridge’s elaborate lighting system may have inadvertently made it a more attractive target to thieves.

“The Sixth Street Bridge had such a spectacular lighting system that it made its copper wire … like advertised,” she said.

Cuff said the bridge’s vulnerability reflects broader pressures across Los Angeles, where public spaces increasingly absorb the strain of economic inequality.

“ We see this on the transit or transit systems too,” she said. “ The bridge seems like a place to harvest resources instead of enjoy the public domain.”

Still, Cuff cautioned against viewing the vandalism as a failure of the design itself.

“ It’s a stunning landmark in the city, and the vandalism that’s happening in my mind is neither a negative reflection on the city, nor on the bridge by any means,” Cuff said. “It is just a set of really unfortunate circumstances that now have to be managed.”

The solution, she argued, is not to pit openness against security.

“The posing of openness against security is the wrong idea. Like, ‘We just have to put up a big gate and then this won’t happen,’” Cuff said. “That’s not a solution because we need to have public parks and public space and beautiful bridges like the Sixth Street Bridge. The question is how do we make them safe and secure?”

Instead, she pointed to practical measures — securing vulnerable wiring, adding security and increasing activity around the bridge.

The ongoing development of the Sixth Street PARC project beneath and around the bridge could also help by bringing more people into the area, she said, making vandalism less likely when public space is actively used and informally monitored.

“As long as it feels neglected and abandoned,” Cuff said, “it’s not going to get better.”

How the creators see it

If scholars see the bridge as both landmark and lightning rod, its designer sees something more personal.

When architect Michael Maltzan, whose Los Angeles–based firm led the bridge’s architectural design, first envisioned the Sixth Street Viaduct, he said he hoped it would capture both the emotional attachment Angelenos felt toward the original 1932 span and a broader vision for the city’s future.

“More than anything, I had hoped that the bridge would really represent an ongoing idea about the future of Los Angeles,” Maltzan said Friday. “One where infrastructure, which has traditionally divided us and separated communities, could be reimagined to be something that united communities, but also as a destination for communities.”

Since opening, he said, the bridge has reflected both the best and most complicated aspects of public life.

“ If they’re truly public, if they’re truly open civic spaces, then people have the right and the opportunity to bring anything to the bridge that they want to,” Maltzan said.

He praised quinceañera photo shoots, lowrider parades and even viral haircut videos filmed on the span as signs of civic ownership.

“I think those are fantastic because it means that people are bringing to the bridge the things that they care the most about,” Maltzan said. “And you would hope that there’d be that emotional connection between anything that you make in the city and the community of the city.”

The vandalism and copper theft, he said, are a different matter — not a failure of design, but a reflection of broader city challenges.

“The bridge is this real symbol in the city and it represents so much of what’s happening in the city,” he said.

Maltzan said the city’s plan to fortify the electrical system — originally designed to allow maintenance crews easier access over the life of the bridge — is a necessary next step.

In the original design, he said, the lighting system was built for accessibility and long-term upkeep. That same access was later used to strip copper wiring.

“The fortification is really just meant to make that less possible and to bring the lights back to the bridge,” he said. “ It’s a beautiful image in the city when the bridge and those string of arches are lit up.”

What comes next

In announcing the selection of Tetra Tech, the city said the firm’s design will restore lighting across the bridge while fortifying infrastructure intended to deter theft and vandalism.

The plan includes restoring wiring across the bridge — including roadways, ramps and arches — and strengthening pull boxes, service cabinets and conduits, along with installing a security camera system. City officials said completion is expected before the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

A spokesperson for the Department of Public Works said Friday that the design team is working with the Bureau of Street Lighting and the Los Angeles Police Department to identify security and theft-deterrence best practices.

Copper wire theft has been “a rampant nationwide problem,” the spokesperson added, with the Sixth Street Bridge becoming a consistent target. The projected timeline for relighting is early 2028.

According to Councilmember Ysabel Jurado’s office, the delay in restoring the lighting stemmed in part from timing and scope.

The bridge opened as the city was entering a new budget cycle, and the scale of the theft and vandalism required a full technical assessment before officials could move forward. That assessment was completed in 2024, and funding was secured in the following budget to design what the office described as a permanent solution rather than a temporary patch.

“We have to design infrastructure with maintenance, safety, and real daily use in mind from day one,” Jurado said in a statement Friday. “This updated plan fortifies the system against copper theft, adds security elements, and integrates the lighting into the surrounding park space so the bridge is active, visible, and easier to protect. That’s how you prevent repeated damage and costly delays.”

Jurado said funding for the work nearly fell victim to broader budget pressures.

“In the middle of a budget crisis, this funding was at risk,” she said. “I fought to keep it in place so the Bureau of Engineering could issue the Notice to Proceed for $1 million for Tetra Tech to begin their design work. That milestone means we are finally moving from assessment to construction with a long-term fix that protects the public’s investment.”

Jurado said the recurring damage to the bridge’s lighting system reflects broader underinvestment in city departments.

“This challenge reflects decades of underinvestment in the basic departments that keep Los Angeles running,” she said. “When the Bureau of Street Lighting and the Bureau of Engineering are understaffed and underfunded, projects take longer and repairs cost more. Investing in frontline services is not optional; it’s how we deliver safe, reliable infrastructure, especially for the working-class communities that rely on it every day.”

For Maltzan, success would mean more than restored wiring or fortified conduits. He recalled moments when the bridge lighting aligned with citywide events — City Hall and the skyline glowing blue during a Dodgers World Series run.

“That kind of civic image is exactly what we deserve in the city,” he said.