The Accidental Orange

Now that bridge down there, that warm orange color folks come a long way to lay eyes on. You'd figure somebody sat in a room and picked it, wouldn't you. Picked it like you'd pick paint for a porch. Well, near as the story goes, it didn't happen quite that way. It happened more by accident, and I always did love an accident that turns out better than the plan.

There was a consulting architect on the job named Irving Morrow. When the great steel started arriving, it came coated in a reddish primer, the kind of rusty undercoat they slap on raw metal to keep it from weathering before the real paint goes down. A lot of folks figured a bridge like this would end up gray, or black, or maybe a plain aluminum, sober and industrial. But Morrow, he looked at that warm reddish steel standing against the water and the sky, and something caught in him.

He got to pushing to keep a warm hue instead of the gray or the black. And his reasoning, near as I can tell you, was a good one. Out here you've got the sea below, the sky above, and that fog rolling through thick as a wet blanket. A gray bridge, a black bridge, it'd just melt right into all that and disappear. But a warm color would stand up and be seen, hold its own against the whole misty lot of it.

That warm shade became the one they call International Orange. Not a grand design decided ahead of time, mind you. Just a fellow with a good eye, seizing on what the primer already showed him. Sometimes the best thing a body can do is notice what's right in front of him, and have the sense to keep it.