For almost 100 years, Fanny Bridge has been a landmark in Tahoe City. It’s the only bridge over Lake Tahoe’s sole outlet, where the water spills through the Lake Tahoe Dam into the Truckee River. Until the bypass road was built in 2019, the bridge was also the only way to access the West Shore from Tahoe City.
By the time this story went to press, however, the bridge was no more. Having reached its lifespan and no longer meeting current structural and safety standards, the historic bridge is being replaced.
Before Fanny Bridge is nothing more than a memory, Moonshine Ink takes a look back at the famed bridge’s history and lore.
The bridge was not always known as Fanny Bridge. Built in 1928, its official name is the Truckee River Bridge or bridge number 19-33. (That number was stenciled on the south abutment, leading some people to mistakenly believe it was the year the bridge was constructed.) But for as long as anyone can remember, the bridge has gone by its nickname thanks to all the people over the years who have peered over its railing to gaze at the fish and blue water approximately 8 feet below — revealing their derriéres to motorists.
Nancy Stromswold, the archive manager for the Gatekeeper’s Museum and the North Lake Tahoe Historical Society, said that while historians can’t trace the moniker to when it was first introduced, the name Fanny Bridge has been in use for at least the past seven decades.
“I have a feeling it was pretty organic how it got named that way,” she said. “I started coming here in 1960 and that was the name then.”
Fanny Bridge was not the first bridge built over the lake’s outlet. In the 1860s, Alexis Von Schmidt, a San Francisco-based civil engineer born in Russia, constructed the first bridge and the first dam at the mouth of the Truckee River. They were built out of wood and stone. Von Schmidt had an elaborate plan to send Tahoe’s water to San Francisco via a tunnel to be excavated through the Sierra Nevada mountains and to the American River.
(The Truckee River’s natural terminus is Pyramid Lake in Nevada.)
Needless to say, his plan never came to fruition, and his bridge and dam only lasted around 20 years. While Von Schmidt’s dam never sent water to San Francisco or Virginia City, it did serve to propel logs down the Truckee River. The dam was demolished in 1907.
Evidence of Von Schmidt’s structures has not been completely erased. According to Stromswold, you can still see pilings from his dam in the water if you look upstream from the current one. The engineer also built a second dam near where River Ranch now stands; there is a plaque in front of the restaurant along the bike path that commemorates his water diversion schemes. Stromswold said that a single log from this dam still remains in the river to this day.
The Lake Tahoe Dam, an 18-foot-tall concrete slab and buttress structure, was built between 1909 and 1913 to control the top 6.1 feet of Lake Tahoe’s water. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1981 and modernized six years later.
Around the time the dam was completed, automobiles were beginning to take hold and a road circumnavigating the lake was finished in 1913.
“With the advent of cars, they needed a stronger bridge,” Stromswold said.
Placer County built a concrete bridge sometime after the Von Schmidt bridge, but little is known about it. It lasted approximately 20 years before the modern bridge we know today was constructed.
Fanny Bridge was a T-beam girder bridge constructed of reinforced concrete, with decorative concrete brackets that supported the outer roadway. The roadway was 32 feet wide and 122 feet long. The famous railings that visitors have leaned over for decades to stare at the blue water and trout below had a windowpane design.
Despite the fact that Fanny Bridge has existed for almost 100 years, it was not eligible to be put on the National Register of Historic Places.
“Although the bridge has been an integral part of the historically important development of Tahoe City, the particular structure is the last in a line of bridges in this location and, in and of itself, does not make a critical contribution to the growth of Tahoe City,” stated the 2022 report Lakeside Trail Phase IIA – Outlet Crossing. “The bridge is not associated with any persons important in history, nor does it have the potential to yield important information in history.”
The new bridge, which will be 15 feet wider than the old one, will be a single-span bridge (no piers in the river) that will feature sidewalks and bike lanes on both sides as well as a pedestrian crossing between businesses and recreational areas on either side of the bridge. The new bridge will match the appearance to the historic bridge and is expected to be completed in mid to late November.
The old bridge is being demolished, but the name Fanny Bridge will live on forever.
