L.A.'s Shakespeare Bridge is turning 100. Shall we compare it to a summer's day?

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Set us as preferred There is no love like municipal infrastructure love.It was late in the 20th century when my wife, Mary Frances, and I moved into Los Feliz.Quickly we learned that our corner of the neighborhood was known as Franklin Hills, and that just about every eastward outing would take us across a funny little bridge with eight pointy turrets.

That bridge was the Shakespeare Bridge.As a teacher at nearby Ivanhoe Elementary, Mary Frances crossed the bridge twice every school day for more than 20 years.As a student there, our daughter Grace crossed it for six years, usually with me as chauffeur.We’ve crossed it at all hours in every kind of weather, on foot, on bikes and in cars, talking about school, work, family and, lately, the fractured state of the nation and world.

Now that bridge on Franklin Avenue at St.George Street is near its 100th anniversary and an Oct.

10 neighborhood celebration is in the works, complete with a street party and procession.As the day approaches, I keep thinking about how large a funny little bridge can become in the lives of its neighbors.Originally it was the Franklin Avenue Bridge, designed by J.C.

Wright of the city’s civil engineering department in the mid-1920s, when a twenty-something cartoonist named Walt Disney was new to the neighborhood and the Vitagraph Studios, a block away, were transitioning from silent films to talkies.Paid for by a controversial city assessment of neighbors, the bridge is 262 feet long and 30 feet wide — a pipsqueak compared with landmarks like Pasadena’s Colorado Street Bridge or the 6th Street Bridge between Boyle Heights and downtown L.A.’s Arts District.

Its three open-spandrel arches were made using Portland cement.Nobody knows where the Shakespeare nickname came from, but city officials designated the bridge as L.A.’s Historic-Cultur...