It's quite amazing, looking back on it now, that they ever agreed to let anybody on the bridge when it danced about at all. It is said that pedestrians happily paid the toll for a ride on the roller-coaster type structure... Take a look at our video, below, and you can understand why.

There were reports from some drivers that, during periods of even light to moderate wind, the road bent enough so that you couldn't see the vehicle on the road in front of you. Again, looking at the video you can well believe it...

So it was, that on today's date, just under 4 months after the bridge had been opened, it collapsed in what is today one of the most spectacular collapses of a bridge ever recorded.

The toll keeper on the bridge allowed one last passenger in his car, Leonard Coatsworth, copy editor of the Tacoma News Tribune, before the bridge collapsed. Coatsworth abandoned his car before the bridge finally gave up and ran for his life. He left his dog in the car - it had refused to get out of the car when he hurriedly tried to grab it. Thankfully the dog was the only death in the collapse.

We have edited a public domain video we found on archive.org. The running time is 2 minutes 10 seconds.