Biography | Raymond Watson — The Footbridge Over Campus Drive Named in His Honor

The concrete span over Campus Drive was built in 1985 to walk students from University Town Center onto the UC Irvine campus without crossing traffic.

For twenty years it had no personal name.

On 27 October 2005 the university renamed it the Raymond L. Watson Bridge.

About two hundred guests heard the announcement in the Irvine Barclay Theatre, then went to the span for a plaque. Donald Bren, chairman of the Irvine Company, paid for the gathering and spoke — a rare public appearance.

Watson was seventy-nine. He had lived in Newport Beach's Eastbluff village, one of the first Irvine Company neighborhoods he helped plan, for more than forty years.

The plaque calls him a modern Renaissance man and credits him with championing educational excellence, city self-governance, and a distinctive sense of place.

He told the Daily Pilot afterward that he had no idea he would still be here forty-five years after arriving from San Francisco.

The bridge is the right object. Watson's work at the ranch was the joint between a private land company and a public campus. Town and gown share the same deck.

He donated his papers to the UCI Libraries in 2004 and added more in 2011. The finding aid still lists the bridge dedication as a line in his own chronology.

Watson died on 20 October 2012 at his Newport Beach home, of complications of Parkinson's disease. He was eighty-six.

The house is a private residence and is not a pin. The span is public. The plaque is still at the steps.

Photo: Allyunion, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons