Celebrating the ‘bridge to nowhere’
Residents and politicians mark viaduct’s 100th year
Bundled against the cold, Joyce Crook, 92, could not stay away from a birthday party for a bridge.
“I wouldn’t miss it,” Crook said Wednesday after watching the unveiling of a Heritage Toronto plaque marking 100 years since the opening of the Prince Edward Viaduct that connects Bloor St. to Danforth Ave.
Crook, who grew up in East York, heard from her father Albert about returning from the Great War to see a magnificent structure connecting Toronto’s core to what was, in 1918, an agricultural and industrial suburb isolated by the Don Valley and Rosedale Ravine.
“He said it was great, that it changed the whole east end, it just opened it up,” Crook said after the ceremony. “Before that you had to cross at Gerrard or walk through the valley. It’s a marvellous construction. The architect had so much vision.”
The bridge, named after future King Edward VIII but pop- ularly called the “Bloor St. viaduct,” was a monumental architecture, engineering and construction feat costing $2,480,349.05, or about $36 million in today’s dollars.
R.C. Harris, then-public works commissioner, insisted a lower deck be included for a subway connection that would not be built until 1966 — foresight that saved the city a fortune in fu- ture costs and headaches.
Mayor John Tory said there is a lesson in the fact that what is now a celebrated Toronto landmark, immortalized in film and Michael Ondaatje’s 1987 novel In The Skin of a Lion, was in1918 ridiculed by many as a boondoggle “bridge to nowhere.”
“Thankfully the naysayers of the day did not win out …” Tory said, adding he hears similar criticisms about city projects. “Even today it’s the same thing — ‘too big, too bold, too expensive, too soon.’
The bridge does, however, have a tragic side. Its height long made it a magnet for people who jumped to their deaths.
Councillor Paula Fletcher paid tribute to the “Luminous Veil,” a suicide barrier and public art installation first illuminated in 2015. “That’s more bold thinking — to take a bridge that had such a sad history and to make something so beautiful out of it.”