Galt’s pedestrian bridge brings back the memories
Residents recall the time they used an old electric railway bridge as a shortcut
CAMBRIDGE — Little Elizabeth Hardin felt dizzy.
The rumbling flows and spinning floes beneath her schoolgirl feet — she was maybe 11 or 12 — rose up with spring’s arrival, tickling the open railway ties she walked on warily. This was Galt in the 1950s. This was the legendary Holey Bridge, stretching across the Grand River at the same points as Cambridge’s new, yet-to-open pedestrian bridge. It was once part of the Galt, Preston and Hespeler Street Railway.
The crossing Hardin recalls was more than 60 years ago.
Beneath Hardin, between the gap-toothed railline sleepers of this long-lost electric railway bridge, she could see ice chunks churning past.
She could reach down and touch the frigid water, if she wanted.
Hardin, an east-side girl, hurried across. She had to get to her west-side school directly across the river. She gulped and swallowed her fear.
“It was absolutely terrifying,” recalled Hardin, now 75 and still a Cambridge resident.
“The ties were wide enough apart, if you really wanted to, you could slip through them down to the river, down to the water …”
The Holey Bridge, as the east-side kids called it, was no mystery nickname. After all, it was full of vertigoinducing holes between the railway ties. There was no solid and reassuring bottom beneath its unevenly spaced ties, hung in 1912 over an oft-surly Grand River to serve industry on the west side.
And it was The Holy Bridge too, in Hardin’s young mind. She didn’t clue into the holey aspect for a very long time. To her, it was holy.
For her the structure summoned up reverence and prayer. When Hardin and her two sisters used the electric railway bridge to get directly to class at Dickson Public School, a silent prayer might be mouthed for a safe crossing.
Every step was a concentrated effort on a blustery day over a roaring river.
Two-word exclamations, a holy expletive, might blurt out.
“Some ties were further apart than others,” Hardin, a retired historical researcher, said. “All you did was watch where you put your next foot.”
So Hardin and her sisters, Harriet, who was older, and Rosemary, who was younger, tread carefully across its perilous spacers four times a day from their east-side home on Ainslie Street.
They went to their hill-top west-side school in the morning. They returned home for lunch and then when back to school in the afternoon. Then it was home for dinner.
Trains crossed only occasionally, she recalled, but the girls played no games on the Holey Bridge. Their doctor father, John McNichol, had no desire to patch one of his little girls up after a death-defying fall due to tomfoolery.
The Holey Bridge was a tricky shortcut to class from Cambridge’s forgotten age of electric rail. If the Holey Bridge got flooded, kids might use the Concession Street bridge, further to the south, to cross the river instead. It was closer to their school than the Main Street bridge to the north.
No matter which bridge they chose, they had to walk to school.
“Hell or high water, school was nonnegotiable,” Hardin said.
And the Holey Bridge was the quickest careful-step route.
Every step will be sure and easy on the new pedestrian bridge, which uses one of the midriver pillars that once supported the long-gone Holey Bridge.
There are no gaps in the new bridge, which will likely open in May.
Modern amalgamated Cambridge will use it as a pedestrian-cycling link from the east-side Galt businesses to the west-side theatre district, and looming highrise development.
Hardin can’t wait to pedal across on her bike. But for her, the new bridge also represents a restored connection to a fading childhood and Galt’s distant small town past.
The memories rise up and reach across the river of time.
There’s the mayor, Art White. He lived at the end of Ainslie Street. He had two kids. There’s the garbage man and the bread man and the people who ran the corner store.
“It was a time where kids had total freedom to roam the town,” Hardin said. “In my memory, it was pretty great to visit the people at the flour mill or the police station that was down the street. Or to hang out at the fire hall. It was a pretty good childhood.”
And there were those fearless kids from Walnut Street.
The I-beams and rivetted metal sides of the Holey Bridge didn’t scare them. They challenged each other to walk across the top of the bridge.
“There were a couple of boys who were daredevils, for sure,” said Hardin, who doesn’t recall any harm coming to any kids along the Holey Bridge.
She’ll stroll the new bridge come the spring and take in the old view.
“That whole neighbourhood has a lot of childhood memories for me,” she said.
“I think it will be a very nostalgic walk.”