History
It was built by The City of Calgary in 1916 for $375,000. It replaced the MacArthur Bridge, a steel truss bridge built by a land developer called the Centre Street Bridge Company Limited The MacArthur Bridge was destroyed by a flood in 1915. Centre Street Bridge was designed by John F. Green, featured an upper and lower deck, and large cast concrete lions on four massive plinths, two at each end of the bridge. The lions were cast by Scottish mason James L. Thompson, and were modelled after the brass lions at the base of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, London. The upper deck, a reinforced concrete arch structure, spans 178 meters (584 ft) and is 15 meters (49 ft) wide. The lower deck, an "I" girders structure, runs for 150 meters (490 ft) and is 5.5 meters (18 ft) wide.
Centre Street Bridge is the central point of the quadrant system of the city.
The bridge went through extensive restoration in 2001, when it was closed for one year. The lower deck is configured with reversible lanes. The original lions were replaced with replicas after considerable debate. Local legends of adjacent Chinatown hold that the lions would come alive after dark and roam the city streets. One of the original lions is now located at City Hall, another is in long term storage.
The opening scene of the 2001 Steven Seagal movie Exit Wounds was filmed on the bridge.
Read more about this topic: Centre Street Bridge (Calgary)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Boys forget what their country means by just reading “the land of the free” in history books. Then they get to be men, they forget even more. Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“In front of these sinister facts, the first lesson of history is the good of evil. Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)