History
The Oak Street Bridge opened in June 1957. During the planning, it was the "New Marpole Bridge" and steel plate girders salvaged from the second Granville Street Bridge made barges for constructing the foundations of the Oak Street Bridge.
After the bridge opened, traffic began to move several blocks to the east. The business districts along Hudson Street and Marine Drive went into a swift decline.
Tolls were charged for two years and $1 million was collected in the last year. Tolls were removed from all of the bridges in the Lower Mainland in the 1960s, although the recently opened Golden Ears Bridge utilises an electronic tolling system.
The Oak Street Bridge was meant to partially replace the Marpole Bridge, just to the west, connecting Vancouver to Sea Island, on which the Vancouver International Airport is located. The Marpole Bridge was dismantled the same year the Oak Street Bridge opened.
In 1995 two lanes of the bridge were closed alternately for resurfacing the concrete deck. A median barrier and higher curbs were also installed, and its earthquake resistance was enhanced.
Read more about this topic: Oak Street Bridge
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“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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—Griffin Jay, and Reginald LeBorg. Prof. Norman (Frank Reicher)