The operator's booth of The Cherry Street Bascule Bridge.Supplied
Last week, I went to say goodbye to an old architectural friend, but I was too late. Instead, I found long-armed excavators sleeping off their feast, surrounded by piles of concrete and steel table scraps.
Maybe you’ll think I’m crazy when I tell you my pal was the Bascule Bridge just north of Old Cherry Street (there is a new one now) and Villiers Street. It was constructed the year I was born, 1968, and operated until a few years ago. And the bridge itself, although interesting, wasn’t my particular fascination. No, it was the little operator’s booth that cantilevered over the Keating Channel. Accessed by an open-tread staircase attached to an insanely sturdy steel arm, it would become as important a mental marker for me as the neon Duckworth’s Fish & Chips sign, the CN Tower, or the Princes’ Gates.
The Eastern Ave. bridge.Supplied
With its metal ‘ribs’ expressed on the outside of the booth, can lights and row of symmetrical, vertical windows, it always reminded me of a tiny TD Centre, which, as architecture aficionados know, was designed by one of the pioneers of international style modernism, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who also taught at the famous Bauhaus school.
To be clear, the old Cherry Street booth was not designed by anyone famous. Well, not internationally famous. Torontonians of a certain age will remember the name Ray Bremner, the tough-as-nails Scottish engineer who became City of Toronto works commissioner in 1964 at 33 (mayor Phil Givens was impressed with his work overseeing construction of Toronto’s New City Hall and offered him the job). Bremner would work for the city until 1989. A plaque on the bridge – which I hope the city has saved – gives credit for its design to R.M. Bremner; also credited is the mayor in 1968, William Dennison, a few fellas from the Habour Commission, structural engineers W. Sefton and Associates, and the general contractor, Ruliff (Rudy) Grass, who helped the Toronto Argonauts win a Grey Cup in 1947 and then went into construction.
Mr. Bremner was admired by all who worked with him; as the Globe reported in his 2004 obit, he “wasn’t afraid to stand up to politicians” and “worked with a fierce determination to keep streets free of potholes and garbage.”
But why bring up Mr. Bremner and his bridge? It’s been sent to the scrap heap of history, so who cares? And the bridge had seen better days: according to Wikipedia, it needed $2-million in repairs in 2007; its bearings broke in 2010 and it took a year to find replacements in Sweden; and in 2019, the Toronto Star reported that it had been “stuck in an upright position for over a month.”
The Cherry street booth was designed by Ray Bremner, the tough-as-nails Scottish engineer who became City of Toronto Works Commissioner in 1964.Supplied
Because, in my mind, it was as worthy of heritage preservation as those other industrial bits the city has worked so hard to save in that area, such as the 1961 Atlas crane next to Polson slip or the Victory Soya Mills silos at the east end of Toronto Harbour.
Saving the entire bridge would be impossible of course, but what about that little operator’s booth? Could it not have been restored, brought up to current code and installed where the new Keating Channel pedestrian walkway will be built? Heck, install those coin-operated binoculars and call it the Bremner Birdwatching Station. Or place art inside so those who climbed it would be rewarded with something beautiful. Or, if consensus decides it’s not accessible to all because of those stairs, seal it up and leave it as an objet d’art that also acts as a placemaking tool.
I wonder if there will be any pushback when another piece of our collective, industrial history is thrown onto the scrap heap this coming autumn? Probably not, since a Torontonian would have to be in his or her 60s to remember having access to it: the Eastern Avenue Bridge, which crosses the Don River but was closed in 1965 when Eastern Avenue was realigned. Today, it sits between Sunlight Park Road to the east and the 10-year-old park, Corktown Common, to the west.
Last week, I parked near 170 Bayview Ave. to look at the old 1932 bridge (the design is a “Baltimore Truss bridge” which was patented in 1871). As I approached, I thought about the 64-page report prepared by ERA Architects in 2002 and how it described the bridge as being in “fair to poor condition” and that there would be a “significant risk of failure during a major flood event.” While I don’t argue with that – especially with the increase of severe weather events – I do find that, on pages 29 and 30, where the “Criteria for Determining Heritage Value or Interest” are discussed, the bridge fails ideologically as well. It is not rare or unique; it does not display a high level of craftsmanship; there are no direct associations with a person/organization/theme; it does not contribute to an understanding of community or culture; it is not functionally, visually, or historically linked to its surroundings; and, lastly, it is not a landmark.
Perhaps it is not unique, and perhaps it is not associated with a person of interest, but it does tick off those other boxes (it would tick them a lot better if not imprisoned behind a chain-link fence). No, it cannot be a bridge any longer, but why not offer pieces to sculptors? And then place those reinterpreted/reworked pieces in Corktown Common or Villiers Island? Nope, the report dismisses salvage and relocation due to “logistic constraints.”
I’m sure it was logistically difficult to save the massive concrete columns that once held the Gardiner Expressway’s eastern portion aloft along Lakeshore Boulevard E. near Leslie Street. But the city found a way and allowed artist John McKinnon to transform them. Mr. McKinnon writes at Artworxto.ca that he wanted a visitor to “have a sense of time passing … here is a historical artifact that’s been rehabilitated, rather than being just what it once was, it has now been manipulated into … a kind of sculpture that you can interact with.”
Time is passing, and more quickly in Toronto, where there are more shovels in the ground than any other Canadian city. Time to decide what’s important.