(Montgomery Sisam Architects)
The martyrdom of the Fort York Bridge was unexpected, chiefly because hardly anyone even knew the project existed in the first place.
Unlike the last bridge Toronto got into a twist about cancelling — the Island Airport bridge, back in 2003 — the Fort York Bridge wasn’t a hot issue at all. It was a line item on the budget, more or less bought and paid for, a pretty new strand in the urban fabric. But that’s the thing with martyrs: It’s not beauty in life that gives them strength, but ugliness in death.
Had it been built — and it came so very close — it would have been a thing of beauty. It was to snake from Wellington St. west of Bathurst, across two rail lines, landing close to Fort York. Sinuous and lithe, linking King West to the Fort York lands and, critically, connecting two of the city’s growing neighbourhoods. It was to commemorate the not-entirely-heroic battle of York, which played out more like the summary abandonment, sacking and burning of York.
There was plenty of ugly about the bridge’s demise. The most galling part was how far along the process had gone before it was summarily aborted. There had been a design competition. (This cost money.) The winning bridge had been engineered. (This cost money too.) It had been tendered. (This took time, which, by many accounts is money.) The tenders had come in. However, the lowest bidder was $4 million above the $18 million city staff had originally estimated, meaning a subcommittee of city council had to sign off on it.
No such luck.
At the end of a committee meeting that had dragged on for hours on a completely unrelated matter, David Shiner, a suburban councillor, dropped in a motion that sent the bridge back to the drawing board. The bridge’s supporters, including newbie councillor Mike Layton, in whose ward the bridge sits, were caught completely off-guard. No warning was given that Mayor Rob Ford’s loyalists were going to spear the project in the obscurity of the committee room. Given that this bridge could only be built on a tight timetable, coordinated with work on the neighbouring railway line, the current plan is likely as good as dead.
Later, after city council decided against revisiting the matter, Shiner explained that the plan threatened to get in the way of developing city-owned land for condos, whose value he calculated as nearing $100 million. At any rate, he argued, it’s possible that condo developers could be co-opted into paying for the bridge through Section 37 contributions so the city wouldn’t have to pay anything.
Meanwhile, Giorgio Mammoliti, the suburban councillor who can generally be relied upon to deliver the cartoon version of whatever question is at hand, got up in council and complained that the city is building pedestrian bridges downtown when it could be re-paving roads in the suburbs.
In the end, it was impossible to tell whether the bridge was cancelled out of value-consciousness, relentless parochialism, suburban resentment, or good, old-fashioned spite.
Spite? Well, sure. If this all feels a bit familiar, you might be reminded of the bridge to the Island Airport that David Miller killed after he won the mayoralty. It too was an ideologically charged bridge, favouring cars and planes over local residents. It was to be located in the same neighbourhood, and was also cancelled late enough in the process to incur substantial financial penalties. The Fort York Bridge was to cost $22 million. The Island Airport bridge? As the laws of nemesis would have it, reports pegged it at $22 million as well.
They were cancelled under very different circumstances: In 2003, David Miller ran his election campaign against the Island bridge, which genuinely looked like a boondoggle that would have guaranteed a jetport or even more condos.
Still, that cancellation, like this one, was a fiercely disputed partisan issue, which remained stuck in sundry craws for years. Now we can consider it avenged: An eye for an eye, a bridge for a bridge. I suppose we can count ourselves lucky to live in a time and place when rival factions spare us the bloodshed and merely run around, cancelling each others’ bridges.
But what a lousy way to run a city. If the Fort York Bridge wasn’t killed as payback for the Island bridge fiasco, it was certainly dispatched in the manner of one part of the city trying to spite the other. If you believed Toronto was actually one city, you’d call it the city spiting itself. And this is a point doesn’t seem to have been lost on residents.
The Fort York Bridge was an unexpected martyr, but it proved to be an able one. In council, downtown councilors waved about telephone-book sized sheaves of e-mails pleading for its salvation. The fact that Torontonians were willing to get so worked up about a project that wasn’t on the public radar is telling. Writing in Spacing’s blog, author Shawn Micallef proved especially adept at turning the Fort York Bridge into a meta-object, and then a rallying cry. Without meaning to, Ford has sparked a new jingoistic slogan for future battles: “Remember the Fort York Bridge!”
Of course, it’s not about the Fort York Bridge. Nice as it was, it was a project that few had heard of, to a site that fewer visit, commemorating a battle that’s etched into nobody’s list of favourite hometown memories. Rather, barring a miraculous revival, the bridge will go down as a monument to civic self-destruction.
Not that this kind of thing is entirely without precedent. In 1813, at Fort York, the town’s British defenders blew up their own base and retreated across the Don, burning a bridge as they went. Commemoration indeed.
