No denial of the Nile

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View of Arlington Street Bridge facing south. Feb 01 , 2012 (Ruth Bonneville / Photographer) Winnipeg Free Press

The Arlington Bridge opened on February 5, 1912 with little fanfare. The only elected official in attendance was former alderman Archibald McArthur, the man who proposed the link six years earlier.

In 1906, the only streetcar route to the North End was via the subway at Main Street and Higgins Avenue, but more were needed to keep up with the growing population. McArthur proposed connecting Brown and Brant streets with an overpass, but it received a lukewarm response from colleagues. As chairman of council's bridge committee he ensured that it stayed on the city's agenda. In June 1909 the project finally won a money referendum, the two streets were rechristened Arlington Street and the project got underway.

Despite running over-budget and seven months behind schedule, there was a more serious issue at hand. Streetcar drivers considered it "suicide" to take a streetcar down such a steep grade into a major intersection. Offers to outfit streetcars with disc brakes and to post marshals at the foot of the bridge did not appease them. Legal wrangling continued for a decade before the city finally gave up. No streetcar ever ran over the city's new, $250,000 streetcar link to the North End.

Soon after, the Arlington Bridge began its long history of unexpected and expensive repairs.

The first came in 1931 with the replacement of iron corroded by the acrid smoke from the locomotives below. The 1940s brought a series of major repairs and closures. Despite Alderman Blumberg's 1946 comment: "The sooner the bridge comes down and a modern one goes up, the sooner will the city maintain expenses," the bridge was not dismantled and repairs continued.

A 1966 review concluded that the bridge was at the end of its lifespan and would soon, perhaps suddenly, have to close. This spurred planning of a Sherbrook-McGregor overpass, which became mired in community opposition and funding battles. The city chose to re-invest in the Arlington Bridge.

In 2011 the city launched a $1.5 million study of the Arlington Bridge and its future. The results are expected in 2013.

Local lore once said that the Arlington Bridge was originally built to span the Nile River. Legend held that the bridge had been built for an African interest but never paid for, and Cleveland Bridge (U.K.) sold it to Winnipeg on the cheap.

It's now considered an urban legend because council papers and media stories of the day make no mention of it. Still, the story is definitely plausible. The city's tender called for quotes on two styles of bridge. The competition complied but Cleveland offered a single, take-it-or-leave-it design at such a low price, the city took it. The company, by the way, has no record of ever having built an Arlington Bridge for Winnipeg.

The Nile connection is first mentioned in 1946, not as braggadocio but as justification to scrap the bridge: the city settled for an off-the-rack product intended for another market, it was time to admit the mistake and start anew.

If it was fiction, it was a good guess. At the time of the Arlington Bridge's tender, Cleveland Bridge was in North Africa building numerous spans over Sudan's Blue and White Nile rivers. Due to local skirmishes, political interference and a new British policy that colonies had to "pay their own freight" for infrastructure projects, some projects were delayed, moved to new locations or scrapped all together.

There are numerous of examples of Cleveland bridges from that era, most famously the Blue Nile River Bridge (1909) in Khartoum, Sudan.

Despite its troubled history and uncertain future the Arlington Bridge has remained an icon on the city's skyline for a century, outlasting all but two of its contemporaries (Louise and Redwood) and three incarnations of its nearest neighbour the Salter Street / Slaw Rebchuck Bridge. And it easily outlasted those youngsters, the Disraeli Bridges, which were completed in 1960 and are being replaced as we speak.

Christian Cassidy blogs about Winnipeg History at West End Dumplings

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 5, 2012 A6