Swaddled in giant tarps and looking like some sort of a giant Meccano set wrapped up for the festive season, the northern half of Edmonton’s Low Level Bridge is a sight to behold these days. A $12.7 million rejuvenation project is giving the vintage 104-year-old bridge a new lease on life.

It’s the first time in nearly a quarter century that the bridge has undergone major work. This time, the old 1.5-metre wide sidewalk is being replaced with a three-metre wide pathway. The old corroded metal support brackets are being replaced to handle the wider sidewalk.

After all the steel is repaired, the 213-metre long structure will be sandblasted and painted the same colour as the 211-metre long bridge that handles southbound traffic. Then, sometime in November or early December, the structure will resume its service as a vital link across the North Saskatchewan River.

The story of the Low Level began in the early 1890s with the efforts of Edmonton businessmen to get the federal government to build a crossing. Tthe only regular conveyance across the water then was John Walter’s cable ferries, the first of which commenced operation in April 1882. But Walter’s ferry service only operated when there was no ice in the river, making it a less than reliable mode of transport year round.

Edmonton businessmen lobbied Ottawa long and hard for dollars to build a bridge. The federal government, undoubtedly fed up with the pleas from Edmonton, sent a telegram to Mayor John McDougall, stating that if the town put up a $25,000 bond towards construction, they would build it.

There were just 1,500 persons living in Edmonton in those days, but a few businessmen quickly pooled their resources and sent the bond by wire to Ottawa the very same day. The federal bluff had been called and Edmonton would have its bridge.

Construction on piers began at long last in March 1898 but the project was then delayed a lack of cement, the wait for tenders for the superstructure and a shortage of steel. The first steel arrived August 7th, 1899 – just ten days before the North Saskatchewan began to flood.

The water rose and rose until it had submerged the piers. Newspaper accounts of the day paint a vivid portrait of the consternation that resulted when the river rose to 42 feet above the low water level and four feet above the top of the piers. Within days, plans had been made to add eight feet to the height of the piers.

That particular flood also claimed the sternwheeler, the “Northwest,” lifting it from its dry dock on John Walter’s flat and slamming her into the newly built centre pier of the bridge, relates J.G. MacGregor in his book Edmonton A History. “For ten minutes she hung there, and then ever so slowly, her sides smashed in and her back broken, she swung free and set out on her last run down the river she had known so well. Three days later, one hundred miles downstream, she was still recognizable as she passed the mouth of the Saddle Creek, thenceforth to be se seen no more.”

Well, the flood subsided and, by October, the job heightening the piers was complete. Actual steel work on the trusses began on November 10th and on December 4th the riveters went to work on the centre pier.

The city declined to do much to commemorate the completion of the bridge (which was actually a federal government project) and so a group of citizens got together and staged an official opening. An account in the April 6, 1900 edition of the Edmonton Bulletin says the honour of driving the last rivet went to Pioneer Donald Ross (for whom Rossdale is named).

The bridge linked Rossdale with Cloverdale, an area established in the 1870s, when two farms began operation near the banks of what was to be called Mill Creek. By the turn of the century, it developed into a bustling commercial and industrial site, with brickyards, lumberyards, coal mines, an abattoir, acreages and a few houses for good measure.

Back then, the district was known as Gallagher Flats, after landowner Cornelius Gallagher, who ran Gallagher-Hull Meat Packing Co. and who was later to become Mayor of Edmonton. In 1907, most of the area was gobbled up by the Town of Strathcona and it later became part of Edmonton when Strathcona was annexed in 1912.

Over the years, the bridge has carried vehicular, train and pedestrian traffic across its deck. Initially the single-lane bridge handled trains, wagons and pedestrians and then a wooden deck was added to handle other vehicles.

The first train crossed on October 20th, 1902 – a Canadian Northern locomotive No. 26 with a coach, box car and two flat cars. Such was the jubilation about the first train to cross the river into Edmonton that Mayor Short proclaimed a civic holiday.

The first streetcar went across in 1908. The Low Level Bridge got its official name when the High Level Bridge was completed in 1913.

It’s a good thing the decision was made to add eight more feet to the height of the piers because, if you look at the photographs of the bridge during the next big flood in 1915, the deck is mere centimetres (inches in those days!) Above the water. A train was parked on the deck to keep the bridge from floating off to Saskatchewan.

The 1915 flood prompted a decision to raise the deck another three feet – but it took 30 years for work to actually get underway. The June 15th, 1947 edition of the Edmonton Bulletin reported that “hydraulic jacks will inch the deck up to a maximum of three feet at the centre and 18 inches at each end. New steel beams will be placed beneath the deck.”

The lift operation brought the old span to the same level as the new parallel one, constructed to the south of the original. About that time, the old Edmonton Yukon and Pacific Railway line was torn out. With Edmonton booming, traffic levels surged dramatically and, to alleviate congestion, a carbon copy bridge, based on the plans of the original but with a wider deck, was officially opened August 2nd, 1949.

Southbound traffic continues to use the newer bridge, while northbound traffic uses the original one, handling more than 27,000 vehicles a day.

The Journal’s Art Evans, commenting on the completion of the new James Macdonald bridge in 1971, observed that the ancient Low Level “looks rather small and out of things, like a by-pass to oblivion, the road to nowhere. And yet the old bridge has something that its new neighbour will acquire only in the passage of years – character. In this bridges are like people.”