Heritage value, once more

Over on Facebook, some friends of Victoria’s mayor Dean Fortin are telling him that they would like to see the Johnson Street Bridge refurbished. They’re asking him to consider its heritage value, and some repeatedly state that they have a sentimental connection to it and appreciate its form and appearance.

Mayor Fortin has a similar-sounding response for each of them. Take just one example:

I love the current bridge too – it is light and beautiful and has incredible heritage value. The problem is, we would destroy all heritage value as we would have to plate metal the current metal lattice to meet siesmic [sic] standards, and replace the concrete balasts [sic] with foam to keep the “look”. The balasts [sic] are replaced with hydrolics [sic] under the bridge.

The big problems with refurbushing [sic] the Bridge starts with managing traffic. The waterway is federally protected fish way and very important ecologically. We can not have anything falling into the water, especially lead based paint as we strip the old metal. Therefore, we would have to wrap it in plastic and close down the bridge for two years! Can you imagine what that does to commuter traffic on Douglas, to instantly add 30,000 cars to that route! This would be bad for our downtown too, as shoppers and workers go elsewhere.

Refurbishing gets us 30 more years for $40M, then rebuild. New bridge costs $60M and lasts 100 yrs.. (source)

Let’s parse this a bit. Sentimentalists learn that, yes, the mayor loves the bridge too. But the bridge – to mix metaphors – is like an old dog that’s dying. It would be kinder to put the beast out of its misery. The old dog is lame and blind, its kidneys are failing, and anything we do to prolong its life will lessen its quality of life. Getting back to our bridge, this means we’d have to put heavy metal plates on top of the bridge girders’ lacy lattice work, and we’d have to install fake ballasts. It’s easy to suggest that we should instead get a new puppy, which would in any case help us get over losing the old dog.

Next comes the claim that it would also be too expensive and cumbersome and above all deleterious to repair the current bridge.  Lead paint – a scare familiar to all parents – is presented as an insurmountable hurdle. Of course, it’s a given that everyone loves the little baby fishes… One can’t help wondering how the fish ever survived the brutal interventions of late-19th and early-20th century industry…

The old bridge might have “incredible heritage value,” but it has to go, says the mayor.

That stands in opposition to a report entitled Heritage Assessment of the Johnson Street Bridge (PDF), produced in April 2009 for Delcan (the company hired by the City to study the bridge’s condition). The Heritage Assessment report was produced by Vancouver-based Commonwealth Historic Resource Management Ltd. [CHRML] to supplement Delcan’s engineering report. For brevity, we often refer to it as the Kalman report (after Harold Kalman, one of Commonwealth’s two principals).

After analyzing a number of key themes (Social-historical Values; Engineering Values; Contextual Values; Overall Values), Kalman’s report moves, on pp.12ff, to its conclusions regarding the bridge’s heritage value:

The Johnson Street Bridge has very high heritage value in the context of Victoria, the Inner Harbour, and the City’s and Region’s transportation systems.

The Bridge has high heritage value as an engineering landmark designed by one of North America’s most renowned bridge engineers / engineering firms.

The final conclusion (p.14) reads: “The Johnson Street Bridge is a very significant heritage landmark whose characteristics illustrate many key themes in the development of Victoria.”

It seems a shame, truly a shame, to disregard the significance of this bridge, and to rely on the report of just one single consultant whose findings slant toward replacement, and whose prescriptions for refurbishing are designed, a priori, to wreck the bridge’s historical value. Surely there are other engineering firms that have handled repairs on structures like this, and that can offer better technologies than just metal-plating the lattice work or putting foam blocks in place of concrete.

As for the traffic-and-business argument: I’ve seen the “30,000 cars” (or vehicles) number quoted for a number of major arterials in Victoria, which suggests it’s a popular ballpark figure. But if you consult the CRD’s own traffic stats (see this page), you’ll see that Esquimalt Rd. at Harbour Rd. handles between 10,000 to 11,000 vehicles eastbound and about the same number westbound (for a total of nearly 22,000 vehicles per day). These are the stats from days in January 2008.  That’s still plenty of cars, but it’s not near the 30,000 mark …and that makes me wonder what else is being inflated in the discussions around the imperatives and musts and shoulds and have-tos surrounding the rush to replace the Johnson Street Bridge.

Take a look, for example, at this December 2008 article in MIT’s Technology Review, First Self-Healing Coatings; A paint additive will protect cars, bridges, and ships from corrosion, for some insights into how improved paint technology might help us with the Johnson Street Bridge.

In the final analysis, I’m sticking with the heritage experts on this: “The Johnson Street Bridge is a very significant heritage landmark whose characteristics illustrate many key themes in the development of Victoria.”

It’s irreplaceable and we should question and re-question each and every claim that the bridge can’t be refurbished and brought back into its full glory.

Share on Facebook