Constructing beauty: The photographs documenting the construction of the Bloor Viaduct

Archivaria

Volumn 54, Issue 1, 2002, Pages 72-91

  Rodgers, Anastasia ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79959320713     PISSN: 03186954     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. On 23 April 2002, In the Skin of a Lion was declared Canada's favourite book in the CBC radio programme, "Canada Reads," where a panel of Canadian personalities defended their choice for the book that should be read by all Canadians.
2. David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1994), p. 77.
3. City of Toronto Archives, RG 8-10: Works Department: photographs.
4. Peter MacCallum, Exhibit Catalogue: Arthur Goss, selected photographs: October 10, 1998- January 3, 1999 (Art Gallery of Ontario, 1999), p. 2.
5. City of Toronto Archives, RG, 8-10.
6. MacCallum, Exhibit Catalogue, p. 1.
7. Beaumont Newhall, History of photography (New York, 1982), pp. 141-165.
8. Lilly Koltun (ed.), Private Realms of Light: Amateur Photography in Canada, 1839-1940 (Markham, 1984).
9. City of Toronto Archives, RG 8-10.
10. Janice R. Sandomirsky, "Toronto's Public Health Photography," Archivaria 10 (Summer 1980), pp. 145-156.
11. Dennis Duffy also discusses the Health Department photographs in his article, "Furnishing the Pictures: Arthur S. Goss, Michael Ondaatje and Imag(in)ing of Toronto," Journal of Canadian Studies 36, no. 2 (Summer 2001), pp. 106-129.
12. City of Toronto Archives, RG 8-10.
13. City of Toronto Archives, Information file: Prince Edward Viaduct.
14. In fact, the Victoria Bridge was often referred to as the "Eighth Wonder of the World," with the total length of the Victoria Bridge at 9,144 feet.
15. Stanley Triggs, Brian Young, Conrad Graham, Gilles Lauzon, Victoria Bridge: the Vital Link (Montreal, 1982).
16. Ralph Greenhill, Engineer's Witness (Toronto, 1985), p. 17.
17. Stanley Triggs, Exhibit Catalogue: William Notman's Studio: the Canadian Picture (Montreal, 1982), p. 13.
18. The Quebec Bridge collapsed on 29 August 1907 as a result of faulty design and inadequate engineering supervision. Seventy-five workmen were killed. The catastrophe ruined the Quebec Bridge Company and the contractors. A royal commission was appointed in 1907 to investigate the accident and the following year the Dominion government decided to rebuild the Bridge. In spite of a second serious accident in September 1916, which killed 13 men, the Bridge was completed and the first train passed over the structure on 17 October 1917; the Bridge opened for regular traffic on 3 December 1917. The above information was gathered through series descriptions for R610-138-X-E, Quebec Bridge and Railway Company and R254-0-9-E Royal Commission on the Quebec Bridge Inquiry fonds, accessed on the World Wide Web on 25 September 2002 at
19. Ralph Greenhill and Andrew Birrell, Canadian Photography 1839-1920 (Toronto, 1979), p. 146.
20. The small proportion of photographs was carefully selected by the author as a reasonable sample of the Bloor Viaduct photographs, given the space and scope considerations of the current project. An attempt has been made to represent progressive stages of construction by showing items and elements that are seen from one photograph to another. The author considered several other factors as well, such as providing a sense of the momentum, the span across time, a combination of near and far views, and a combination of pure construction shots along with images which include the individuals involved in the project.
21. Please note that it is difficult to determine exactly how the Bloor Viaduct photographs were used within City administration: the annual reports for the years 1915-1918 are not available at the City of Toronto Archives and while lantern slides were created and used, presumably for illustrating lectures, these have not yet been processed and it is unknown whether lantern slides were made for the Bloor Viaduct photographs.
22. In Private Realms of Light, Lilly Koltun asserts that Goss' pictorialist style found no expression in his professional work. However, this paper argues that while Goss certainly did succeed in documenting the required amount of detail in a "realistic" way, there are some photographs in the Bloor Viaduct series where Goss is clearly indulging his artistic sensibilities.
23. John Grierson coined the term "documentary" in relation to fact-based motion picture films in 1928, and the term soon extended to still photographs depicting reality.
24. Joan M. Schwartz, "'Records of Simple Truth and Precision': Photography, Archives, and the Illusion of Control," Archivaria 50 (Fall 2000), p. 23.
25. Joan M. Schwartz, "'We make our tools and our tools make us': Lessons from Photographs for the Practice, Politics, and Poetics of Diplomatics," Archivaria 40 (Fall 1995), p. 42.
26. Robert M. Levine, Images of History: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Latin American Photographs as Documents (Durham, 1989), p. 58.
27. Jesse Edgar Middleton, The Municipality of Toronto: A History (Toronto, 1923), p. 395.
28. For instance, the York County Coroner's Records for 1913-1920, RG 22-5897-0-2, Archives of Ontario, records the deaths of Bloor Viaduct employees, including one who fell a distance of 80 feet from a pier into a well-hole and another worker who drowned in the Don River after falling from the Viaduct. The Coroner's Records also note incidents of dead infants found underneath the Viaduct.
29. Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion (Toronto, 1987), pp. 34-35.
30. In fact for many individuals today, the Bloor Viaduct does not summon awe or a sense of beauty, but rather is a site of desperation and grief. Since its erection, there have been over 400 suicides committed from the Viaduct, making it the second most popular bridge in North America for committing suicide (the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is the most frequently used bridge for suicides). For this reason, groups such as the Schizophrenic Society of Ontario have lobbied for the erection of a suicide barrier to be placed on the bridge in attempts to prevent future tragedies. Public sentiment was divided on this issue; the beauty of the surrounding landscape of the Don Valley - a rare commodity in downtown Toronto - has made some citizens passionately opposed to the defacement of the view that such a barrier could cause. A compromise has been reached, however, and a barrier called the "Luminous Veil" will be built. Construction began in the spring of 2002, rendering the Bloor Viaduct construction photographs even more poignant as a source of evidence for what the Viaduct originally looked like, compared with how it will appear after the construction of the "Luminous Veil."