Friday, March 19, 2010

Ironworkers Memorial Bridge

I was thinking about our class topic of memorials and realized that I know very little about memorials in Vancouver. I googled "memorials in vancouver" and oddly enough pet memorial sites came up the most. The Ironworkers bridge only came up because it has memorial in its name. What I read was actually quite interesting. The bridge was first named the Second Narrows Bridge and its original intention was to access to the Dawson gold fields, but construction was delayed because of WWI. Several years after the bridge was finally built, it collapsed killing 18 workers and one diver who was searching for bodies. This happened in 1958 (and apparently there were several songs written about it) but the bridge wasn't renamed the Ironworkers Memorial until 1994. I couldn't actually find discussion on the renaming - does anyone know why they decided to rename it 40 years later rather than right after the accident? Just as an FYI a vigil is held every June 17th to honour the victims.

1 comment:

  1. A good reminder that memorials aren't always stand-alone, purpose built structures.

    Peter

    ReplyDelete