Our City: Albert Street Memorial Bridge
Albert St. Memorial Bridge with street car. Credit: Wascana Centre Official Website.
Adjacent to Wascana Lake, there is a certain bridge on Albert Street that displays beautiful if not eccentric motifs in a glazed terracotta medium with bright pigments of blue, green, pink and yellow. The bridge’s colours blend in an eye-catching manner without appearing garish as one can stand on it and ponder over the serenity of Wascana Lake and the formidable image of the iconic Legislative building in the distance. It is constantly driven over every day by the citizens of Regina, yet the history of the bridge is not so commonly known. This site is known as the Albert Street Memorial Bridge.
Wascana Lake Postcard, 1911. Credit: University of Alberta Libraries.
When the Great Depression hit after the conclusion of WW1, and the stock market crash in 1929, many Canadians were affected. Throughout North America, many returning war veterans were unemployed and susceptible to poverty. This led some governments to create make-work relief projects that may hire large numbers of people to provide job positions in an otherwise lacking and desperate workforce. In Regina, a large relief project to drain and deepen Wascana Lake was set into motion by the combined funding of the Federal, Provincial and Municipal governments. This large task also included the construction of the Albert Street Memorial Bridge, as well as building two additional islands within the lake. The bridge was constructed in 1930 by 1,302 hired men.
View underneath Albert Street Memorial Bridge, 1958. Credit: Regina Archives.
The bridge was designed by James Henry Puntin from the firm of Puntin, O’Leary and Coxall along with consulting engineer Claude A.P. Turner. The structure spans 850 ft. long and 74 ft. wide over approximately 3 ft. of water, however there is a dam under the bridge which provides the illusion that there is a larger volume of water. Some say that this bridge has a claim to fame as the longest bridge spanning over the shortest body of water in the world, but that is unconfirmed.
The Art Deco architecture’s most prominent characteristics have an Egyptian Revival Style which may be due to the then dubbed “Tutankhamania” that was inspiring a newfound interest in Egyptology after the famous discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 since the bridge was constructed only 8 years later - while the cataloguing of the tomb’s contents was still ongoing. The Egyptian motifs aren’t inherently obvious to the untrained eye, but take on a more subtle form. These design choices included lights styled after Egyptian funerary pots, ceramic glazed papyrus columns, four large Egyptian inspired needles (obelisks), and colourful terracotta balusters with papyrus plants and lotus flower depictions which were both incredibly common in ancient Egyptian artwork and tomb structures. However, the lights were replaced with Victorian style cast iron lights during the 2009 restoration. Other details on the bridge include portraits of Queen Victoria, and bison heads - possibly in reference to the heaps of bison bones that inspired the name for the town, “Pile O’ Bones”.
Colourful terracotta balusters with lotus flower & papyrus plant depictions, 2015. Credit: Wascana Centre Official Website.
Queen Victoria Portrait on Albert St. Memorial Bridge, 2015. Credit: cmh2315fl on Flickr.
Glazed terracotta buffalo head on Albert St. Memorial Bridge, 2006. Credit: ScotWood72, Wikimedia Commons.
The bridge was estimated to cost less than $100,000 prior to construction but ended up costing $250,000. The expense was ridiculed by the Regina public as “Bryant’s Folly”, named after Public Works Minister James Bryant. The bridge was meant to have bronze plaques with the names of deceased Saskatchewan veterans from WW1, but those were never installed. Regardless, when the bridge was opened on November 10, 1930 by Premier J.T.M. Anderson, it was dedicated as a memorial for Saskatchewan soldiers who perished in WW1. The Albert Street Memorial Bridge was the first war memorial made on the public’s behalf in Saskatchewan.