Named for the two hump-like granite peaks that rise above the North Shore treeline, the Lions Gate Bridge was built over the First Nar¬rows in 1938 by the Irish Guinness family, to better funnel traffic to West Vancouver, where they owned a big swath ofpotentially lucrative hillside known as the British Properties.
Designed by brilliant amateurs (Depression-era engineers, some of whom did not have university degrees) and built after 10 years of fierce politicking, the Lions Gate Bridge is a spectacular, triple-span suspension bridge with a ship’s clearance of 200 feet. It remains a Vancouver icon.
In the late ‘905, the provincial government dithered over replacing it with a tunnel or rebuilding it to last another half century or more. They chose the cheaper route, and the bridge underwent a two-year retrofit, involving regular all-night closures that saw high-wire steel workers crawling over the girders through the wee hours of wintry mornings.
The $125-million job went well over budget, but the procedure of lifting fifty-four separate 112-ton deck sections into place, each time in fifteen precision steps, was so well executed that the American Bridge Company and North Vancouver’s Surespan expect to recover what financial losses they may have incurred in renowned — and similar — projects worldwide.
(For more on the history of the bridge, there’s a great read in Lions Gate, by Dilia d’Acres and Donald Luxton, Talon Books.)
When the heavily used three-lane bridge fully reopened in 2002, per¬ennial talk of putting a tunnel under Burrard Inlet resurfaced, this time between North Vancouver and the eastern part of downtown Vancouver. But by now the city was wearying of car-captive behavior. Public transit advocates and other critics loudly objected to building a structure that would only dump more suburban vehicles into the downtown peninsula.
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