From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The Bloor Street Viaduct, officially the Prince Edward Viaduct, is a bridge that spans the Don River Valley in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and crosses the Don Valley Parkway and the Don River. It connects Bloor Street, on the west side of the valley, with Danforth Avenue on the east.
The bridge was completed in 1919 and is 490 meters long and 40 meters high. One controversial feature when first designed was the inclusion of a second deck for rail transport. Although it drove up the price of the construction, the designer, Edmund Burke, demanded its construction. In the end this proved to save millions of dollars in 1966 when the TTC opened the Bloor-Danforth subway line running along the deck.
The construction of the bridge was used as a setting for the historical fiction of Michael Ondaatje's novel In the Skin of a Lion.
The viaduct was the site of frequent suicide attempts. The viaduct has been the site of over 400 suicides, second only to the Golden Gate Bridge. A 1997 report from the Schizophrenia Society of Ontario cited the average of one person jumping from the bridge every 22 days. The bridge became known as a "suicide magnet", prompting the construction of a controversial suicide barrier. After years of delays, the so-called Luminous Veil was completed in 2003 at the cost of C$6.5 million dollars. Designed by architect Derek Revington, it is comprimised of over 9,000 steel rods stretched to cantilevered girders.
