Crowd on Old Connaught Bridge at Pacific Blvd., 1984

Sometimes raising these old Eighties Vancouver photos from the obscurity of my filing cabinets can seem a little bit like contacting the dead — ghosts of my personal past as well as the city of my youth. This image of the old Connaught bridge, which spanned False Creek for 75-years, is such a spectre.

I’ve written at length of my own adventures on its bumpy deck and aloft on the airy balcony of the shed that housed swing-span controls. From that spot, I made the negative that became Industry, False Creek. on a cold November morning in 1984.

The photograph above comes from a September day about town (probably on my Nishiki Landau bicycle) beginning at city hall, crossing the Connaught to the newly-built BC Place Stadium and Terry Fox memorial arch (since replaced by statues designed by artist Doug Coupland). From that location, as the sun dropped behind Kitsilano,  I photographed new concrete girders (foundation of the new Cambie Bridge?) and a crowd streaming over the doomed Connaught’s corrugated boardwalk to an event at the stadium.

Construction workers ponder new Cambie Street crossing beside old Connaught Bridge, Vancouver, February, 1983

I must have ridden back over the bridge to Broadway, heading for my room on W. 17th, between Cambie and Oak. I stopped to revisit the (long-gone) perch where, just 15-months before, I had made the Broadway & Heather, 1983 image. The carpet shop was gone, replaced by an indoor plant business. Major modifications had been made to the front of the building (As noted after a more recent visit, all original architectural details have been erased since then). I exposed the final frame on the 12-exposure roll of Ilford FP4 film.

Contact Sheet

Though I scanned and did preliminary editing of the Crowd on Connaught Bridge photo several years ago, I didn’t complete it until last week, when preparing images for the Vancouver Is Awesome feature. As is often the case when I return to the archive, I notice overlooked frames or I’m reminded to reprint images not committed to paper in decades. Besides the city hall shots, from which I have made silver prints in the past, I think there are a couple more on this contact worth exploring. What do you think?