Marquis de Lorne Bridge, Crossing The Bow River along Stoney Trail, looking North. Photo by Trevor Brown, trevorgbphotography88@gmail.com
It’s not a stretch to think of The Deep South as an island. Hacked off from the rest of the city by the Bow River to the east and Fish Creek Park to the north, provincially-regulated land, there will always be a sense of isolation to the area. I think area residents have always relished this to some extent, though for various reasons we’ve also needed to connect to the rest of the city and province. Naturally, the most basic way to do this is with a bridge. After reading enough about pioneer families in the area who had to “ford” the rivers, being at the whim of the seasons and the water levels, you realize how lucky we are to have a bridge. And unlike a real island like PEI, where the Confederation Bridge linking it to the mainland was controversial for over a century, over time there have been a large number and variety of bridges built in Deep South Calgary: assorted passenger bridges across the Fish Creek as well as the Bow River, and of course, the Marquis de Lorne Bridge connecting the Deep South and South East along Stoney Trail, and the 37th Street Bridge crossing Fish Creek in the West, infamously one-lane into the late 1990s. But I think the most interesting are the various crossings of Fish Creek near Macleod Trail.