I shot a video with my pocket camera. The visual quality is quite poor, but the audio is good. The dissenting/ questioning councilor is Geoffrey Young. Dean Fortin is in the mayor’s chair.

The video is available for viewing on Picasa here.

It’s about 14 1/2 minutes long, which makes it too long for Youtube right now. Will figure out how to get it on YT later.

Mat is brilliantly pulling everything together in his role as webmaster and social media engineer. As a result, the site is looking pretty damn good, if I say so myself. We have links to the blog, to a poll, to subscription to a newsletter, to a photo page, to a culture page, to a history page, a video page, and tons of external links to help people get informed.

There’s now also a link to download PDFs of a beautiful color poster (or, alternately, the same poster in greyscale). The photo is by the talented Benjamin Maddison of Victoria Daily Photo. Thanks, Benjamin!

Granted, Victoria has nothing on Hamburg in the bridge department: the latter is, as the magazine puts it, Europe’s most “bridge-rich” city, boasting a total of 2500 bridges. From the mid-19th to the mid-20th century alone, 1000 new bridges got built (and presumably nearly as many destroyed by 1945, which is conflated to “mid-20th century” by the magazine article…)

One might also add that, given Victoria’s relative bridge-paucity as compared to a city like Hamburg’s bridge-richness, it seems all the more relevant to preserve the storied bridge we have, right? Our civic leaders, however, apparently don’t feel that way and say, “bombs away!” and “buh-bye Blue Bridge.”

Anyway, the magazine article provides illustrations from an exhibition now on view in Hamburg at the Museum der Arbeit, Hamburg und seine Bruecken – Baukunst, Technik, Geschichte bis 1945. The exhibition documents some amazing bridges. Here are a couple of them:

This amazing structure (from 1872) combines rail and automotive transport. According to manager magazin.de, the photo was taken in 1950, but I’m not clear if the bridge still exists.

Here’s another one:

This photo is from 1915 and it looks as though this bridge is having some work done to it. Again, no idea if it’s still extant.

Finally, this one:

It shows a Portal (1884-87) to what looks like the same bridge we see in the previous photo, except that the portal is a delirious Victorian-Gothic work of imperialist architecture, behind which a sort of Rapunzel-like stream of riveted steel flows abundantly …and meets another foreboding portal on the other side.

It makes Post-modernism look like a walk in the park – and us moderns like unimaginative Dilberts.

And please take a look at my first blog post there, Bad Reason, 1, subtitled “Bad reasons to spend money on JSB replacement.” I worked up some steam about what I consider bad civic leadership around here, too.

Bottom line regarding my argument in Bad Reason, 1: Whether ugly (”a brute”) or beautiful, the Johnson Street Bridge is interesting – and that’s the most important thing for a creative, urban economy. Just take a look at the amazing photos on Flickr, tagged with johnsonstreetbridge, for an inkling of the bridge’s ability to offer up interestingness.

Nothing is worse than boring – that’s what the suburbs are for. Whatever will replace the Johnson Street Bridge will be massively and blightingly boring, and therefore an affront to Victoria’s urban character.

One wonders why our civic leaders are so intent on suburbanizing this city.

Below, a photo by Victoria flickreena ngawangchodron (hope she doesn’t mind being referenced by me like this, but it’s such an evocative shot):