A Veil of Deterrence for a Bridge With a Dark Side

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
New York Times Feb 16, 2003

ORONTO, Feb. 16 — Toronto is not known as a city of romance or beauty like Montreal, Quebec City or Vancouver, but it has its share of alluring views of powerful skyscrapers, moody Lake Ontario and the deep leafy furrows of the Don Valley that divide the city's ethnic neighborhoods.

There is no better place to take in all those sights than the windy top of the Prince Edward Viaduct, which as the Brooklyn Bridge united New York, gained the historic distinction of turning Toronto into a single city when it was built in 1918.

The structure became a literary landmark as well in 1987 when Michael Ondaatje described the construction of the double-decker bridge in exquisite poetic detail in his novel "In the Skin of a Lion," marking it as the epitome of this city's latent but limitless possibilities in the collective imagination of Torontonians.

But the steel-arched bridge, spanning the Don River and Don Valley Parkway with a 12-story drop, also has a dark side, one Mr. Ondaatje suggested in his novel by describing how a gust of wind blew a nun off the bridge before she was scooped up in midair by a construction worker suspended on a rope.

Reality has been less kind. More than 400 people have jumped from the bridge to their deaths, including 100 over the last decade, lending the viaduct the morbid nickname of "suicide magnet." Only the Golden Gate Bridge has been the site of more suicides in North America, according to mental health advocates here.

Next month, however, it seems the suicidal jumps will stop.

Workers are putting the final touches to a series of barriers across the bridge consisting of 10,000 stainless steel rods and bow-string masts designed so no one can get through them. The structure, which is costing the city $4 million, is intended to create what the architect calls a "luminous veil" across the bridge.

"I've been given a great opportunity to deal with life and death," said Dereck Revington, the University of Waterloo architect who designed the new structure. He said his work was inspired by Nicholas Temelcoff, the Ondaatje character who caught the falling nun. "A barrier needs the same kind of elegance and grace as Temelcoff," he added.

But many here have opposed revamping one of Toronto's aesthetic treasures and obstructing one of the city's most spectacular views, and the project has fueled a debate about how far local government should strive to prevent people from ending their lives.

Toronto is a cold, even unfriendly place compared with many other Canadian communities, but it has a lower suicide rate than the country as a whole. The suicide rate here, and in the rest of Canada, has declined since the early 1980's. So why spend the extra money on this problem at a time when the needs for more public housing and health-care services have become increasingly pressing?

"Critics say that it costs too much," noted a Toronto Star article on Jan. 28 acknowledging a slew of letters to the editor excoriating the project. "They say it won't save lives. They say the `unfortunates' inclined toward self-destruction will just go elsewhere. They say it's ugly. They say it's an uncomfortable reminder of unpleasant things."

It took five years of lobbying for Michael McCamus and Al Birney, two local mental health advocates with relatives who suffer from schizophrenia, to persuade a reluctant City Council to set aside the money for restructuring the viaduct. The two men argued that if New York and Paris could add protective structures to the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower to avert suicides, Toronto could do the same.

Their campaign picked up sympathy in 1997, when a 35-year-old man named Martin Kruze jumped off the bridge to his death shortly after a man convicted of abusing him as a child received a two-year prison term, a sentence widely viewed as too lenient. The case drew national attention because the convicted abuser was part of a ring operated by employees of Maple Leaf Gardens, formerly the arena of the Toronto Maple Leafs ice hockey team.

Mr. McCamus and Mr. Birney reinforced their campaign with several academic studies showing that similar fences reduced incidents of bridge suicides in other cities.

One such study of the Duke Ellington Bridge in Washington, D.C., showed that the building of a barrier there in 1986 did not cause a corresponding increase in suicides at the nearby Taft Bridge, suggesting that certain sites have a special draw for potential suicide jumpers. Given a barrier, those considering suicide are forced to pause, giving them an opportunity to rethink their predicament and seek help.

"If you thwart jumpers from an immediately accessible site," said Alan L. Berman, executive director of the Washington-based American Association of Suicidology, "you will save some lives."

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