When the Gordie Howe International Bridge opens, expect barricades, security checkpoints, and a carefully planned ceremony. That wasn’t the case the last time Windsor opened a bridge. Nearly 100 years ago, the grand opening of the Ambassador Bridge looked a lot different – and by today’s standards, a little unhinged. There were military parades. Marching bands. Airplanes overhead. And before the ribbon-cutting had even wrapped up, the crowd rushed the bridge. “It was such a tremendous engineering achievement,” Windsor-based historian Patrick Brode told CTV News. “Nobody had ever seen anything like this before in this part of the world.” The Ambassador Bridge officially opened on Nov. 11, 1929, after more than two years of construction. At the time, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world – a title it held only briefly, but enough to make it a global engineering marvel. And Windsor-Detroit treated it like one. According to historian Philip P. Mason in his book The Ambassador Bridge: A Monument to Progress, the day started with military parades on both sides of the river. 20,000 veterans marched through Detroit. Essex County legion groups marched through Windsor. By the time the ceremonies began that afternoon, Mason writes an estimated 50,000 people had packed the Canadian side of the bridge – with roughly twice that on the American side. Detroit factory sirens sounded at 11 a.m. at the mayor’s request. Church bells rang. Planes circled overhead. In one of them, Edward Austin, the son of bridge executive J.W. Austin, flew over the bridge dropping balloons onto the crowd. Then came the speeches. Followed by the chaos. Before the official ribbon-cutting was complete, Mason writes thousands of spectators broke through rope barriers and surged toward the middle of the bridge. Police and soldiers tried unsuccessfully to stop them. One witness quoted in Mason’s book said officers on horseback and motorcycles “were like straw before a gale.” Some people climbed the narrow catwalks running alongside the suspension cables – scaling high above the river just to say they were there. “It was really just a riot,” Brode said. Back then, crossing the Detroit River looked a lot different too. Before the bridge, ferries were the main way across – operating on schedules, carrying limited numbers, and leaving people waiting. For John Paterson, who was born in 1927 – the same year construction on the bridge began – that was just part of life in a much smaller Windsor. “Saturday, everybody went to the market,” Paterson said. “We had streetcars and we had busses. So, people would go to the market, and they would get on with their groceries and sometimes live chicken.” He remembers how different the city looked from the bridge in those early years. “We used to slow down in the car so we could look down the river,” Paterson said. “You look back at Windsor and we didn’t have any big buildings back then.” And once the bridge opened the ferry quickly became a thing of the past. “I don’t think my parents ever used the ferry again,” he said. A year later, the Detroit–Windsor Tunnel opened. By 1938, the old pedestrian ferry was gone. For Paterson, that bridge didn’t just connect Windsor to Detroit. It changed Windsor. “The ambassador bridge brought us into the 19th century,” he said. Now, with the Gordie Howe International Bridge set to open, he believes Windsor could be on the edge of another leap forward. “I’m saying the new bridge is going to take us into the 22nd century,” he said. “With all the new technology and all that, what’s going on there? It’s going to be fabulous.”
