Welland Canal, Bridge 13, Heritage vertical-lift road bridge in Welland, Canada
Bridge 13 spans the Welland Canal with two angled towers supporting a central lifting span and houses a two-story machinery building at its center. The structure connects eastern and western downtown areas across the approximately 70-meter-wide waterway.
The Dominion Bridge Company built this crossing between 1927 and 1930 as part of the fourth Welland Canal's development. The construction cost approximately 986,000 dollars and represented a major investment in improving water navigation.
Mohawk workers carried out all the structural steel work on this bridge, making it one of only two structures in Welland built primarily by Indigenous workers. Their skilled labor shaped a major piece of the city's infrastructure that remains visible today.
The bridge is accessible to both pedestrians and vehicles and serves as a daily connection across the canal between downtown neighborhoods. Visitors should expect the lifting mechanism to operate when canal traffic requires passage through the waterway.
The towers and structure are deliberately angled to both the waterway and the connecting roads, creating an unusual skewed alignment. This tilted orientation was a clever engineering solution to the site's specific constraints.
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