Welland Canal Lookout, St. Catherines, Ontario, Canada (+43.1550, -79.1938)
The Welland Canal connects Lake Ontario to Lake Erie and allows ships to travel between the Great Lakes. Until the canal was dug, Great Lakes shipping could not get downstream to Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River, which connects Lake Ontario to the Atlantic Ocean.
When I was young, I thought that the canal had been built as part of the St. Lawrence Seaway project in the 1950s. The project was designed to allow international trade to come to inland ports like Cleveland and Chicago. But the current version of the canal was completed in 1932 (although minor modifications continue to be made. The first, much smaller canal was constructed in the 1820s, around the same time as the Erie Canal in New York state.
The canal has eight locks to get the ships over the Niagara Escarpment (a steep cliff in the Great Lakes area that I will discuss in a later post). It now takes ships about 11 hours to go between Lakes Erie and Ontario. There are bridges crossing the canal. Some older vertical lift bridges, such as the Glendale Ave. Bridge shown here (photos from 1980 and 2024), can be raised and lowered.
St Lawrence Seaway 
A ship in the lock from the observation deck 
Vertical lift bridge in lowered position 
Vertical lift bridge in raised position
Because of the St. Lawrence Seaway (and the Welland Canal in particular), ocean-going ships are now able to travel into the freshwater Great Lakes. In addition, ocean fish also traveled the same path. This has caused environmental damage to the lakes, such as the alewife damage to the beaches when I was a kid. Later coho salmon were bred to eat the invasive fish, but other unforeseen consequences happened as a result. Now, we have zebra mussels and quagga mussels threatening the native flora and fauna of the lakes. For an interesting discussion that battle, see the book “The Death and Life of the Great Lakes” by Dan Egan.
For more information:
http://www.stcatharinesmuseum.ca/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welland_Canal
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35187180-the-death-and-life-of-the-great-lakes
Neat! I didn’t know bridges just completely lifted instead of folding up.