Fifty years ago today you could have elbowed through the crowds by the Ambassador Bridge to gawk at the worst freighter shipwreck on the Detroit River and the best tourist attraction of the time.

“It was a circus attraction. Everybody flocked down there,” former CBC radio reporter Hal Sullivan, 70, said Monday of the first big story he covered.

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It was the sinking of the British freighter M. V. Montrose, which ran into a barge being pulled by a tug and sank under the bridge the night of July 30, 1962. All the crew got off safely and The Windsor Star reported about 20,000 spectators in Windsor and Detroit watched “the lumbering ship flop to her side in 30 feet of water.”

It became such an attraction there were boat cruises to see it and an increase in passengers on the Boblo amusement park boats. Parents took their kids to see the wreck and the Ambassador Bridge, which at the time allowed foot traffic, stopped pedestrians from walking on the bridge at night in case they fell off while gawking.

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John Polacsek, the former curator of the Dossin Great Lakes Museum on Belle Isle, and others from the Great Lakes Maritime Institute planned to lay wreaths at the site of the wreck at about 9:20 p.m. Monday to mark the historic sinking even though no lives were lost. It’s a part of history, he said.

“A number of boats have gone to the bottom but this is the worst one,” Polacsek said of the freighters sinking in the Detroit River.

Polacsek, 61, said it cost $750,000 to raise the ship and then more money to repair it.

The 440-foot vessel was said to be valued at $6 million to $8 million exclusive of cargo and was just 18 months old, The Star reported. There have been tragic shipwrecks and tugboats sinking with lives lost on the river but the only other freighter wreck he could recall was a freighter damaged by ice that got to a Detroit dock in the winter of 1920 and sank.

The Montrose was coming from France to the Great Lakes with fine wine and 200 tons of aluminum, he said. It had docked in Detroit the day before the collision and unloaded cargo from various Mediterranean ports. It was leaving the Detroit Harbor terminal at about 9 p.m. July 30, 1962 when the collision occurred, The Star reported.

The 4,993-ton vessel struck a steel barge being pushed by a tug. The collision ripped a hole in the side of the freighter causing water to flood into the front of the ship. The plan was to try to get the vessel to the Canadian shore but as the propeller rose out of the water the ship could not be controlled.

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Early news reports said the Montrose had not signalled with its whistle while leaving the port and witnesses said the tug sounded a distress signal and reversed its engines. Polacsek said with the currents and forward momentum the tug could not stop.

At an inquiry held the following day the captain of the Montrose said that before leaving the terminal he made the regular security call by radio telephone that the Montrose would leave in five minutes. Whistle signals and radar were not used because it would have been useless at night with so many small vessels in the river, the inquiry was told.

There were lawsuits over the collision and Polacsek said the captain of the tug, Frank Becker, was said to have quipped that he was the first American to sink a British ship on the Great Lakes since the War of 1812.

Crew members said they didn’t realize there had been a collision at first. Three people including the captain stayed on the ship for about five hours until it listed to one side. If they had abandoned the ship it and its cargo could have been claimed by anyone. Polacsek said.

The next morning there were crowds at Ambassador park, snow fences to keep cars from being parked on the grass and police trying to control traffic on Riverside Drive.

It took two months to salvage the wreck and get it back afloat so many people remember seeing it. Sullivan recalls his wonderment. “How could this happen and how could everybody have gotten off? And why is it just sitting there on its side?”

Paul Jagenow, was about 14 at the time and now works as a senior dispatcher for the J. W. Westcott Company which had its mail boat go to the Montrose along with the Detroit fire boat to get the crew off the sinking ship. He said the collision and sinking was highly unusual.

“It was quite the tourist attraction,” Jagenow said. “I remember as a youngster my mother took the whole family and we parked on the American side and walked up on the bridge and looked right down on the side of the ship.”