It’s a Canadian thing not to tell our own stories enough. When we have, it’s traditionally been a particular kind of story, usually involving the taming of something wild, like an ocean, a forest, a prairie, or a mountain range. Or the story is about some lonely person in one of those landscapes, making a go of it on their own. These are all fine stories to tell and they’ve had a lot of play in defining the Canadian identity, but what about epic tales of how our cities came to be, of how our urban infrastructure came to be, stories that might better relate to the reality of Canadian life today?
Most Canadians live in and around cities and unlike oceans, forests, prairies, and mountain ranges, natural forces didn’t create those cities, people did, and they expanded greatly in the twentieth century as the country grew. The built monuments of this era are sometimes great, sometimes invisible. Vancouver has the Lions Gate Bridge, opened in 1938, allowing the British Pacific Properties land to the north to become a new part of Vancouver’s metropolitan area. In 1955, Halifax and Dartmouth were connected by the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge, making the two small cities seem like one much bigger one, like San Francisco and Oakland joined together by the Bay Bridge, but on a Canadian scale. At Niagara Falls, Sir Adam Beck harnessed an entire river for hydro power, letting the province grow.
Across the country there are depression-era works projects that continue to carry cars and trains, and trunk sewers and sewage plants that we happily never see or hear from, content that they’ll keep our cities running. These are epic stories and if Canadians knew more of them there might be a greater appreciation of their cities.
Water pipes may seem boring, decidedly unsexy things, but one of the greatest films ever made about cities is a story about infrastructure: Chinatown. Roman Polanski’s fictionalized version of William Mulholland and the California Water Wars evokes the time when Los Angeles made bold decisions that allowed it to become a great city. The L.A. of Chinatown is pre-war craftsman bungalows, wooden telegraph poles, orange groves, and the dusty newness of a city pushing its way into the hills and around the vast oceanside basin it would eventually fill up and spill out of.
The story famously has everything in it – adultery, politics, incest, money – but tying it altogether were characters who knew that the place where they lived was going to be important, a real contender even. So for good or evil or an ambiguous mix of both, the characters in Chinatown got in the game. They had vision. In __canada we’ve come closest to this kind of expansive infrastructure celebration in all the fussing the country does over the Canadian-Pacific Railway and the Last Spike story, although Pierre Berton’s rendering of events had somewhat less incest and adultery. In this genre, arguably the best offering from Toronto is the story of R. C. Harris, the City of Toronto’s public works commissioner between 1912 and 1945, a figure with vision who pushed back against parsimonious small-thinkers on Toronto’s city council and prepared the city to be the great metropolis that it would become.
Harris does live on in the imaginations of Torontonians, and even other Canadians, thanks to Michael Ondaatje bringing Harris to life in his 1987 novel, In the Skin of a Lion. It’s in those pages that people who weren’t city wonks or infrastructure nerds heard about how Harris built the Prince Edward (or Bloor) Viaduct across the Don Valley, linking east and west Toronto, while anticipating the subway to be built decades later and designing it so trains could run underneath the roadway. Toronto is not known as a city of bridges but this viaduct and the half-dozen other ones Harris built across the city’s ravines are Toronto’s smaller versions of the Lions Gate or Macdonald bridges. Ondaatje’s phrase, “The Palace of Purification,” describing the art deco gem of a treatment plant Harris built in the Beach neighbourhood, has become the widely used nickname of the plant, something residents here are proud of and something nobody ever asks the cost of.
But imagination-capturing doesn’t happen overnight. Chinatown was released back in 1974, and William Mulholland already had one of the most famous, fantastic, and sinister roads in the United States named after him: L.A.’s Mulholland Drive. Harris had his treatment plant named after him later, but people tend not to immediately connect workaday things, even grand ones, with the long-gone civic officials they’re named after without writers and artists helping that mythology along.
Americans also simply tend to hold and tell their own stories more confidently, to revere both their heroes and their anti-heroes, without the reserve and deflection average Canadians employ. Others revisiting Harris’s legacy have bolstered Ondaatje’s evocation of the man, weaving him into a steampunkish and vital Toronto creation myth.
It is an odd thing to be a Torontonian: we are always longing for the city we don’t allow ourselves to have
Toronto journalist John Lorinc covers both the minutia and grand narratives of city politics and has written extensively about Harris. In a piece in the winter 2006 edition of Spacing magazine called The City Builder, Lorinc outlines Harris’s life work and dedication to civic works but uncovered what might have been the driving force behind building the Palace of Purification and other clean-water initiatives: Harris’s six-month-old son, Emerson, died of erysipelas and pneumonia in 1906.
As Lorinc explains, the baby’s death was yet another statistic in the “public health catastrophe” that was afflicting Toronto in the early twentieth century. The bacteria causing erysipelas thrived in unhygienic conditions, like those found throughout Toronto due to open sewers that flowed directly into Lake Ontario, the source of the city’s drinking water.
With this in mind, Lorinc draws comparisons with New York’s vilified Robert Moses, who built similar infrastructure, but arguably destroyed parts of the city in doing so. Lorinc writes, “Harris embodied a more humane vision, a sense that a city’s public works – no matter how monumental – are ultimately there to benefit its residents as they go through the workaday routines of daily life.”
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R. C. Harris is beginning to live in our imaginations, with one foot in Lorinc’s historian camp, the other in Ondaatje’s fictionalized version. This is how myths are created, with a bit of fact and a bit of creative liberty. A 2013 exhibit called The Water Czar at the city-run gallery in St. Lawrence Market traced Harris’s thirty-three-year career, building on what is already known by mining the city archives for photos and ephemera. It revealed that Harris struggled with councillors then as some civil servants do now over their professional advice, and political cartoons of the day lampooned his extravagant materials and grand designs.
And yet, today these same things are the beloved bedrock of Toronto, the buildings and works people are proud of and identify with when they try to think of why Toronto is a great place, why they want to live here or even like living here. It is an odd thing to be a Torontonian: we are always longing for the city we don’t allow ourselves to have.
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