The R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant

On the lakeshore where the Beaches neighbourhood gives way to the Scarborough Bluffs sits one of Toronto's most unlikely landmarks: a water filtration plant built like a palace. It takes its name from Roland Caldwell Harris, Toronto's Commissioner of Public Works from 1912 to 1945, who used his three decades in office to push through a string of outsized civic projects — the Prince Edward Viaduct among them — with far more ambition than their basic function required. Construction began in 1932, in the depths of the Depression, with Harris using the project partly as a make-work initiative for a city short on jobs.

From novel to filming location

The building's symmetrical stone-clad facades and stylized ornament put it firmly in the Art Deco idiom fashionable in civic buildings of the period, earning it the nickname "palace of purification" — a phrase popularized by Michael Ondaatje's 1987 novel In the Skin of a Lion, which fictionalizes the plant's construction and the immigrant labourers who built it. The plant never stopped doing its actual job, still treating lake water for much of the city's east end, but its grand interiors have also made it a recurring backdrop for film and television productions shooting in Toronto.

Sources

• Wikipedia — R. C. Harris Water Treatment Plant
• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Michael Ondaatje

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