An Art Deco cathedral for drinking water
The R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant
Toronto's drinking water is filtered inside a 1941 Art Deco building so ornate it earned the nickname "Palace of Purification" — and inspired the same author who wrote about the Bloor Viaduct.
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Most cities keep their water infrastructure deliberately boring and out of sight. Toronto built its main filtration plant to look like a palace — on purpose, during the middle of the Great Depression.
Built by the same man who built the Bloor Viaduct
The plant is named for Roland Caldwell Harris, Toronto's public works commissioner for 33 years and the same official who oversaw construction of the Prince Edward Viaduct two decades earlier. Construction began in 1932 and the plant became operational on November 1, 1941, designed with Art Deco flourishes — buff brick, arching windows, stylized frescoes — that had nothing to do with water filtration and everything to do with civic ambition.
The "Palace of Purification"
The building earned its nickname honestly: it looks far more like a grand public monument than a filtration facility, an unusually lavish piece of infrastructure to build in the depths of the Depression, when most cities were cutting spending on exactly this kind of ornamentation rather than commissioning it.
Michael Ondaatje's "ideal city"
The plant became the emotional centrepiece of Michael Ondaatje's 1987 novel In the Skin of a Lion, which fictionalizes its construction: "Harris dreamed the marble walls, the copper-banded roofs," Ondaatje wrote, imagining the commissioner modeling its entrance on a Byzantine city gate and its interior as "an image of the ideal city" — the same novel that features the Bloor Viaduct just as prominently, tying two of Roland Harris's real projects together in fiction the way they were already tied together in fact.
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Sources
- The Canadian Encyclopedia — Toronto Feature: R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant
- BlogTO — The Historic R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant Is Where Toronto Gets Its Drinking Water
- Wikipedia — R. C. Harris Water Treatment Plant