The Palace of Purification
All is not what it seems in the Beaches neighborhood of Toronto. Any veneer of normalcy is first shattered as the sanitized white glare surrounding me in the subway is supplanted by the sun’s diffuse spread. The subway, a beast of the city’s dark underbelly, recommunes with society, zooming past busy streets in the process. As it begrudgingly screeches to a halt, I step out of the train and gladly walk away from the incessant croaks and groans emanating from its joints. The litany of oddities only grows as the day progresses. An escalator from the subway platform descending into the bowls of Earth leads to the street. A right turn from the ordinary flatness of Kingston Road abruptly gives way to the steep decline of Blantyre Avenue. The skaters trudging up, boards in hand, suggest that the downward pull of gravity which terrifies pedestrians for its promise of asphalt is a boon to others. Nature nurtures landscape, guiding it through glacial transformation; humans, au contraire, are impatient. Our desires flaunt the constraints of our brief existence. Some plunge into despair from this realization; others carve up land for a shot at immortality, inadvertently creating skater heaven.
There is an uncanny symbiosis, a truce of sorts, between these two omnipresent forces, Nature and Human, along the Avenue’s stretch. I shrug at the sight of a thick tree sitting atop a car garage, with its bulging veins and arteries protruding into the air, past the boundary marked by the garage door. I exist outside this truce, and Nature compensates for temporarily relenting in its wrath by now affixing its full attention to torment. The sun unceremoniously beats down and shedding items of clothing offers little reprieve from the discomfort of a thousand needles pricking my skin.
The end of Blantyre Avenue looks upon a large well-maintained field. A short structure, by way of adornment, squats along the entirety of the field’s longer edge. This is the disappointing first-sighting for a visitor to the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant. With their energies whittled away by the demands of the trek, the dejected may leave at this juncture, but it is to their loss: the deceptions continue with the Plant’s front lying on the other side of whence one approaches.
To get there, I walk across the fields - really the lungs of the Plant - and the multitude of manhole covers that hide concrete chambers holding gallons upon gallons of water from Lake Ontario. The water flows slowly in there, discarding the larger sediments it carries as it does, but its collective force is sufficient to render cracks in the concrete prison straining to contain it. The secret of this tremendous aquifer is belied by the faint reverberation of its motion that reach the surface; it only adds to the deliciousness of this knowledge that the telltale hum is easily missed. The atmosphere of tranquility about the place is generally misleading; motion can be found sequestered in every nook and cranny. The entire establishment is lined with a mind-boggling network of pipes that traverse the landscape under orders from a pumping house and its regiment of untiring machines that pump, pump and pump some more. They propel water from the lake into the chambers lining these fields, then push it forward still into the filtration building’s waiting filtration pools which augment earlier efforts at purification. The entire enterprise is well-oiled. It has to be. Its tentacles touch a third of the city with water clean enough to be drunk from taps. Disruptions in service are not just an inconvenience but potentially lethal.
The Plant has won as many accolades for its architecture rendered in the Art-Deco style, hidden from plain view but charging only some exertion for the pleasure, as for the remarkable feat of purifying a billion liters of water a day at a cent a liter. Its austere beauty, uncharacteristic of public infrastructure, has practical origins as a subtle persuasive tact. An essential human right today, clean water was relegated to unnecessary luxury in the near past, when the mechanisms of water-borne diseases were poorly understood. The derision of water purification as frivolous motivated the turn to an aesthetic argument: the hope was that the public, if not as impressed by the prospect of avoiding almost certain death from cholera, a then-popular haunt of public health, would at least be taken in by the facade’s attractiveness. These shrewd deliberations of astute public officials, conscious of the perilous nature of their stations and their subservience to the public’s whims, continue to pay off in the double dividends of functional and aesthetic value.
I spent the day mostly in a state of awe, dotted with a smattering of discomfort’s ephemeral encroachments. I realize that the halls of polished marble, which I enjoyed in their sanitized glory, are surely stained by the drudgery of poor souls that toiled away in dangerous, sometimes lethal conditions. The day I visited the Plant marked its hundredth-anniversary; it is safe to say that the men that built it are long gone by now. But in the crowds crawling over every inch of the facility must be their families eager to get a taste of the world inhabited by their fathers, uncles, and grandfathers, and I am consoled by the thought of their lineages having a permanent marker for their loved one, a permanence that is denied to most of us in death.
I can’t hold onto the sadness that accompanies these somber thoughts for long: our helplessness against the unrelenting march of time is a bitter but common truth. There is no extant trace of the thousands of men and women that manned the Plant, and, as visiting hours approach an end, the flurry of activity today, so precious in its rich complexity, will die down too, with most traces vanishing along with us. The scattering of wrappers, the footprints embossed into grass, and of course the memories will linger about longer, but with time, these too will disappear. The Plant, however, remains. It has withstood a hundred years of first arrivals and final departures, and it will stand a hundred years more still.
