From Globe and Mail, May 19, 2012.
His
familiar initials, R.C., are indelibly linked to the city’s magnificent art
deco water treatment plant, the Bloor viaduct and Michael Ondaatje’s 1987
best-seller, “In the Skin of a Lion.”
But
Roland Caldwell Harris -- who began a 33-year term as works commissioner a
century ago this week -- left his civic fingerprints all over Toronto, building
hundreds of kilometres of sidewalks, sewers, paved roads, streetcar tracks, public
baths and washrooms, landmark bridges and even the precursor plans to the GO
commuter rail network.
“The
significance of Harris a hundred years later is that we’re still living
fundamentally in the city he imagined,” observes Dalhousie architecture
professor Steven Mannell, who studies his career and has advised city officials
on an extensive rehabilitation of the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant, due to
be finished next year.
He
famously added a second deck to Prince Edward Viaduct in anticipation of a subway
line that wasn’t built for decades. What’s less well known is that Mr. Harris
was a photo buff who, in 1930, presided over the city’s first planning exercise
-- a process that led to construction of congestion-easing arterials like Dundas
East and the parkway extension of Mount Pleasant through Rosedale and up
towards St. Clair.
Unlike his predecessors, he insisted on
high architectural and landscaping quality in the design of his works projects.
He regarded structures such as the St Clair Reservoir, built in the late 1920s,
in both aesthetic and functional terms.
A
reformer who emerged in an era when many big cities were trying to
professionalize their bureaucracies, Mr. Harris’s career began at a time when
Toronto was experiencing unprecedented growth pressures, notes Wayne Reeves,
director of the City of Toronto’s museums. Between 1905 and 1912, the
population grew by 72% and the area of the city expanded by 76% due to
annexations.
Mr.
Harris, who served as the city’s lead commissioner, was a portly, cigar-smoking
and avuncular figure who was frequently quoted and caricatured in the
newspapers of the day. Prof. Mannell says he relied on an extensive network of
contacts to advance his agenda.
But
he also had the decidedly non-bureaucratic habit of carrying a state-of-the-art
camera with him at all times. A family photo album recently lent to the Toronto
Archives shows he enjoyed taking portraits as well as action shots at sporting
events, landscapes and images of cities he visited while traveling abroad.
Mr.
Harris, in fact, hired Arthur Goss, a fine art photographer, to document the
city’s works projects and living conditions in poor areas. In his novel, Mr.
Ondaatje latched on to this detail to render a fictionalized version of Harris
as a self-aggrandizing bureaucrat preoccupied with building monuments to his
own legacy.
Born
in Lansing (now North York) in 1875, Mr. Harris grew up in Toronto’s first city
hall, on King Street, where his mother had a job as a cleaner. He worked as a
reporter briefly before joining the city, where his superiors quickly saw his
administrative skills and began promoting him through increasingly important
positions, including stints as commissioner of streets and property.
Early
in his married life, Mr. Harris and his wife Alice Ingram lived in an apartment
in the ‘new’ City Hall, E.J. Lennox’s monumental brownstone that was completed
in 1899 amidst scandal. The huge structure looked out over a densely populated
slum district – known as “The Ward” and now the site of Nathan Phillips Square
–infamous for its shacks, poor immigrants and fetid “privies.”
While
living at City Hall, the couple had three children, one of whom died in
infancy, in January, 1906, due to complications from a strep-related
infection.
At
the time, the child mortality rate in Toronto was very high because of cholera
epidemics, contaminated milk and other water-borne illnesses.
Perhaps
not coincidentally, Mr. Harris threw himself into the task of modernizing the
city’s water treatment system from the moment he took over as works
commissioner. He quickly identified Victoria Park, on Queen Street East, as the
ideal location for a landmark filtration plant, although the current structure
wasn’t built until the 1930s.
He
also worked closely with several other crusading figures – Dr. Charles
Hastings, the city’s medical officer of health, and civil engineer George
Nasmith – to purify the water supply and provide better sanitary facilities for
the poor. By the early 1920s, the city’s mortality rates had plummeted due to
their efforts. “He was always looking at preventative approaches,” says Mr.
Reeves.
When
North Toronto residents threatened to de-amalgamate over compltains about
inadequate sewage treatment in the late 1920s, Mr. Harris responded by building
the North Toronto Sewage Treatment plant, nestled in the Don Valley. It still
operates.
Prof.
Mannell notes that it’s unlikely a towering and outspoken figure like Mr.
Harris, who died of a heart attack in 1945, would thrive in public service
today, given years of political attacks on civil servants at all three levels
of government.
But
Mr. Harris belonged to a very different generation of bureaucrats who “saw
city-building as a project not to be done three or five years at a time, but a
generation at a time,” he adds, noting that those officials, many of whom held
the same position for decades, often found themselves at odds with parsimonious
politicians who cycled in and out of city hall on narrow mandates.
“He
was a civic official who saw himself as a co-equal to council.”
The Toronto Archives will
have a display of R.C. Harris documents and artifacts at Doors Open next Saturday.
In mid-September, the City will celebrate his career with an exhibit, entitled
“The Water Czar,” at The Market Gallery, St. Lawrence Market.
