Wednesday, September 19, 2012
R.C. Harris and the East End Sludge Wars
Saturday, May 19, 2012
R.C. Harris and the City of Toronto's First Formal Attempt at Planning
The result was the May, 1930, report of the Advisory City Planning Committee, entitled, "Street Extensions, Widenings and Improvements in the City of Toronto." It was presented at a special meeting of council on May 14, with Bert Wemp, a Toronto Telegram editor, in the mayor's chair.
The plan, the report explained, was based on projections that the city would grow to 1.5 million residents, thereby necessitating improvements to the street system, transportation, public recreation, zoning and “aesthetics." "[P]rimarily the need for planning is the outcome of the accumulation of people in one area and the daily movement of those people following their daily avocations.”
This passage, better than any other in the report, outlines the balancing act confronting ambitious officials as they sought enduring long-term solutions to the city's growth pressures without running afoul of council's deep aversion to borrowing:
Meet the man who shaped 20th century Toronto (Globe and Mail)
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
R.C. Harris family photo album
What R.C. Harris Can Tell Rob Ford's Toronto
One of the most famous stories about Roland Caldwell Harris, the longest-serving Toronto works commissioner, is that when he approved the design of the Bloor Viaduct shortly after taking the job in 1912, he insisted on fitting out the bridge with a second platform capable of supporting subway tracks. His foresight would prove enormously useful when the city got around to building the Bloor-Danforth line in the 1960s.
Here’s another example, which I learned this weekend during the Door’s Open tour of the R.C. Harris Water Filtration Plant. Harris’s initial design for the filtration building (the upper-most structure) was only half its current length. But he made sure the whole operation was scalable, down to the configuration of the pipe fixtures (T-joints instead of elbows) buried deep inside its elegant art-deco walls.
Why? Because Harris knew a growing city’s consumption of water will invariably increase. Indeed, a second wing opened in the 1950s, several years after his death, its construction facilitated -- and made more affordable -- by Harris’ capacity to think ahead.
I think it’s safe to conclude that Rob Ford’s council would never have approved the construction of a water filtration plant decked out in marble and brass, nor that second platform for the viaduct.
In terms of the former, the design would have been assailed by the gravy fighters as too “fancy” and unaffordable for a city in the throes of a devastating depression: `Marble and brass for a water treatment plant! Are you nuts?’
As for the subway platform, the Fordists would have shot down the proposal as a nonsensical waste of taxpayer dollars: `Why,’ they’d ask, ‘should homeowners have to ante up millions for something that may never get built?’
Of course, Harris did encounter precisely that kind of political opposition in his day. But he was a deft and far-sighted bureaucrat who knew how to bring council, the media and the city’s residents around to the recognition that city building is about much more than the next property tax bill (or election).
He understood that urban infrastructure is for the ages.
Harris also grasped that civic infrastructure and high-minded design travel comfortably together through time -- a reminder that the urban experience is as much an aesthetic experience as a social one. He got it. As a reporter for The News observed in a 1914 profile, “He sees all the romance in the development of the city.” “A city,” Harris said in a 1922 speech, “is something into which men put their souls.”
I think the vast majority of Spacing’s readers would readily understand those sentiments, as do the thousands of Torontonians who turn out for events such as Door’s Open, Jane’s Walk, Nuit Blanche, etc., etc.
The concept, however, appears to be lost on this administration -- utterly and totally lost. The brothers Ford see the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Ironically, the relentless elimination of forward-looking city-building expenditure is the antithesis of “respect for taxpayers.” Such cuts leave Toronto poorer in every way, including financially, because delay always leads to higher cost down the road.
How much higher? Consider this: Between 1909 and 1912, a New York consulting team had drawn up plans for a Toronto subway system north along Yonge Street. Voters rejected the proposal in a plebiscite. Subsequent attempts by the Toronto Harbour Commission to revive the concept were met with derision from the mayor of the day, Horatio Hocken, and ultimately led nowhere, except perhaps, to the construction of that second platform on R.C. Harris’ Bloor Viaduct.
The estimated cost of that proposed subway, for the record: $7,708,550. And, no, I didn’t forget any zeros.
Friday, June 4, 2010
R.C. Harris and the Urban Sensibility
“His subject was know your city and it soon became apparent that the one thing worth knowing in Toronto is the works department. The thought of the destruction of cities made Mr. Harris realize to the full just what goes into the making of a city, the exact number of barrels of tar and asphalt for the streets, the miles of pipes for the sewers, the millions of laths and nails and bricks. Mr. Harris so loves Toronto that if he had time he would gladly count every brick in Toronto, and not only count them but kiss them.