Meet the man who shaped 20th century Toronto (Globe and Mail)

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. 

R.C. Harris family photo album

The photos posted to my flickr site -- http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnlorinc/ -- are from an album of photographs taken by R.C. Harris, currently on loan with the Toronto Archives. They include landscape shots, photos from trips to the United States, images of Toronto, and many portraits of his family, including his wife, Alice Ingram, his mother and father-in-law, his two children Katherine and Roland Jr., and images of Emerson Clewlo, the Harris' second child, who died of pneumonia brought on by a strep-related infection in January 1906.

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.

R.C. Harris and the Urban Sensibility

The "Ideal Scrapbook," which appears to have been maintained by R.C. Harris or his wife, contains a remarkable assortment of newspaper clippings about his life and career. A number of themes emerge from this collection:

First, he appeared frequently in editorial cartoons, typically depicted as rotund, bespectacled, and bemused by the antics of local politicians and other bureaucrats. The mere fact that he had that kind of a exposure suggests how popular he was. In our age, I'd guess that very few Torontonians could pick a senior bureaucrat out of a police line-up. In the 1920s, however, these senior civil servants had well developed media profiles.

Second, Harris was the subject of a remarkable outpouring of media adulation. While the newspapers of the day eagerly reported on the shortcomings of local politicians and the spendthrift ways of council, Harris is generally spared criticism. Quite the opposite, in fact. Several articles openly gush about his skill and resolve, while a few are positively lyrical in their depiction of what we'd now describe as Harris' urban sensibility.

Here's an example -- this is an extended excerpt from an undated 1922 news report about a speech he delivered to a gathering of the Women's Liberal Association:

“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.

"He said that a city is something into which men put their souls. Paving blocks and hydrants are ectoplasm. A drain well dug is as glorious as an opera or a picture. He was particularly conscious of the loving kindness that has gone into every foot of Toronto’s 737 miles of sidewalks. [Mr. Harris's] whole soul has gone into those sidewalks. They are Mr. Harris himself and he could feel that he had been walked on by more people than any other civic servant in Toronto.

…

"Mr. Harris begged the ladies to know the sidewalks and the parks and the back lanes, and he particularly implored them to know the sewers and the water works. He asked them when they saw one of his men idling around a manhole not to think that this man was loafing. He was a sentinel for the man below, a hero who was crawling through an 18 inch pipe for the glory of Toronto. The man on top today, said Mr. Harris, would be tomorrow the man below and a hero in his turn...."

R.C. Harris and the Langstaff Industrial Farm: Links

This thesis includes a photo of the jail farm buildings being demolish in 1989:

www.fes.uwaterloo.ca/research/hrc/pdf/LossOfHeritagePropertiesInOntario.pdf

A link to the bibliographic information on the Royal Commission studying the Langstaff and Concord farms, empaneled in 1926:

theta.library.yorku.ca/uhtbin/cgisirsi/x/0/0/5?searchdata1=a1662957{CKEY}

Excerpt from a local history of Richmond Hill:

http://edrh.rhpl.richmondhill.on.ca/default.asp?ID=s11.13

Google Books:

"Opportunity Road: Yonge Street 1860-1939" By F. R. Berchem, pg. 143

R.C. Harris and the Langstaff Industrial Farm

On a warm day in June, 1911, a delegation of City of Toronto officials piled into a car and drove 16 kilometres up Yonge Street to a 386-acre farm owned by James and William Russell, members of an old pioneer family. The group -- which included Mayor Horatio Hocken and Alderman Tommy Church, who would succeed him -- strolled across the pastures, pausing to admire a stream running across the land, located near Richmond Hill. A tumble-down colonial farmhouse stood nearby.

Their guide on this day was Toronto’s energetic properties commissioner Roland Caldwell Harris, who had pressured the Russells into granting the city an option to buy the farm for $162 per acre. Harris’ plan was to establish an “industrial farm” where minor criminals could serve short sentences doing agricultural work, instead of rotting in the notoriously over-crowded Don Jail.

As Harris later told The Star, “We don’t want it called the jail farm or to have the name of the jail associated with it. The object of this place is to give the men who have fallen a chance to lift themselves up again – to show them that reclamation lies in their own hands. We seek to help – not to punish.”

A century later, such sentiments sound almost impossibly remote and even naive. With Stephen Harper’s Conservatives bent on imposing a retributive criminal justice agenda featuring longer sentences, larger penitentiaries and fewer pardons, the government has been closing existing prison farms, ostensibly to save money.

But in the Toronto of the 1910s, the notion of diverting minor offenders from the Don had gained broad popular support. “We have a barbarous system of handling the fellow who gets drunk,” as one controller put it. “He hasn’t done anything or stole anything. He is a victim of his own weakness.”

It took R.C. Harris several more months to close the deal, and the city finally spent $60,000 to acquire the Russell farm and some adjacent land, as well as cows, horses and pigs. The sale closed shortly before council named the 37-year-old Harris as works commissioner, a post he held for 33 years, during which time he oversaw dramatic changes in the way the City of Toronto looks and functions.

Despite the promotion, Harris insisted on keeping a hand in the development of the industrial farm. Aiming to have capacity for 500 inmates, the city planned to erect cottage dormitories, a main building with a kitchen, dining room and common areas, and barns. The property, according to a council report, could someday house facilities for very poor seniors and “the indigent.”

Conspicuously absent from the plans were bars, fences and other symbols of incarceration. The routine revolved a nine-hour shift working in the fields. As Alderman Joseph O’Neill, who chaired the committee overseeing the project, said in late 1912, “We have no locks or keys, cells or guards. We put the men on their honour.” Only a handful ever escaped.

The facility functioned without incident, easing congestion at the Don Jail. Initially taking 65 prisoners, it eventually held several hundred.

It was a time when social reform ideas were in circulation. During an election debate organized by women’s groups in December, 1912, speakers called for improved housing for slum areas, campaigns to treat milk and water, psychiatric hospitals and female police officers. Also on the agenda: the establishment of an industrial farm for teenage girls found guilty of minor offenses. As one participant said, “We ought to send them out into the fresh air to grow vegetables and flowers and raise chickens.” Two years later, the City agreed, acquiring a 200-acre farm, in Concord, to house female inmates.

The City touted its investment to taxpayers. As Hocken said in his 1914 mayoral address, “One has only to visit the institution to ascertain the great difference between the men who are confined at the farm and those incarcerated at the Toronto Jail...I feel satisfied that the reformation of those sentenced to the farm warrants the step taken by the municipality…”

As time passed, Harris moved on to other projects, such as the water filtration plant in the east end. The industrial farms, for their part, began to generate controversy, revolving around chronic infighting between the city and provincial officials who shared administrative responsibility. A 1926 inquiry into the simmering conflicts led to layoffs, but Queen’s Park continued to question the city’s use of the farm as a place to also house infirm and poor seniors. By the early 1930s, the province had taken over the operation of the farms.

The men’s facility was converted for use as a hospital in 1938, but continued to serve inmates after World War Two. Rob Leverty, executive director of the Ontario Historical Society, recalls driving past it on family outings in the late 1950s. “It intrigued me that there was a farm with prisoners,” he says, noting that the conditions seemed humane by contrast to movie depictions of chain gangs.

After province closed the facility in 1958, tenant farmers rented the land, paying as little as $7,800 per year. But in 1982, the Langstaff Jail Farm stormed back into the public consciousness when Toronto council decided to sell the property, which sat in the path of Greater Toronto’s sprawl. It encompassed a desirable chunk of real estate bounded by Yonge, Bayview, Highway 7 and the 16^th Sideroad.

For four years, Toronto officials bickered with the Town of Richmond Hill over a fight that involved ambitious development schemes from well-connected builders and auto-parts magnate Frank Stronach. In the end, the winning developer anted up $75 million but soon flipped some of the land for a hefty profit.

There’s a curious coda to this story. Shortly after the sale closed, Toronto council earmarked $23 million of the proceeds to establish the Toronto Atmospheric Fund, an agency mandated to finance energy efficiency retrofits for both public and privately-owned buildings. TAF proved to be one of the first such funds, and the model has been widely emulated elsewhere.

It's fascinating to discover how these two progressive-minded ideas from very different eras turn out to be linked by the long arc of time.

R.C. Harris, Photographer

News reports frequently cited Harris's enthusiasm for photography. Some excerpts:

Toronto Weekly Star, June 8, 1912:

- “ Mr. Harris’ habit of nearly always carrying a camera has been commented on, and, no doubt, many people have guessed that the Commissioner generally wears a tail coat for this very purpose. It might be supposed easy for him to tuck away a pretty big camera in its capacious folds. But the truth is Mr. Harris in his inveterate pursuit of photography has a fondness for a very small camera. For quite a long time, he has carried a tiny English vest pocket instrument, and he recently bought another, smaller if possible. And it is with these – the two smallest cameras manufactured – that he has most of his picture-making fun. They wouldn’t bulge the pocket of the thinnest man at the Hall.

Toronto Star, March 2, 1914:

Works Commissioner Harris, as soon as the hour of the day comes when he is transformed to “Roly,” turns joyfully from boiler plates to photographic plates, from blue prints to gas light prints. He is a camera fiend of much renown among the experts of the art. He can make all kinds of photographs. Some of them are clean and sharp, like his reports, some of them are vaguely beautiful, like his answers to newspaper men when questioned about something he does not wish to reveal. Their quality is almost always fine.

A short profile of Harris (News, July 14, 1914) noted what we would now describe as his urban sensibility:

He sees all the romance in the development of the city. The men who work in perilous places, who plan great bridges, who toil day and night when water famines threaten, when water mains burst, when the unforeseen spells danger and the welfare of the whole or a portion of the community is threatened, all play their part in the story of the city. If he could be forced to write the romance they would not be forgotten.

[Note: the references to water famines and burst mains would have been broadly recognized by the Torontonians of that period, who were dealing with chronic water shortages caused by the deterioration of the city's water system.]