A colleague stands knee-deep in the (new) Garrison Creek Sewer, where it passes beneath the curve of College Street and snakes southwest towards Fred Hamilton Park. This section of sewer was likely installed c. 1912, and shows the progression towards concrete construction.
It was a great privilege to find our way into Garrison Creek, Toronto's most legendary lost river, which lives on today as one of its most awe-inspiring sewer systems. Draining a wide swath of the city's old west end, the network of sewers that has been constructed since 1884 largely mirrors the surface watershed obliterated as development marched west and north and the creek became a hindrance, nuisance and health threat to urban living. Beneath the streets and parks, the creek still lives in glorious tunnels of brick and concrete, forgotten yes, but never removed entirely. Read More
The steam generation building at Indiana's Marble Hill Nuclear Power Station, during demolition in 2010.
Last summer, I visited the wreckage of the never-finished Marble Hill Nuclear Power Station, in rural Indiana, in the midst of being demolished more than twenty five years after it had been cancelled. What I saw, and photographed, was an incredibly unusual view into a technology and a physical infrastructure that we rarely are allowed to see, much less to become familiar with as a real, physical thing. This is the first in what will be an ongoing series of articles and photographs revealing the physical remnants of America's history of failed nuclear power projects. Read More
A new attraction called EdgeWalk will be premiering later this summer at Toronto's CN Tower. On offer will be the opportunity to leave the safe confines of its concrete and steel structure and walk to the edge of the tower's main pod. There are a host of reasons that the unveiling of EdgeWalk shouldn't surprise us, but the reality is that people have been exploring the possibilities of a vertical Toronto for years now, without minders and stunt gear. This article considers the attraction and value of EdgeWalk, and of unsanctioned experiences that are already providing new views and footholds on the city. Read More
This is the second in a series of articles discussing pressurized urban utility networks, elaborating further on an aspect of municipal water distribution networks that has been largely neglected outside of the technical literature of civil engineers: leakage. Municipal distribution systems are constantly depositing water into the soil and sub-soil that surrounds them, making an unavoidable and potentially highly significant contribution to the hydrogeology of the city. Read More
Watermains. The word can only invoke visions of puddled intersections, flooded basements and construction equipment. We haven't been given the opportunity to think about the system when its presence in our lives isn't mediated by disruption and catastrophe. The water distribution system, despite our visions of its anonymous ubiquity, is a distinctive and sometimes disorderly component in the city's fabric, and one worth exploring as more than just piping. The first in an ongoing discussion of the place of pressurized infrastructure systems in the urban landscape: drinking water systems, gas lines, and district heating systems. Read More
In Calgary, a new chapter is about to be written in the public experience of urban water and wastewater. The City of Calgary's Utilities and Environmental Protection (UEP) department and art firm Sans façon's have crafted an innovative plan to merge public infrastructure and public consciousness. Is this the beginning of a reversal of North America's century-long withdrawal of infrastructure from the realm and imagination of the public? Read More
In mid-December, news broke that application had been made to demolish Toronto's R.L. Hearn Generating Station. Efforts immediately began to fight that demolition and to find an alternative use for the building, but fighting this battle on heritage grounds is probably a bad idea. The Hearn station is a building that needs saving not for its past, but for what it means to the city's present. In a city where life is confined increasingly to condo suites, the kind of space enclosed in the Hearn power station is both a priceless artifact and an exceptionally valuable inheritance, even if we haven't quite figured out how to value it yet. It would be a shameful act to demolish this building and throw away the chance to retain a space whose size and impact will never be reproduced in Toronto. Read More
Several years ago, I began a project with photographer Andrew Emond, looking at a complex of grain elevators and related industry in Buffalo, NY. We interviewed former and current elevator workers, read up on the history of the North American grain trade, and spent a lot of time rambling through and photographing what was then a huge, idle complex of elevators at Childs Street (one has since been reactivated). That work has culminated in the release of a short book, to which I have contributed the text and Emond has provided the glorious medium-format photography. Read More
This fall, I have been publishing articles about sewers in much lower profile areas of Toronto. Whether we look beneath that part of East Toronto that isn't quite the Beach(es), or below the modest homes and businesses along Rogers Road in the old Borough of York, we can find sewers that say a lot about how the communities above came into being, and about the places and challenges we face today. This article is probably the last in that immediate series. Another sewer system built to confront a looming sanitation crisis in an area of the city annexed in the first decade of the twentieth century, for me the Earlscourt and Junction Sewers are literally a little closer to home: the photograph above was taken beneath a street immediately around the corner from where I live. Read More
For a long time, the sewers in Toronto's west end were unchallenged in my mind as both the most fascinating old system in the city, and the one most in need of exploration. However, as a result of my colleagues' dogged determination, there is some serious competition on the eastern horizon: the East Toronto and Midway sewers, a network of pipes and conduits as complicated as the Garrison system but with fewer hazardous environments and impassable diversions, although we did have to boat across one chamber. Read More
