R. C. Harris Water Treatment Plant
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The R. C. Harris Water Treatment Plant in Toronto is both a crucial piece of infrastructure and an architecturally acclaimed historic building. It is located in the east of the city at the eastern end of Queen Street and at the foot of Victoria Park Avenue along the shore of Lake Ontario. It is located in the Beaches neighbourhood.
The plant was built between 1937 and 1941 and is named after the long time commissioner of Toronto's public works Rowland Caldwell Harris. The building, unlike most modern engineering structures, was also created to be a vivid architectural structure. Created in the Art Deco style, the cathedral-like structure remains one of Toronto's most admired buildings. It is, however, little known to outsiders. The interiors are just as opulent with marble entryways and vast halls filled with pools of water and filtration equipment. The plant has thus earned the nickname The Palace of Purification.
Despite its age, the plant is still fully functional, providing approximately 45% of the water supply for Toronto and the Region of York. The intakes are located over 2.6 kilometres (1.6 mi) from shore in 15 metres (49 ft) of water, running through two pipes under the bed of the lake. Water is also chlorinated in the plant and then pumped to various reservoirs throughout the City of Toronto and the Region of York.
The facility grounds have been made available to the public. Despite some concerns of vulnerability to an attack on the water supply since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the grounds have remained open to the public, but security has been increased. In the summer of 2007, construction began on the installation of an underground Residual Management Facility allowing process waste to be removed before discharging into the lake. As a result of this project, the grounds are under heavy construction and are only partially publicly accessible.
[edit] Appearance in popular culture
The The R. C. Harris Water Treatment Plant has been used in dozens of films and television series as a prison, clinic, or headquarters.
- The building of the plant is vividly recounted in Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion
- The headquarters of "The Man" in the 2002 comedy Undercover Brother
- A prison in the 1998 comedy Half Baked
- An asylum in the 1995 horror film In the Mouth of Madness
- "The Centre", a nefarious think tank in the television series The Pretender
- Base of operations for Genomex, an antagonistic corporation in the television series Mutant X
- The Elsinore Brewery in the 1983 film Strange Brew
- The Henry Ford Centre for the Criminally Insane, as seen in Robocop: The Series
[edit] External links
- City of Toronto page
- Virtual tour by Michael Hainsworth
- Pictures of the plant
- More pictures of the plant
- A few more pictures of the plant
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