When telling the story of the Holocaust, one effective way to overcome our sheer inability to comprehend the scope and scale of such atrocities is to zoom in on one or two stories: share one particular experience, in all its brutal specificity, and we have at least a small way into the event—the small details illuminate the larger whole.

One theatre company from the Netherlands, Hotel Modern, takes a related approach in KAMP (CAMP). The production depicts a typical day at the Auschwitz concentration camp, but instead of zooming in into a closeup, it shrinks everything down, literally, into miniature. It’s the accumulation of thousands of small details that has the impact in this case.

Eleanor McMahon thinks it’s time to change the conversation around cycling in Ontario.

McMahon is the founder of the Share the Road Cycling Coalition, who will be hosting the fifth annual Ontario Bike Summit this week in Toronto. She says that we need to stop talking about things like bike lanes and other bicycle infrastructure as a zero sum game between cars and bikes.

“We do polling, and our polling tells us that 89 per cent of Ontarians are both drivers and cyclists,” she says. “The notion that it’s cars versus bikes is overblown, and it’s really not working anymore. Deciding to change the conversation means going out of our way to poke holes in that idea and say from the get go ‘We don’t buy into that philosophy, and just because you say it, doesn’t make it true.’ ”

Even with the success of acts like Lonely Island and Flight of the Conchords, people still tend to view musical comedy with some suspicion, and not without reason. Those high-profile success stories aside, at the club level, musical comedy is too often the province of people who aren’t quite good enough to make it as musicians, but not quite funny enough to make it as comedians.

Two local comics, Robert Keller and Rush Zilla, are out to change that perception with their show, Off Key Comedy, which features a wide variety of acts whose only commonality is that they combine music and comedy in one form or another. The third edition of the monthly show will take place on May 23, at Comedy Bar.

Despite the fact that the last show in Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s 2012/2013 season is titled Of a Monstrous Child: A Gaga Musical, Lady Gaga herself takes a secondary role. There are no homages to raw-meat dresses and gold-plated wheelchairs here. Instead, writer and director Alistair Newton uses the House of Gaga as a pathway into the history of the notable performance-art stars that came before her in the pantheon of queer iconography, and how she is and isn’t a construct of all of them put together.

As Halloween approaches, we are surrounded by images of death. Most focus on the ghoulish aspects, from bony skeletons to creepy tombstones with punny names for the deceased. But the mock graveyards decorating residential lawns bear little resemblance to Toronto’s real cemeteries. Instead of depressing, scary final resting places, these spaces are full of life. There are tantalizing hints amid tombstone epitaphs of our forebears’ fascinating stories. Informational plaques and thoughtfully designed monuments attest to the importance of historical figures and business tycoons (or the amount of money they had to toss around). Lovers of flora and fauna can enjoy manicured gardens, vibrant fall colours, or spot specimens of urban wildlife. Park-like atmospheres lend themselves to cycling, running, walking, or other forms of exercise meant to delay a permanent move to the graveyard.

This week, Torontoist celebrates the city’s cemeteries through visits to five of them, along with the story of one that is as deceased as those who were buried there.

Our series begins with a trek out to the east end to wander around St. John’s Norway Cemetery at Kingston Road and Woodbine Avenue. While other local burial grounds have attracted grand, ego-boosting monuments, St. John’s has always been humbler in fulfilling its role as a place where average Torontonians can remember loved ones in a low-key setting.

History

The cemetery dates its beginnings to 1853, when local landowner Charles Coxwell Small (whose middle name lives on in a nearby avenue) deeded three acres to the Anglican church. The new religious institution was intended to serve the growing village of Norway, which was centred at the present-day intersection of Kingston and Woodbine. Bishop John Strachan consecrated both the cemetery and the original church building on July 1, 1855. Both spots were alternately known as St. John’s Norway and St. John’s Berkeley—some accounts note that Small tried to enforce the latter name for the community rather than the enduring one, which was inspired by the local Norway Pine harvesting industry. The cemetery underwent major expansions in 1905 and 1925. Though the cemetery has always been administered by the St. John’s Norway Anglican Church, it is considered a non-denominational burial ground. The grounds have been used as a set for films like To Die For and The Virgin Suicides.

Grounds

Walking through St. John’s feels like a stroll through a small-town cemetery. There aren’t the massive monuments to millionaires that dot Mount Pleasant, nor the plaques that accompany notable historical figures in Cabbagetown’s graveyards. What you will find among St. John’s 35 acres are row upon row of tombstones on the higher elevations of the cemetery, and flat, nearly grown-over markers in the lower area. Roads within the cemetery are well-marked, though two-way traffic is impossible even for bicycles through the narrowest stretches.

Notable Names

Beyond families who left their names on local landmarks, such as the Ashbridges, the most recognizable figure buried in St. John’s Norway is Roland Caldwell Harris. During his reign as Toronto’s Commissioner of Public Works from 1912 to 1945, Harris supervised the construction of much of the city’s infrastructure, including the Prince Edward Viaduct and the water treatment plant that bears his name. His epitaph: “No ostentation mark’d his tranquil way. His duties all discharged without display.”

Favourite Spots

The area devoted to those who fell during the World Wars is undergoing refurbishment by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to provide legible, uniform markers. The war memorial, installed by the Royal Canadian Legion in September 1967, is an intriguingly abstract representation of a soldier standing guard over a steep hill.

What the grounds lack in glossiness they make up for in human interest stories. After reading a number of the tombstones, we felt as if there were more heartfelt epitaphs than average. The final messages range from favourite hymns and notes of regret upon a loved one’s passing, to humorous pop culture references (such as the marker in the cremation garden that reads “Beam me up Scotty”).

In the nervous laughter department, we discovered the resting place of a couple who bore the last name Death. The epitaph reads “Some day we’ll understand.”

Photos by Jamie Bradburn.

A view of the filtration building rotunda.

Harris was known for his predilection for striking architecture, and R.C. Harris (the plant, not the man) is certainly that. Harris’s Works Department contracted with the engineering firm Gore, Nasmith, and Storrie, whose architect, Thomas Canfield Pomphrey, designed the plant in the art deco style that was fashionable in his day. The resulting edifice is a huge compound of buff brick, arching windows, and subtle, stylized frescoes, that looks like a factory in the land of Oz.
The plant, located at the extreme east end of Queen Street, at the foot of Victoria Park Avenue, was built in phases throughout the 1930s and became operational in 1941. In the 1950s, a wing was added to its filtration building, doubling its total throughput capacity to almost one billion litres of lake water per day. Currently, the plant purifies about thirty percent of Toronto’s tap water. It’s one of four City treatment plants, which together enabled Toronto to consume 481,032,190,000 liters of water in 2008.

The R.C. Harris plant has two heritage designations, one from the City of Toronto and one from the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering. But despite its architectural appeal, and despite the fact that it was designed to accommodate public tours, the interior of the so-called “palace of purification” has spent the last ten years isolated from admiring eyes, as though under one of those evil spells to which all palaces are occasionally prone. With occasional exceptions, it hasn’t been open to routine visitation by outsiders, including the media, owing to an abundance of post-9/11 caution.
But Toronto Water management recently completed a review of their access policies, and have decided that certain parts of R.C. Harris can once again be opened to periodic tours. As a result, R.C. Harris will be participating in Doors Open Toronto this year. (The last time the plant did Doors Open was in 2000, the program’s inaugural year.)

Ron Brilliant, the Plant Manager at R.C. Harris, is looking forward to receiving the public again. As a kind of warmup for Doors Open, he and Andrea Gonsalves, a communications co-ordinator with the City, gave us a look inside the walls of R.C. Harris, and even beneath its floors.

These are pumps, in the plant’s pump house.

Brilliant has been at the plant since 1997, when he left a private-sector job to work for the City. He carries himself with the calm authority one would probably want from someone responsible for providing a life-critical utility to millions of people, and yet somehow, even though he constantly uses a raised voice to make himself heard over the droning of machinery, he seems soft spoken. A gentle nature is an asset at R.C. Harris, because the plant has those historic designations, and so aside from Brilliant’s more technocratic duties, it’s up to him to make sure the building is maintained in a way that respects its heritage. Fortunately, he seems not to mind playing conservator; to all appearances, he’s completely in love with the plant.

Brilliant leads us inside the pump house, a relatively small building situated to the south of the large filtration building that’s visible from Queen Street.
Inside, we ascend a brass-bannistered staircase into what was originally the plant’s control room. It’s slightly smaller than a school gymnasium, and it’s completely empty save for some antique odds and ends in various corners, and some pictures on the walls. At the moment, the room doesn’t serve a purpose, but that wasn’t always the case. An archival photo from the 1940s shows it filled with NASA gear: huge hulking heaps of electronics, bedazzled with indicator lights and dials. It’s incredibly different from the plant’s current control room: we couldn’t photograph it for security reasons, but it consisted essentially of a large desk with a few computer monitors on it, and one guy sitting behind them.

The plant is now so thoroughly automated that Brilliant says it’s run by just two people 75% of the time. The full staff complement is thirty-one, but most of them are only around during the day. (R.C. Harris is a twenty-four-hour operation, for obvious reasons.)

The original control room has a bank of windows that looks out over the plant’s pumps, which are round, teal things, each as tall as a man, that crouch like snails on an orange-tiled floor. They suck water out of Lake Ontario and then shoot it off to other distribution locations throughout the city once it’s purified. Brilliant says the pumps are the same ones that were initially installed when the plant was first constructed. They’re kept around not for heritage reasons, but rather because they were built to last. “If we bought new ones, the walls on them would be about this thick,” says Brilliant, holding his fingers very close together. The old pumps have walls that are much thicker than that.

From the pump house, Brilliant leads us to the filtration building, the largest of the plant’s aboveground structures and probably its best known. Inside, we visit a small laboratory, where ten identical kitchen faucets continuously pour into a single, long basin. They look like some kind of surrealist sculptural meditation on the implacability of water, but actually they serve a practical purpose: each faucet is connected to a different point in the plant’s purification process, so staff can quickly take samples from anywhere in the works, to calibrate their testing equipment.

Brilliant takes a paper cup and sticks it under a faucet that flows with raw lake water, then fills a second cup with the plant’s final, purified product. “You won’t be able to tell the difference between our raw water and our finished water,” he says. “This lake is very, very clean. It’s something that people tend to think is not clean, but that’s totally wrong.” Most of what R.C. Harris filters out is sand and grit. The water, when it arrives, says Brilliant, is already so spotless that it’s difficult to purify it further.

He gives us both cups to examine. There isn’t any visible difference between the two. We ask if we can taste from both, but he says: “No.”

A view of the exterior of the plant’s service building.

The main part of the filtration building is designed in such an ornate, idiosyncratic way that it’s hard to believe its construction was ever funded. Twin hallways flanked by green marble control panels stretch in opposite directions from a central rotunda with a domed ceiling, dominated by a towering art deco grandfather clock-like structure with four faces, all fitted with brass plates, brass dials, and brass hands. One face is a clock, but the other faces are connected to the plant’s vital systems. They indicate water levels at various phases of the treatment process. This information was once necessary, but now that everything is mostly automated, the whole clock apparatus is mainly decorative.

Under Brilliant’s watch, this hallway has had some of its marble replaced. He and his staff removed coverings from the windows to give the space back some of its original character. On some of the old marble control panels, plastic stoppers plug holes where old instrumentation was removed in order to make room for new, digital controls. Brilliant concedes that he could have replaced the panels with replicas that didn’t have holes, but he believes in keeping the plant outfitted with as much of its original ornamentation as possible.

The overall appearance of the interior of the filtration building is like a 1920s sci-fi movie set (in the vein of Metropolis), and in fact we aren’t the first to note that. R.C. Harris, like many Toronto landmarks, has had occasional star turns. It has served, in films, as headquarters for leagues of evil masterminds, prisons, and asylums. Brilliant disliked sharing the plant with film crews even before the post-9/11 security crackdown. He has a scary anecdote involving a 150-pound camera and a pipeline full of toxic chlorine.

To either side of the huge hallways are rows of filtration beds, forty in all. The beds do the brunt of the plant’s dirty work, and their mechanism of action is surprisingly simple. Lake water, after being treated with a coagulant to gather whatever small amounts of foreign matter might be present in it, is pumped on top of the beds, which are just flat expanses of fine-grained anthracite—in other words, charcoal. The water dribbles down, leaving whatever gritty debris and other impurities may be present trapped in the charcoal. The clean water continues dripping down through successively coarser layers of rock until it reaches an underground reservoir. Then chemicals are added, chiefly fluoride and chlorine. At this point, the water is ready to be pumped off to the city at large.

These are filtration beds, in the filtration building.

This process is similar to the one that takes place in any home filtration pitcher (a Brita, for instance). Brilliant is a little contemptuous of the idea of home purification. He doesn’t partake in it, himself.

“The problem I have with Brita filters is that the first time you use it, it’s good. Second time you use it, what are you doing? You’ve got some not good stuff, and now you’re putting some more not good stuff through.”

“It just becomes a breeding ground.”

R.C. Harris cleans its filters at regular intervals. It does this by flooding the filtration beds with water from underneath. The water picks up whatever dirt has accumulated in the charcoal, and is then sluiced away into a massive, newly-built underground residue management facility, where the dirt is allowed to settle out, and is then separated with centrifuges and dumped into huge waste containers for removal, while the excess water is pumped back into the lake. This process is known by unappetizing appellation, “backwash.”

The underground residue management facility was the last big project to be completed at the plant. It was finished in 2008. (And it was executed, incidentally, by CH2M Hill Canada, which merged, in 1995, with Gore and Storrie, the company that originally designed the plant.) Now, the focus is on its exteriors. R.C. Harris is in the middle of a thorough revitalization of its walls and roofs. Parts of the outsides of the plant’s buildings are swathed in scaffolding, while contractors replace the old brick with new, similar brick. It’s disruptive work, but it’s the only way to keep the place in good condition for years to come.
Brilliant doesn’t see protecting the building’s historical and architectural appeal as onerous. “To me, it’s just good practices,” he says.