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.
31 comments
John, please don’t use the “it only cost a dollar in 1910” argument. $7,708,550 was an extraordinary amount of money back then, to put it in today’s terms you would probably have to add a couple of zeroes. It is the kind of argument that confuses an issue.
For example, the average annual earnings for a worker in manufacturing and production in 1910 was $417 (quickly looked up on StatsCan’s site). The cost of building the subway would be equal to the annual earnings of 18,485 people.
Fair enough. My point is that if city council had begun building subways in the 1910s instead of the 1950s instead of fussing about jurisdictions and the mill rate, Toronto would be a very different place. And even if we calculated the 2011 value of those 1912 dollars, I’d be willing to bet the expenditure would have gone a lot further than it would today.
According to the Bank of Canada’s inflation calculator, $7.7 million in 1912 would be more than $150 million today. That’s a lot of money, but still only a fraction of what subway construction now costs. The Spadina extension is budgeted at $2.6 billion (with a “b”).
I’d actually be curious to hear from someone who knows more about this than I do. Why have construction costs gone up 10 or 20 times more than the rate of inflation? It seems germane to the issue under discussion, since this kind of cost inflation has made city-building on the scale of the R.C. Harris Filtration Plant prohibitively expensive.
R.C. Harris’ fingerprints are all over the city. Take the St. Clair reservoir* which could have been functional and that’s it. Instead, it’s an attractive part of a public park.
His foresight regarding the subway platform was remarkable considering that the main east-west street in Toronto at the time was Queen Street. There was talk of building a subway (or at least an underground streetcar right-of-way) along there.
So, who is our R.C. Harris, or where do we get another one?
* http://www.flickr.com/photos/thru_the_night/3917234197/
What a ridiculous piece of smear journalism on the Fords.
Harris’ vision involved the grand creation of the very bones that make this city possible. It was quite literally the equivalent of saying “we should be building subways” while lesser visions wanted to run streetcar tracks instead.
Let’s bring that notion forward 100 years. What is the large infrastructure proposal is Rob Ford proposing? That would be expanding the subway system. What is the attack against it? “Too expensive, light rail would be more effective” blah blah blah. Precisely the argument, your own piece tells us, was levied against Harris in his day.
Your soapbox seems awfully rickety.
If you disagree with what he is doing as mayor, why not criticize what he is doing, instead of publishing pieces speculating on what he might have said about projects 100 years ago?
And really, have we decided that the Fort York bridge is tomorrow’s equivalent of the Prince Edward Viaduct? That seems just a bit hyperbolic.
R.
@R: The Fords have a vision for a subway, but they don’t want to take responsibility for paying for it. The only privately funded/operated subways I am aware of are in hyper-dense Asian megacities. Harris didn’t balk at investing tax dollars into the construction of public services. The Fords won’t find enough private money to build Sheppard, so taxpayers will eventually be on the hook. But they pretend otherwise.
@ James M: over time, engineering, safety and accessibility standards increase over time, thus the added cost. No one could ever propose building Manhattan-style subway stations today (dark, narrow platforms, inaccessible), even though they mostly do their job.
Re: James M. & Construction Costs
I imagine digging in a developed part of the city has always been more expensive as the engineering work becomes more involved. We also have much more complicated underground infrastructure to consider, and a more developed sense of ethics about stuff like how much to pay construction workers, what is and isn’t acceptable to put in the ground (environmental assessments are pricey too I’ve heard) and how much community input matters.
Finally, surely it can’t be a recent development that consultants offer up one number that turns out to be remarkably low in the long run.
It can’t possibly be a new thing that civic infrastructure has massive cost overruns.
R.
It’s not just that subway construction costs have inflated (they have) but they include hurdles that subways in 1910 would not. Expropriating, cutting and covering has been replaced by tunnel boring machines which are more expensive than navvies. Deaths during construction are not merely statistics but require partial or full shutdowns while the Province investigates. Fireproofing requirements are more stringent, as is the case with ventilation. Environmental impact studies are required even on projects like subways which tend to ameliorate alternative impacts like roads. Second escape exits are required on new construction as well as elevators to facilitate those with limited mobility.
However, to get back John Lorinc’s mention of R.C. Harris’ credo on civic infrastructure, it is a pity that Mr. Harris did not invent Doors Open too. Perhaps a populace used to being invited into civic palaces might have become accustomed to them, and sought more of them.
@Richard: I think John’s point is is that if Rob Ford has decided we can’t afford a bridge (“We’d have to borrow $22.4 million” by his own email to people upset about cancelling the Fort York bridge), which was actually already budgeted for and approved, and whose cancellation will mean $1.5 million in work already done for it is tossed in the bin (where’s the respect for taxpayers there?) then that does not bode well for any vision from city hall. I’m certainly not holding my breath.
And to the Fords’ plan to build a subway along Sheppard (for which the city will have to borrow $4,000,000,000) – nothing has been announced, and be sure, it will end up costing the city dearly for a gravy subway to nowhere either in road tolls or forgone property tax revenue, when a fully funded plan serving 10x as many riders already existed and was capriciously tossed in the trash by his excellency, who is not a transit planner.
Rob Ford’s transport “vision” consists of trotting out the phrase “war on cars” against everything that is not a car, when the real enemy is in fact the single passenger in that car beside you. Oh, and his “vision” also includes painting curbs different colours to denote where you can and can’t park, borrowed from such places as Israel and California, where curbs are visible all year round because it doesn’t snow there.
@Richard:
You assume too much about John L’s position on subways. In fact, he has made similar arguments about subways being an investment in the future. He has asked only that these investments be grounded in reality and not feel-good fantasies.
Also, the Fort York bridge is indeed similar to the Prince Edward viaduct in that it will be used by the residents of condos that have not yet been built. And sadly and inevitably, the promised “cheaper” design will certainly cost far more than the existing “fancy” design because of the delays caused by people like David Shiner and Michael Del Grande, whose supposed “fiscal conservativsm” is going to make us all broke.
@R: E.J. Lennox’s City Hall was over-budget, as was the water filtration plant. Does anyone remember or care? Is the city poorer or richer as a result of these projects?
Etobicoke prior to amalgamation took an approach that mirrors that of the current administration. They didn’t raise the etobicoke portion of the property taxes I believe for over a decade. To do this, they cut back significantly on the infrastructure maintenance that was not immediately visible to etobians. So, some roads would be paved since everyone can see rough pavement. However, areas like Parks and Recreation facilities were not maintained as they should. By the time of amalgamation in 1998 some facilities were in such bad shape that they were considered a hazard. So, the new city spent millions bringing them back to standard. Was any money really saved? I would guess not. What was accomplished by this exercise? A few etobians felt good about their artificially low taxes. Had they been fooled by the low tax proponents? I believe so. When I get an email from someone telling me I can cash in big with little investment and no risk, I along with many others click the trash button. Why do they believe the same message when brought forward by some of our elected representatives?
re: cost of subways — consider also how stations have changed since 1950, not only in terms of safety and accessibility standards, but in terms of architectural design and scale.
Compare the simple local stations on Yonge and Bloor-Danforth, with the monster stations on the Spadina extension. Compare the scale of, say, Bayview station (8,200 riders per day) (let’s charitably leave out Bessarion’s 2,500 as an outlier that will be increased with development) and Woodbine station (13,800 riders per day). Check out the footprint (land, buildings, facilities) for the stations on the Sorbara extension, even low-use stations like Sheppard West. And, for comparison, look at the minimalist stations proposed on the underground section of Eglinton.
John L, Richard, Mark: Thanks for the replies. Everything you say makes sense, but I’m still perplexed.
If you look at the original Yonge subway, it was built in the 1950s (not the ancient slave-labour past) and it cost $67 million. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $570 million. By contrast, the Spadina extension has only half as many stations, is being built in a part of the city that’s not particularly dense, yet somehow costs 5 times as much.
I know that today we have elevators, wider platforms, better ventilation, as well as environmental assessments, community consultations, etc., but can that really account for such a massive price difference? What percentage of the increase can is attributable to each of the various factors? I don’t mean to hijack the comment thread with my tangent, but this is something I’ve been curious about for a long time, not just in the context of subways, but in the context of construction and city-building more generally. The cost escalations of the past few decades seem astonishing, at least to a non-expert.
Have to agree with Richard… this soapbox seems rather rickety.. and the point of Lorinc’s argument from “Harris” seems overly selective in where specifically it wants to point.
@Lorinc Let me be clear that I agree: Rob Ford’s Sheppard Subway funding plan to date does seem to involve much rabbit-and-hatting and I’m hopeful that we get it. I suspect, insofar as Ford has a philosophical tradition, he probably doesn’t mind spending big money on big infrastructure, and I suspect he’ll come through with the necessary funding to get it built. (I wish he’d dream bigger and run it all the way to the Rouge River, but that’s me.)
@Nick: I’ll only say that you’ve illustrated my point… when it was built the Prince Edward Viaduct was a costly bridge to nowhere (civic development east of the Don River was concentrated down around Queen) and, as John’s article points out had a subway level for trains that didn’t run. You can level the exact same criticisms at it that you can at the very expensive “Sheppard Subway to Nowhere.” But it takes vision to build big infrastructure, but I predict the subway is going to prove vital to help connect and enliven that portion of the city.
@John: Really? The Prince Edward Viaduct and the Fort York bridge are comparable? I want you to consider what the city would have been like without the connection at Bloor Street. It’s a bit more dramatic than a few condos MIA.
@Lorinc(2): Harris’ use of primo materials for the filtration plant is ridiculous, and if that drove it over-budget, then a mistake was made. As for old city hall, I can’t say, since I don’t know where the cost over-runs were from. I do know that council turned down Moores “Archer” for new city hall, because it was too expensive, and so Nathan Phillips, when he stepped down as mayor and private donor’s bought it for the city, and it’s since been considered Toronto’s most significant piece of public art.
I’ve wondered, based off that episode, why there isn’t a fundraising drive right now to get the funds together to build the Fort York bridge? Why is only public money acceptable for it.
@Richard — there was just such an offer from John Tory, who proposed that council leave in place the funding it had approved earlier this year, with the balance (i.e. the overrun of about $5m) to be raised privately. But the Fords didn’t go for it.
Re old city hall — the construction and associated costs created a huge scandal in the 1890s.
If the Fords were overseeing water treatment, our taxpapers would be getting typhoid with some frequency.
The cost of labour, which factors in benefits, unions, safety, etc., is through the roof since midcentury. While the need for labour has decreased due to increased use of specialized machinery, it would still cost an order of magnitude more than in the old sandhog days.
Meanwhile, the cost of materials for literally everything involved in construction, most of which now has to be made outside of Canada and imported, is exponentially more. You can’t just drive over to Laird Drive to pick up some more Canada Wire, etc.
Finally, the legal issues are insane. Can you imagine if the NIMBYs like Save our St. Clair had blocked construction of the Yonge subway back then? Oh, sorry, can’t build the subway for a city of millions because the guy with a three year lease on a convenience store is protesting the loss of a parking spot…
There is no secret to why things cost more. The real mystery is why we now elect fools and jesters instead of leaders.
Iskyscrapper
There was backlash against the Yonge Subway. They were told politely to STFU and GBTW. That would be political suicide now.
I wonder what R. C. Harris would have to say to Mayor Miller and Transit City?
@Lorinc: If an offer to privately fundraise to raise the difference for the Fort York bridge was shot down by council, then it’s a shame you chose to write the article you did above. Dreams about Ford and Harris are irrelevant. Cracks in the conservative alliance are significant. Can Mammoliti whip every councillor on the Mayor’s coalition into voting against private fundraising for a memorial bridge? Is that what our city hall thinks of Soldiers laying down their lives for Canada?
Maybe you did make a point of this earlier, but I missed it, and if you didn’t, then I do feel the above article is a missed opportunity.
@Richard
The bridge and the viaduct are indeed comparable, but obviously on different scales. The viaduct was important to the Toronto as a whole. The Fort York bridge is important to the Fort York condo area. I guess if you don’t live down there it makes no difference to you or other Torontonians, but as long as the City collects property taxes from these folks, I figure they deserve the same public investments everybody else takes for granted.
The Fort York condo area is only beginning to experience the growing pains that come from transforming a former industrial area into a residential neighbourhood. It is harder to get around, and there are few services, connections and public amenities. It is easier to drive to get anywhere, because even though the King streetcar is a few hundred meters away, it is inaccessible in many areas due to the railways. Building proper connections, public spaces and services is not gravy: it is a core function of all cities since before Rome.
Just look at Liberty Village. The congestion there is so bad that their proposed pedestrian/cycling bridge connection became an election issue, particularly championed by the *right-wing* candidate. Many of those residents are freaking out now because they fear their own bridge project will also be cancelled, since it is not even as far along as the Fort York bridge project was.
And if you want to imagine the Fort York condo areas without the bridge (and similar connections, parks, services, public spaces, etc.), just look at St. James Town: just as Shiner is proposing, this area was jammed full of apartments, but it was cut off from everything that makes a neighbourhood successful.
By cancelling the bridge and proposing to pave over more public space and parkland to cram in more condos, while ignoring the huge need for more public investments (which the condo residents’ property taxes are supposed to pay for), Shiner, Ford and others could turn the Fort York condo area into another concrete slum.
Iskyscraper: Sure, but the cost of labour and materials has increased in many other industries too, i.e., the very industries that are used to calculate the rate of inflation. So the question still stands: why has the cost of construction increased at a rate that is many times the rate of inflation? Automobiles, for example, are made by very well paid workers, they use many of the same materials involved in construction, they’ve gotten much more elaborate and sophisticated in the last fifty years, yet they’re not any more expensive when you adjust for inflation. So is the extreme cost escalation in construction due primarily to the legal/regulatory/NIMBY issues? If so, that is truly astonishing. In any case, I’m asking this question out of genuine curiosity; I’m not trying to be obtuse or argumentative. If you can direct me to actual numbers, research papers, and the like, that would be much appreciated. My attempts at Googling this haven’t been very fruitful.
@Richard – in response to your reply:
Please, Ford’s subway along Sheppard is not a vision – transit planners don’t foresee demand for 50 years, that’s why an LRT was chosen as the best, most cost-effective yet city-building option. It was planned, funded, and already under construction. And the subway’s not going to happen: no funding is in place, Ford promised no tolls during the election campaign and has just repeated he’ll keep this promise, and furthermore, development charges or tax increment financing can only make up a fraction of the amount necessary. And these charges will reduce the amount of funding available to city coffers in the future because they’d go instead to paying off some mythical private sector investor. So instead of being a city-building visionary as you would have the Fords, they’d in fact bankrupt it for future generations (I won’t mention their operating deficit of $775 million this year).
Voters may have had good reasons for what they were doing in 1912 when they said no to the subway.
They were already paying for the surprisingly high costs of providing infrastructure to the areas that it annexed from 1909 to 1912. Some areas like Earlscourt had nothing at all. It’s the same reason that they city told the York Land Company to take a hike when they came calling to incorporate Leaside into Toronto. And later refused to move north into York.
Not sure if irony is the correct term here, but if the PEV wasn’t fitted for underground rail when constructed, it would have greatly increased the likelihood that the main west-east subway line would have run through the core of the city, rather than north of it. Thus forcing passengers to transfer at Yonge or St. George to get downtown rather than riding directly into it.
Nick – That’s the problem with you LRT fanatics. A lack of consistency. Thank goodness you weren’t around when the Yonge line was being extended (Summerhill….who on earth wants to go north of Bloor?).
Transfer City was a regional neighbourhood regeneration project. It was NOT a true transportation plan. Everyone who looks beyond the toy train mindset knows this. The speed, the spacing stops and the lack of signal priority doomed it. That plans was the biggest discredit to “rapid transit” since the St.Clair Boondoggle.
And if you’re so worried about money, then why not BRT? We can save $600 million on Finch if it was built as BRT and not LRT. Why is that not an option? Is it because you’re too good to ride a bus?
The REAL crime in this whole thing is that according to Steve Munro, Queen’s Park offered $2 billion to Sheppard provided that Eastern Eglinton could remain on surface and they turned it down. It’s the greatest crime of all.
I’m no economist, so I’m completely making this stuff up, but a guess would be that while commodities can shift production to elsewhere (the vast majority of cars are no longer made in the US or Canada, right?) you can’t shift construction of a building or infrastructure. It would be nice to have a subway line made up somewhere in China, with lax regulations and oops-we-killed-some-people labour laws, and then shipped over and installed, but the world doesn’t work that way. So while inflation for produce and manufactured goods and even many services has been kept low by globalization, infrastructure (and really large buildings, like stadiums) costs far more than the rate of overall inflation would suggest. As an anecdote to this theory, subways ARE in fact cheap to build in China, which is why they have 14 subway lines in Beijing, 12 of which are from the last decade.
By the way, I’m staying out of the troll war regarding LRT, but I’ll just say that no rails at all (which is the actual outcome of any Ford plan) is neither visionary nor citybuilding.
I would have liked to have seen a “What John Maynard Keynes or James Buchanan Says to David Miller’s (and previous council’s) Toronto” article.