I have a feeling we're not in Montreal anymore.

I’ve been asked a number of times if I’ve ever come across anything underground in Montreal that’s surprised me.  I never really quite know what to say since most of what I see is fairly predictable. It’s mostly pipes and chambers of varying sizes, constructed out of either concrete, brick or occasionally metal. I haven’t (yet) come across any dead bodies, pirate ships or gold coins — although I did find an old wallet once. What surprises do exist usually aren’t worth mentioning; a section that abruptly ends or a stretch that gets larger in diameter when you were expecting it to get smaller. Not exactly the sort of stuff that inspires answers people are hoping to hear.

Occasionally, though, I do come across things that I’d consider to be quite out of the ordinary and this entry involves one such example.

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Decarie-Raimbault sewer excavation. Montreal, 1958

Here’s a little quote that I discovered the other day that I’m quite fond of.  Taken from the book City A-Z, which conveniently enough, can be browsed through online.

The sewers are the hidden underground beyond time. Unlike the carefully counted, quantified, rationalized into the time-space orders of the above-ground city, the sewers are the randomness of what is left over. These are mythic bowels of the city, repository of unacknowledged histories. This is where all sorts of family dirt ends up.

*Insert obligatory “sorry for the lack up updates” statement here*

A fresh post is coming up tomorrow and it’ll be far better than this one, I promise.

The lovely three meter wide brick pipe of Toronto's "Humble Howard."

A couple of weeks ago I made a trip back to my old underground stomping (sloshing?) grounds of Toronto to go and have a look at a recent discovery made by a group of local explorers. “Humble Howard”, named after Toronto’s first land surveyor John Howard, consists of a 3 meter-high circular brick sewer that starts at the northeastern edge of High Park and eventually makes it way down towards Lake Ontario. Today it serves primarily as an overflow conduit for the smaller sewers if ever ever the city’s interceptors become overburdened.

The evening I visited the system with Kowalski, nel58 and Controleman led to the discovery of a beautiful  (but extremely foggy) connecting sewer built of brick and concrete. Its shape and overall atmosphere  gave it a certain warmth and coziness. I would have gladly followed it to its conclusion had it not been so late in the evening at that point.

Inside the combined sewer that was given the nickname "High There."

While I can’t say I’ve missed Toronto that much since moving to Montreal three years ago, I am envious of its range of possibilities when it comes to exploring the underground. Even after a decade of people actively exploring it and looking for new things to get into, there’s still a feeling that there’s still a lot of infrastructure down there that remains untapped.

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