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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A shaft underneath Bridge Street once used for dumping snow into the sewers.

Perhaps the most interesting underground features in the Montreal area are found within the old sewers built during the mid to late 1800s. Usually constructed entirely of brick and of sizes up to 9’ in diameter, they often appear to be steeped in history in a way that newer concrete sewers just can’t compare to. They have a warmer and organic quality to them as well that I tend to appreciate. Where concrete sewer systems can feel like cold modernist pieces of architecture, the brick ones seem more like inviting Victorian homes.

A good example of these characteristics can be found within the Point St. Charles Collector. As its name implies, this sewer was responsible for the drainage of the eastern half of Point St. Charles. (The western half was serviced by another sewer that I first started to explore in this entry). The sewer was also responsible for a portion of the neighbourhood once known as Victoriatown. Given that so little from this area can still be found at street level, it’s of some comfort that at least its sewer system can still be found and explored today.

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With no rain in the immediate forecast,  nel58 and I decided to re-visit a sewer that we had first entered two summers ago. We had to leave at the time because the air quality didn’t seem all that great.  I had sort of forgotten about it after getting distracted by a handful of other things around the city. Last night it was considerably fresher. Well, as fresh as a sewer can get, I suppose.  It didn’t smell like rotten eggs this time so that was good enough for us.

This was taken towards the end of the Point St-Charles Collector, near the intersection of Mill and Riverside in the area once known as Goose Village. It’s an old one; built between 1864 and 1866 when the city was beginning to develop a systematic drainage plan. Of course  it’s had its share alterations over the years, such as the side-pipe in the above photo which had to be patched up with concrete. Other sections have been walled off or filled in with rubble containing a fair amount of old glass and pieces of pottery.

More photos, maps, and historical stuff to follow soon. In the meantime, click the photo above for the larger version and (hopefully) enjoy.

Grit removal tanks of Montreal's wastewater treatment plant.

Montreal’s wastewater treatment plant can be found at the far east end of the island in Pointe Aux Trembles. It’s the largest in North America and ranks the third largest in the world- capable of handling 32 cubic metres of water a second.  Raw sewage (usually) ends up here via a network of deep-level tunnels referred to as interceptors. These interceptors form a ring around the island, collecting and distributing wastewater to the plant before it has a chance to enter the surrounding rivers. To get a better sense of how the interceptors work, you can have a look at the entry I wrote  here.

Montreal's wastewater treatment plant as seen from Microsoft Live Maps.

While it’s an impressive system in terms of its scope and capacity, the treatment process itself leaves much to be desired. In fact, it’s actually one of the worst in Canada. A national “report card” issued by the Sierra Club in 2004 gave the city’s treatment process a grade of F-. The only other city to receive a grade worse than Montreal was Victoria, a place which doesn’t even have a treatment process in place yet.

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Inside the City of Montreal's former water intake conduit

In my last entry I talked about Montreal’s Aqueduct canal and its role in bringing water to the city of Montreal. In this entry, we’ll begin to go underground, but first, a bit more history…

I mentioned the use of hydraulic machinery and how it was powered by water by the aqueduct. Only a small portion of that water (less than 5%) was actually sent through the pipes and into homes and businesses. By the late 1800s, several problems with this system started to make it less than ideal. The first issue was that demand for water was increasing and more horsepower was required to distribute it. The aqueduct at the turn of the century, roughly a quarter the width it is today, was incapable of providing the hydraulic horsepower necessary to power the pumps.

On top of this, the success of system was often at the whims of mother nature. Low water levels in the summer and ice blockages in the winter frequently reduced pumping capacity. As a result, steam power, which was both cost and labour intensive, would then have to be used as a back-up.

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Tell-tales suspended inside the Cote-St-Paul collector sewer.

One thing that’s been bugging me for the past couple of years is what purpose these suspended metal poles serve. They’re always found close to the top edge of a dropshaft that’s six or more feet in height.  Sometimes there are just one or two, or in the case of the sewer I was in last night, sometimes there’s a large batch of them. They’re always the same width and made with the same material. There are also eyelets at both ends of the pole: a large one at the top that fits through the fixture in the ceiling and a smaller one at the bottom. Both the old more recently built sewer systems in Montreal have them.

I once came across some blueprints from the City which referred to these poles as “tell-tales” but that doesn’t really “tell” me anything at all. They’re fairly light and swing back and forth easily if pushed. They’re not robust enough to serve as safety features, though they do come in handy for hanging onto if ever you want to step out close to the edge.  A chain or an actual railing would be much more practical if that’s what they were supposed to be used for.

They also don’t seem to be there to measure flow rates or water levels. The trash that accumulates on them gives some indication as to how high things might have been in the past, but wouldn’t provide the degree of accuracy to satisfy hydraulic engineers.

I know that tell-tales are used in sailing to help gauge wind direction and speed. I suppose that if there was a large enough air disturbance in the sewer, these poles might start start moving a little. Water falling down a dropshaft can definitely cause changes in air pressure which can often lead to problems, but I’d be surprised if the poles were hung up to indicate  that. I mean,  it also seems like a pretty low-rent way of doing it.

Anyone else out there have any ideas? Please don’t make me call the City’s Public Works department to get an answer for this one. You’re my only hope.

Update – As a friend of mine pointed out:

“I’m pretty sure the dangling things are warning devices similar to these. They’d indicate to anyone riding on top of a car an impending area of low clearance like an underpass. Underground, I suppose if a worker was disoriented and/or his flashlight died, a smack to the face from one these would prevent him from walking off a ledge.”

Works for me! Thanks, Rich.

Brick and ceramic tile block transition near the intersection of rue D'Argenson and Centre

Here’s a nice little find from the other night inside one of the older brick sewers running below Rue D’argenson in Point St. Charles. I had originally hoped to see something interesting where the sewer passes underneath the Lachine Canal and towards Rue St. Jacques. That ended up being a letdown with nothing but a dead-end chamber near the Canal’s edge not even worth photographing. Making our way in the opposite direction, we came across something uncommon for Montreal: a 150 meter section constructed using clay tile blocks.

It’s questionable as to why the transition occurs, but it’s possible that the brick sewer was initially laid during the late 1800s and the tile section  later during the early 1900s when the streets south of rue Centre began to fill in a bit more.  The sewer likely discharged into Riviere St-Pierre just ahead of the portion that had been converted into an open tailrace channel for the City’s Waterworks system. From that point everything would have been whisked away to Verdun and out to the St. Lawrence.

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There’s a terrific multi-page article about Montreal’s lost rivers in the Saturday edition of The Gazette. I’ve been working with journalist Marian Scott who did an excellent job researching the subject by bringing in a broad range of people including city historians, architects, engineers, geologists and environmentalists. It’s been a fun and interesting project and it was nice to see a few of my photos used. I really wasn’t expecting to see myself on the front page so that was a nice surprise.

Unfortunately what’s online isn’t quite as interesting without a lot of the visuals that are in the print version, but for anyone interested in having a read, you’ll find the different sections below.

Our island’s lost rivers – main article

‘Drainer’ explores the world of water under our feet – section about yours truly (a few of the numbers in there aren’t quite right, but otherwise all is good)

Water, water everywhere -  summary of some of the island’s lost watercourses

This CSI tracks a polluted creek – section involving Daniel Green of Le Société Pour Vaincre la Pollution (the Society to Conquer Pollution)