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.

Brick meets concrete somewhere at the south end of Toronto's "Humble Howard"

That’s not to say that Toronto has better or more interesting stuff (most of the time, anyway) , but because it’s so spread out and is, in many ways, a bit more cosmopolitan, there’s always a sense that one could never run out of new things to find and to try and get into. Just when you think everything in that city has already been cracked, something new and exciting inevitably comes along.

Montreal, on the other hand, tends to feel a bit more finite in its opportunities. While we have an extensive sewer system, much of which can be walked through, it tends to lack in other areas such as steam and service tunnels or infrastructure related to its waterworks. I get the feeling that in a couple of years, I’ll be starting to run out of things to put down on my to-do list. I have no reason to complain right now, not while I still have a pile of things to get to and to try and document well,  but I can feel it coming.

What appears to be an overflow pit for a low-level sewer found on the right side of Rochester's Densmore Creek drain.

Rochester is another city that seems ripe for great discoveries, mostly because it’s an old city, but also because so little of it seems to have been examined in detail thus far. It also features the impressive Deep-Rock Tunnel System, a sewer overflow system that puts Montreal’s interceptor network to shame.

After reading about the exploits of two underground enthusiasts living there, we decided to take the long way back to Montreal and meet up with the two of them. “Trent” and “Whittaker Owens” guided us through a rather interesting storm drainage system that involves a mammoth overflow chamber, colloquially referred to as the “Titanic Room” due to the bow-like structure planted in the middle of the room.

Inside Rochester's "Titanic Room" aka the overflow chamber of the Densmore Diversion Facility.

The rest of the drain is arch-shaped, similar in style, but far larger than Toronto’s “High There” and the Point St. Charles Collector of Montreal.

Inside the big arch that makes up the better part of this Rochester drain.

Also of interest along the way were two flooded stone pits located off to the side with the smell of combined sewerflow wafting up from below. I’m not familiar enough with the city’s system to be able to make sense of how all of this fits together. I’ll leave any explanations to its local explorers who know far more about these things than I do.

Additional  underground reading & viewing:

Toronto
Vanishing Point
Angels of the Underground
Jon Muldoon’s image collection

Rochester

Trent’s Flickr collections

So  “construction season” started a few days ago here in Montreal, and with it came the City’s announcement that they’ll be spending a record $608 million this year on road and underground infrastructure projects. According to a CBC report, roughly half of that amount will be spent on sewers, but I’m guessing this will mostly involve replacing watermains.  Journalists have this habit of referring to any underground pipe as being a sewer regardless of its function.

Construction crews have been busy ripping up the asphalt of the streets for awhile now, replacing the century-old iron mains with what looks to be  PVC pipe. It’s for this reason that portions of Notre Dame and Maisonneuve are currently closed off to general traffic. I’m sure overhauling some of  the older brick sewers is next on the agenda. Any piece of infrastructure that’s approaching 150 years old is bound to make any civil works engineer nervous. While I insist the old brick sewers are still in reasonably good shape, maybe the people who get paid to inspect them for a living have a better idea as to what’s on the verge of collapsing and what isn’t. Or maybe it’s just a make-work thing. Who knows?

In terms of what I do, construction and rehabilitation has its advantages and disadvantages.  On the positive side, it can help make things become more accessible. For eg:  when streets get closed off to traffic, it makes it much easier to get down inside of things, like a manhole that’s situated in the middle of the road.  The drawback, at least for myself,  is that with all this construction can come loss.  I’m always afraid that some of my favourite underground things in the city might someday get replaced using modern materials thus diminishing some of their charms.

The brick old collector sewer that runs below Rue McGill is a good example of this. A few years ago a pre-fab concrete pipe was inserted through much of its length. As you’ll see from the before and after photos, the end result isn’t quite as appealing to the eye.  I’ll admit, the fear of losing these sorts of things is pretty selfish.  I know that if anything did happen to break down or collapse, it would likely cause substantial problems for a large number of people— things that would make my own complaints about lost photo-ops seem rather petty in comparison. Then again, given the number of people who will likely be complaining to no end about traffic delays over the next few months, I probably shouldn’t feel too bad about it, should I?

The West Island of Montreal offers what are essentially the low-lying fruit for underground exploring. The primarily residential areas of Pointe-Claire, Dorval and Beaconsfield all make use of a separated sewer system with one set of pipes for sewage and another for stormwater. Storm drains discharge directly into the river (or Lac St-Louis) and if one knows where the larger outfalls are, one can simply put on a pair of rubber boots (or even flip-flops) and walk on in.

Most of the time this would be considered a good thing, but it seems as though the majority of storm drains in this part of the island were built during the 1970s or later using fairly simple prefab concrete components. Put another way: if you’ve been in more than a few, they’re kind of boring.

Still, they offer a respite from the stress that comes with exploring the combined sewers found elsewhere on the island. You don’t have to worry about manhole covers, e-coli poisoning, industrial contaminants, hydrogen sulfide, rats (if you’re afraid of them) or things getting swept away through three feet of fast-flowing grey water. Every so often it’s nice to not have deal with such challenges.

A  comment left by Jean Naimard in one of my recent entries suggested I take a look at an outfall for a storm drain in Beaconsfield. It’s actually one that my friends and I had first eyeballed this past winter. It was never exactly a high priority, but when plans to go through the next stretch of Riviere St-Pierre with a friend were canceled, I decided to go and have a further look on my own.

Enter “7-UP”

The double outlet of 7-UP. Live or Dead. The Choice is Yours.

The slightly vandalized outfall is found at the edge of Lac St-Louis near a quiet residential street. A box-shaped culvert divided in two carries the water of a small creek (Ruisseau St-James) underneath Blvd St. Charles. The creek soon re-appears on the other side of the street at the edge of someone’s side yard. Seeing this, one might be tricked into thinking there’s nothing more to it than that. However, if you wade through the channel on the left side, you’ll find a second drain that splits off to the north. Unfortunately, this is about as surprising as things get.

Looking back through to the outlet of the west conduit.

The junction where the hidden storm drain splits off to the right.

For the next kilometer it’s straight reinforced concrete pipe. It starts off six feet in diameter then gradually shrinks down to less than four at which point there’s little incentive to go any further.

Standard-issue concrete pipe. Note the lines from the varying water levels.

The only thing to remove a bit of the monotony (and the back-aches) are seven manhole chambers, each marked with dayglo spraypaint by a group of kids who were bold enough to venture through this drain on February 26th, 1972. How do I know the date? Easy. They wrote it on the wall.

The February 26th, 1972 chamber.

One chamber has a customary penis drawn on its walls (labeled “penis”, just in case there was any doubt), another “Far Out!”, while the 7th and final one simply says “7-UP.” I’m guessing even they were bored at that point.

Beyond the juvenile quirks, there isn’t much else that’s worth pointing out. The brain-like flowstone in the 7-UP chamber is a nice touch as are the different types of minnows to be found along the way. Most of the drain is filled with several inches of rock debris, giving things the look and feel of a natural creek bed. Seeing small fish swimming about only adds to this illusion.

Trips to other storm drains in Montreal, especially ones taken during the middle of summer, will often reveal an abundance of living creatures: various species of spiders and insects, crayfish, even raccoons. It’s not quite as exciting as coming across an alligator in the sewers, but given that this is the island of Montreal, you have to take what you can get.

I’ve probably done a poor job pitching things, but a storm drain like this is actually the perfect starting point for anyone interested in exploring the underground themselves. While not as exciting as some of the older sewers in Montreal, it would still give someone a good idea of what it’s like to be underground without any of the risks mentioned earlier. If there were enough interest, I’d like to take a small group of people on an interpretive walk of sorts through one of the storm drains in Pointe Claire. The one I have in mind has a few more things going for it. More on that later, though.

View this location in Google Maps.