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