A few weeks ago I visited Old Delhi in India, a dense cluster of buildings and narrow streets. Imagine a dozen Kensington Markets stacked on top of each other and squished together. I was struck by the layers of wires on all the buildings, like an electric spider web covering the entire neighbourhood.

There’s a Hindi word called “jugaad” that describes makeshift solutions, and the ad hoc wiring is Delhi is part of that tradition. Here in Toronto jugaad is frowned upon, violating bylaws and other regulations, but there was something romantic about all those wires, used and unused, all signs of human endeavour and ingenuity.

We’ve got some electric layers here too, though a bit subtler than Delhi’s. Toronto tends to clean up its old bits, whereas in Delhi the old layers lingered among the new. Kensington Market works this way, not always polished, with traces of the discarded past hanging around. With regard to electricity, the basement rafters of old Toronto houses are like Delhi: defunct old knob and tube wiring remaining next to phone, cable and new, less flammable, hydro wires.

Providing electricity to the city remains a provisional effort, a battle against the elements and decay. An explosion in a downtown hydro vault can still bring the TTC to a standstill and the power can still flicker or go off during a storm.

All around the city, especially in the older parts, wooden hydro poles with the familiar T silhouette at the top are relics from the early days of electrification. Some people detest them, think they look shabby or ramshackle, but it’s good to be reminded this is still a bit of a frontier town, growing fast and figuring itself out.

Some wooden poles are new but temporary, like those found around recent developments, but many are still in use. Along some of the old rail corridors, like the Barrie Go Train line north of Dupont St. near Lansdowne Ave., old glass insulators are still perched on near-ancient wooden poles, the wires drooping between them, stretched with time.

It’s an interesting combination, the oldest kind of infrastructure carrying the power that fuels our most contemporary and critical devices. Thrilling, even: the bending of time where more than a century of various technologies are bundled together to make things work today. A time-based jugaad, if there is such a thing.

A timeline of Toronto electrification can be found on a fence installed last year around the employee parking lot behind Toronto Hydro’s headquarters on Carlton St., just east of Yonge. The design looks vaguely like Toronto’s streetgrid and beginning with 1910, each section has an archival photo of significant moments in the city’s electrification.

1911, for instance, shows Old City Hall wired up with lights, almost Delhi style, with the words HYDRO — ELECTRIC over the entrance: a celebration of flipping the switch and turning the lights on.

That we still call it “hydro” is a kind of pleasant and comfortable euphemism as only about a quarter of Ontario’s electricity is water generated, the rest coming from nuclear, gas, or renewable sources.

When the power lines are buried, arguably beautifying streetscapes, we lose touch with the herculean effort it takes to power everything up. The wood poles, with buzzing transformers that sometimes spark remind us electricity is a real force, but our visible hydro infrastructure isn’t always so brutish.

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Hydro substations, especially in more suburban, residential areas, are often camouflaged as homes, only the hum of electricity from within and no trespassing signs give them away. Not all try to hide, as some are elegant mid-century bunkers with TORONTO HYDRO ELECTRIC SYSTEM written in beautiful Neutraface typeface across the front, sometimes fashioned in copper, the green letters bleeding their patina onto the building below.

“Electricity is noble,” these bunkers suggest. But it’s rough and raw too. It’s nice to have both versions on Toronto streets.

Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef

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