The Bloor Street Viaduct, designed to transport traffic, water and electricity, is impressive in scale, stretching 494 metres across the Don Valley and 40 metres below.

On Oct. 18, 1918, the day the viaduct formally opened to the public, the Toronto Daily Star headlined with jubilant news about another bridge: Zeebrugge (“Sea Bridge”), the Belgian port and site of Germany’s last U-boat base on the Flanders coast, had been captured by the British.

And while a “considerable crowd” gathered in Toronto to mark the opening of the bridge, which joined Bloor Street East with the Danforth and paved the way for a rapid expansion of the city east of the Don River, the faraway continental war cast its shadow over the celebrations.

“We will not have any more speeches,” announced Mayor Tommy Church, “for if we keep you here any longer we will be violating Dr. Hastings regulations as to gatherings of people,” referring to efforts by the city’s medical officer of health to contain the Spanish influenza, which had spread from the battlefields of Europe across the globe and would ultimately claim more lives than the war itself.

So, with three cheers to the King, Public Commissioner of Public Works R.C. Harris and construction engineer Thomas Tayor (at home with the flu), the crowd was dispersed and the City Hall party “boarded their motor cars” and drove, for the first time, over the Don Valley and back to their offices.

R.C. Harris, the man behind the bridge, is a contested figure. The longest-serving works commissioner in the city’s history, who occupied the position for 33 years from 1912-1945, he has been credited with shaping 20th-century Toronto like no other.

In addition to the Bloor Viaduct, formally called the Prince Edward Viaduct, Harris was responsible for a complete overhaul of the city’s water treatment system. He commissioned more than 1,100 kilometres of paved roads and sidewalks, sewers, streetcar tracks, public baths and bridges. Unlike his predecessors, he was as interested in form as in function — most evident in the monumental art deco-style water filtration plant at Victoria Park that bears his name.

Rarely without a camera around his neck, Harris took thousands of pictures of people and civic projects in this city and others, which he developed in his own darkroom. He was a far-sighted planner who often butted heads with council, famously insisting, for instance, that the viaduct have a second lower deck for mass transit — anticipating the Bloor/Danforth subway that would be built half a century later, in 1966.

Harris is a central character in Michael Ondaatje’s novel In the Skin of a Lion. He is portrayed as an arrogant bureaucrat, obsessed with his own legacy. And while he was rotund, he was probably not as ego-driven as Ondaatje’s depiction suggests.

Harris’s real obsession was with public health, specifically with water; under his tenure, the infant mortality rate in Toronto dropped from 140 per 1,000 live births to less than half of that, making Toronto a model of public health in North America. This obsession was likely personal: although he never talked about it publicly, Harris’s second son, Emerson, died at six months from a Strep A skin infection associated with unhygienic conditions, likely contaminated water.

The viaduct exerted a strange pull on young adventure-seekers and ravine-roamers, when these were still sanctioned. My father, who spent his early childhood in a neighbourhood just east of the valley, remembers watching his older brother crossing the steel girding under the bridge. This achievement, if true, did not make the news, but David Stewart’s did. On June 3, 1957, the 11-year-old boy and his brother were playing follow-the-leader along the bridge’s railing, when a gust of wind sent David over the edge, falling 18 metres to land on the only soft patch of ground far and wide: “Mud Spot Saves Boy” ran the Toronto Daily Star’s headline.

Over the years, the bridge came to attract stunts of a more tragic nature. By 1997, suicide from the bridge was occurring on average every 22 days, a rate topped only in North America by the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

Toronto city council voted to erect a barrier, which was completed in 2003. Designed by architect Dereck Revington, the elegant structure of cantilevered steel rods was called the “Luminous Veil” in reference to a lighting concept for the bridge that was too expensive to realize at the time.

In honour of the Pan Am Games, the project has been completed; the barrier is now illuminated with an LED lighting system that responds to weather, temperature and wind, creating what Revington describes as a “500-metre canvas.”

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There was some wrangling at city council over this project, with some, including the mayor, questioning the wisdom of a $2.8-million investment in esthetics in a city full of potholes. Ultimately, beauty won out.

R.C. Harris would have approved.

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