As part of Doors Open Toronto 2022, I rode my bike to the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant yesterday to check it out.
The Wikipedia page will tell you some of the films and shows to feature this facility, but it's not an exhaustive list.
Here's what's listed there right now:
- The building of the plant is vividly recounted in Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion.
- The headquarters of "The Man" in the 2002 comedy Undercover Brother.
- A prison in the 1998 comedy Half Baked.
- An asylum in the 1995 horror film In the Mouth of Madness.
- "The Centre," a nefarious think tank in the television series The Pretender.
- Base of operations for Genomex, an antagonistic corporation in the television series Mutant X.
- The Royal Canadian Institute for the Mentally Insane (next door to Elsinore Brewery) in the 1983 film Strange Brew.
- The Henry Ford Centre for the Criminally Insane, as seen in Robocop: The Series.
- The Langstaff Maximum Security Prison, as seen in Flashpoint in the episode Just a Man.
- The Mellonville Maximum Security Prison, as seen in an SCTV episode (1982).
- A prison in the Psi Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal episode "Solitary Confinement."
- "Lake District Federal Prison" in Between in the episode School's Out.
- A prison building in the Conviction episode "A Different Kind of Death."
- A prison in the closing scenes of The Big Heist, when Donald Sutherland's character enters to serve a 20-year sentence.
- "Ekart County Jail" in the 2015 movie Regression.
- "U.N. Penitentiary Chesapeake Conservancy Zone" in the 2020 season of The Expanse.
- A Children’s Hospital in Guillermo Del Toro’s 1997 film Mimic.
- The office of Richard Jenkins' character, Ezra Grindle, a factory executive with a dark past, in Guillermo Del Toro’s Nightmare Alley.
- Womens Prison in Mayor of Kingstown
Toronto Mike'd listeners heard Blair Packham and me talking about the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant during his return visit on May 20th. That's because it's featured on the cover of The Jitters' self-titled debut.
Here's that cover.
For what it's worth, I'm a huge fan of Toronto's drinking water. I drink litres of the stuff straight from the tap each and every day.
Here are a few pictures from inside.
