Dave HuggardOn the outside, they look like normal suburban houses. But what’s inside will shock you! Literally, that is.
These brick houses, complete with doors, muntined windows, standard large suburban lawns and practical shrubbery, are owned by Toronto Hydro. Built in the post-war years, they house the transformers that step down the voltage from nearby high-tension powerlines for the houses in the neighbourhood. The only real signs that they don’t harbour normal suburbanites are some hefty security cameras, a bit of odd telemetry equipment on the roof, and solid metal front doors with a sign suggesting the distinct possibility of electrocution. Maybe at night you wouldn’t see anyone sitting on their sofa watching Netflix, and their Christmas/ Hallowe’en/ Diwali decorations are probably not up to neighbourhood standards. But otherwise they have it all: driveways, front paths with the correct number of weeds, slightly crooked downspouts, some ornate brickwork, even a chimney in one case, and – oddly – standard power wires coming in from the poles on the street. I wondered if the power company cuts off the electricity if they are late paying their bill.
Seeing and sketching some of the remaining hundred or so transformer houses has been on my bucket list (or would have been, if I had one) ever since I read about them in the spectacularly esoteric Cabinet magazine. There is also a great article about them on 99percentinvisible, which – thank you! – includes a map of many of the houses from another interesting article on spacing.ca. I had a spare hour or two in Toronto, so I zipped around to three of these houses near my long-ago neighbourhood and sketched them on a hot sunny Toronto afternoon. At the last one I could sit gratefully in the shade of a catalpa thoughtfully provided by the transformer-residents.
I’m pleased that such a delightfully quirky thing exists, and that there are magazines and websites that also exult in them. I do admit that there was a little social sloganeer in my head saying “Why can we build houses for transformers, but not for homeless people?” But I noticed that almost everyone in the area is a “visible minority” (a fairly ridiculous phrase in a part of Toronto where every group is a minority, even those who trace their ancestry back to William the Conqueror). Most are probably first- or second-generation Canadians, and I’m happy that they too can live in neighbourhoods not blighted by huge industrial substations. And besides, the transformer-neighbours never play their music too loud on a Saturday night.