Toronto Power Generating Station

Standing on the bank of the Niagara River just above the falls, the Toronto Power Generating Station looks more like a museum of antiquities or a state bank than a place where water was turned into electricity. That was the point. The Toronto architect E. J. Lennox, who also designed Toronto's Old City Hall and the Casa Loma castle for one of the station's backers, gave the powerhouse a symmetrical Beaux-Arts front 132 metres long: a heavy Ionic portico at the centre, flanked by two long Ionic colonnades, all over a steel frame clad in brick and pale Indiana limestone. The riverside was already a celebrated landscape, and the building was meant to dignify it rather than spoil it.

The station was built by the Electrical Development Company of Ontario, a venture of the financiers William Mackenzie, Frederic Nicholls and Henry Pellatt, and it opened in 1906 to send power to Toronto. It was the first hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls owned entirely by Canadians. The engineering behind the façade was just as ambitious: a submerged dam and intake diverted river water into penstocks that dropped into a deep wheel pit, where turbines at the bottom drove generators on the floor above through long vertical shafts, and the spent water was carried away through a brick-lined tailrace tunnel that emerges at the foot of the falls. At its height the plant produced some 137,500 horsepower, generated at 25 cycles per second.

Ontario Hydro bought the station in 1922 and ran it until February 1974. It was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1983, both as an engineering landmark and as an early and unusual use of Beaux-Arts design for an industrial building in the country, and in 2007 it passed to the Niagara Parks Commission. Its heritage values include not only the classical exterior but also the marble finishes of the interior and the hydraulic works hidden beneath. From the Niagara Parkway the long colonnade reads beautifully against the rapids, and it is worth pausing here on the way to the Horseshoe Falls to take in how seriously the builders of Canada's hydroelectric age took their architecture.

Getting there

The station stands on the Niagara Parkway in Niagara Falls, Ontario, about 3 km from the centre of the city and within walking distance of the Horseshoe Falls viewpoints. The nearest airport is Niagara Falls International (IAG), across the river in the United States, about 11 km away; on the Canadian side, Niagara District Airport (YCM) is about 16 km away. The exterior can be seen from the parkway and the riverside promenade.