A boardwalk runs along Lake Ontario past the Art Deco R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant. Queen Street East runs a block inland, lined with independent shops.
What The Beaches looks like
is the main shopping street in the Beaches, running from Victoria Park Avenue to Coxwell Avenue. The independent shops along it turn over often enough that the street looks a little different from one year to the next. The Beaches Branch of the Toronto Public Library, one of the city's four original Carnegie branches, has stood on the street since 1916. The side streets running off Queen are mostly semi-detached and larger Victorian and Edwardian houses, with a scattering of low apartment buildings behind them.
South of the street, a single stretch of sand runs the length of the neighbourhood, backed by a boardwalk and a parallel bike path. The city enlarged the beach with wooden groynes in 1930, and the boardwalk opened two years later. Lake currents keep pushing the sand west. The Scarborough Bluffs to the east used to replenish it through erosion, and rock groynes now hold the shoreline in place instead. runs down to the lake partway along the boardwalk. The has stood at the foot of Leuty Avenue since 1920.
At the eastern end of the beach, where Queen Street runs out at Victoria Park Avenue, the sits on a slope above the water. Construction started in 1932 on the site of a nineteenth-century amusement park, and the plant went into service in 1941. It was built in the Art Deco style, with a long arcaded wall, a central tower and marble-lined corridors inside. It still supplies close to a third of the city's water.
Films shot in The Beaches
The sits at the far east end of Queen Street. It has played more fictional institutions than almost any other building in Toronto. Strange Brew used its exterior as the Royal Canadian Institute for the Mentally Insane, next door to the fictional Elsinore Brewery. Killjoys, the Space science fiction series, used it as Medidas City on the fictional planet Qresh. Two other productions used the plant even more fully. Down at the other end of the neighbourhood, has stood in for an ordinary main street more than once. The Black Stallion used the former bank building at Kenilworth Avenue, now the Stone Lion pub, for a shot of a horse galloping past a teller's window. Frequency, Angel Eyes and Murder at 1600 all filmed at the Garden Gate Restaurant, a Chinese restaurant known locally as the Goof.
In the Mouth of Madness, 1995
John Carpenter's film opens on the plant's exterior. The production used it again for the interior of the asylum, where Sam Neill's character tells his story, held alongside John Glover and David Warner.
Nightmare Alley, 2021
Guillermo del Toro's film used the plant for the scene where Stan Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) arrives to meet Ezra Grindle (Richard Jenkins), not yet realizing he is about to be interrogated.
What The Beaches can double for
The Beaches can stand in for an Art Deco asylum, prison or research headquarters and an ordinary main street storefront.
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