There was a time when the City of Toronto employed a whole roster of full-time, in-house architects to ensure that our public buildings were suitably grand—even the toilets. The city built nine public washrooms in the 1920s, all as fussed over as any library or institutional building. Today, only one remains.
The Prince Edward Viaduct Public Lavatory, at 55 Danforth Ave., was designed by architect G.F.W. Price with brass fixtures and solid-wood stalls, and it was “inspired by medieval and classical prototypes,” according to a city heritage designation from 2007. It outlasted the city’s other eight toilets, and in 1988 was still staffed by two attendants (male and female) on weekdays 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. It was decommissioned that year to be converted into a Greek cultural centre. One neighbourhood local, Richard Ryan, told the Toronto Star at the time that he’d used the toilet since emigrating from Ireland in 1929: “Why the hell close it now?” But it couldn’t have lasted much longer—with only a few dozen users a day, the maintenance cost was calculated to be $17 per flush.
Today, the building is occupied by a French-immersion school, École Napoléon. When asked if the building retains any vestige of its original use, an incredulous staffer at the school would only say, “What, you expect us to work in a toilet?”
