As I walk down stairs beside a defunct, gutted escalator, which clearly has not been cleaned for years, a thought dawns on me: someone, a few hundred feet above, is eating a burrito right now. Standing thirty metres below the city street in an abandoned subway station tends to conjure such thoughts.
There’s nothing particularly special about urban burrito consumption in and of itself: the vertical coincidence of incongruous events is one of the features of city living. It’s not that special. Except for one thing: Chow Yun Fat has been under some of the same burritos. So has Michael Douglas, Keanu Reeves, Paul Hogan—the list goes on.
Bay Lower, the TTC’s decommissioned station, has looked better. In fact, during the seven months between February and September 1966, Bay Lower was a fully operational stop on the Toronto Transit Commission’s subway line. That’s hard to imagine now: its surfaces are coated in a black residue, the remains of an adhesive used to cover the TTC’s tiles and materials to recreate the look of a New York subway station.
When asked why the TTC shut down the station, TTC filming and tours co-ordinator Sandy Tsirlis answered, “It was just too confusing.” Back in the day, trains used to switch between the Yonge-University line and the Bloor line, complicating what is now an independent two-line system (actually, three with the eerily empty Sheppard line). “People used to be going north to Downsview, then they’d suddenly be going west to Kipling or something,” said Tsirlis.
Although decommissioned, Bay Lower is still in use. A maintenance car and workers huff at the far end of the platform. There are boxes and fan equipment strewn about. One box is marked “Precision Escalator Products.” According to Ms. Tsirlis, the TTC sometimes uses this place for short-term storage, as well as training new TTC personnel. The station is also a film set, though you wouldn’t know it from looking around. Johnny Mnemonic, Don’t Say a Word—and as a small crew poster at the top of the stairs indicates—the upcoming film Bulletproof Monk have been filmed here. And, of course, Crocodile Dundee.
Bay Lower doesn’t look like Bay Upper. The lights are slightly different, and there are distinctly 60s-looking speakers running along the ceiling of the platform. As well, sets of small bars hang down between the pillars, to which station signs and artifacts from other locales, fictional or otherwise, can be attached.
“One rule we have down here is no new drilling,” says Tsirlis. The station is cleaned and gets a power-wash every so often, but the stress drilling puts on the station’s structure isn’t worth the maintenance it would accomplish. Some work in the station is going on, though. A large white enclosure squats by the maintenance workers—“That’s just so they can smoke. They’re not supposed to,” says Tsirlis.
Even though it’s a storage room, training space and movie set, it’s hard to forget you’re still in a subway system, even when the trains aren’t running through it. As another train rumbles overhead, I notice ads on the wall that I haven’t seen in other stations. Ads for Dooney and Burke, and something called a “man-wich,” which I can only assume is some form of oversized American sandwich. There’s some graffiti on the walls, something else I don’t often see in TTC stations. Sandy assures me that’s not part of a set. “Sometimes we find people sleeping down here.”
There are even websites about how to get into TTC stations. The website www.infiltration.org features an unofficial tour of the off-limits areas of the TTC. It also indicates the tracks between Museum station and Bay Lower, the only path of access to those without keys, are one of the best places to get killed in the subway system.
How much would Bay Lower be to rent for someone wanting to make some sort of motion picture? “It’s pretty costly,” says Tsirlis. “We have to pay workers for overtime and benefits. Then we have to pay for power, trains and utilities. The location fee by itself, without trains, starts around four to five hundred dollars an hour.” Trains are an extra hundred dollars per hour each.
Looking around at the stretch of concrete platform, I can’t help but compare the rental cost to my own living space. I suppose that five hundred dollars wouldn’t be that bad. After all, it’s close to transit.
Photograph by Simon Turnbull
