Racing down the stairs, I knew the familiar surroundings of my everyday subway commute. My backpack snugly in place, having just come from class, I was fiddling with my mini-disc player; just the usual sort of commuter fidgeting. But this time, as I approached the collector’s booth, I was waved through-without having to part with the usual $2.50-by Sandy Tsirlis, the Toronto Transit Commission’s Filming and Tours coordinator. On the other side of the turnstiles, waiting for me along with Tsirlis, was Toronto Transit Commissioner Bill Saundercook. This was no ordinary ticket to ride.
After introductions, we set out for our strange destination, descending from Bay station’s mezzanine to the bustling platform below. But instead of waiting for the subway, Tsirlis led our us to an innocuous steel door in the middle of the platform that looks like the entrance to every other storage closet or maintenance hatch in the TTC system. This door, however, was not like the others. It opened to a set of tiled stairs identical to the ones we had just descended to the platform. Filing down, we were confronted with a strange prospect: an eerie, empty replica of the station platform we just left. Known to few and seen by even fewer, the platform we found ourselves on was that of Toronto’s so-called “lost subway station,” Lower Bay.
Built in the mid-1960s as part of the Bloor-Danforth expansion to Toronto’s subway system, Lower Bay (or Bay Lower as it was officially known) was designed to link up the existing University line with the new east-west subway. The Lower Bay platform was opened, along with the rest of the Bloor-Danforth extension, in 1966, making it possible to catch a train along the east-west corridor that would head downtown. But with the two lines connected, a delay at any point on the system jammed up both lines, bringing the whole subway system to a screeching halt. After polling commuters and finding that most commuters didn’t care about the service, the TTC abandoned the station after only six months. The north-south and the east-west lines were separated and remain so today.
In addition to being used for storage and staff training, the station has found a second life as a backdrop for film and television shoots. Generally dressed up as somewhere American, Lower Bay has been featured in both big-budget blockbusters and bargain-bin TV schlock.
Today, Saundercook, one of Toronto’s newest TTC Commissioners and a long-time subway commuter, wanted to see the station with his own eyes, hopeful that maybe a small, unused link in Toronto’s transit chain might help revitalize a congested system. Saundercook isn’t sure exactly what should be done with the space-reopening the line or turning the station into a transit museum have both been floated as ideas but so far haven’t gone anywhere-but thinks the possibility of using it more effectively should be explored.
As our entourage descended into the station, I was struck by the height of the ceiling. It feels cavernous compared to most TTC stations, with a ceiling several feet higher than Upper Bay’s. The platform was also much cleaner than I expected, considering that the place has been mothballed for decades. There was a fair amount of garbage, but if you tilted your head and squinted, Lower Bay could have been a normal station after a busy day of litter-prone commuters had passed through. All of the standard TTC fluorescent lights were in operation overhead, and the walls weren’t noticeably dirtier than Upper Bay’s. The yellow safety strips that line the platforms in other stations were conspicuously absent.
As we proceeded down the length of the station’s island, what used to be an escalator came into view. Its stairs had long since been ripped out, and only the rubber handrails remained. At the western edge of the platform, drywall had been erected to section off a locked storage room, and the western wall of the station had been recently repainted black, likely, I was informed, for a movie shoot. Signal lights glowed red beyond the mouth of the tunnel, waiting for a train that would never come.
As we walked, Saundercook wondered aloud about the logic of letting a usable station sit vacant, when nearby Yonge was pressed to capacity during rush hour every evening.
“Consider the amount of money spent in today’s dollars for a sophisticated transfer on the subway that has been mothballed,” he said. “Can we do something with today’s technology that would overcome the issues with the delays?” he asked, as a train thundered overhead into Upper Bay.
Continuing the tour, I conceded to myself that one of my principal desires for wanting to see Lower Bay (a desire that had nothing to do with transit congestion) wasn’t going to be realized. In touring Lower Bay, I was hoping the tiled stairs would somehow lead me into the subway’s optimistic, jet-age past: to a space so public, and so mercifully free of advertising, that entering it would be like time travel. A place where one could imagine the ladies in beehive hairdos primly clicking across the platform. Where one could imagine the echoing voices of the men talking about Lester Pearson and the Cold War. I wanted to see a subway station of the 1960s, even a grimy, abandoned one-especially a grimy, abandoned one. But the walls of Lower Bay, walls that have not seen paying passengers since 1966, turned out to be festooned with the trappings of the modern world.
In this case, fake advertisements: props from film shoots yet to be taken down. Fake billboards advertising real products-Axe body spray, Honda, T-Mobile-undoubtedly served as product placements in the background of some thrilling subway action sequence, a more glamorous fate than the nearly identical ads on the subway platform just upstairs. Either way, these ads, and an inexplicable copy of the Toronto Star from last August sitting crumpled on the floor next to the stairs, erased any hope of an encounter with some forgotten Toronto past. Turns out Toronto’s lost subway station wasn’t quite as lost as its commercialized cousins. All it needed was a few flashing plasma TVs.
Back on the eastern side of the platform, the TTC had created another storage space, this one out of chain link fence, so the dusty machine parts-some of them looking like they’d been dropped there in 1966 and never moved-were visible inside. The corral was also unlocked, much to the chagrin of Tsirlis. From this side of the platform, the trains running from Yonge to Upper Bay were visible (and very audible) in the tunnels. I asked Tsirlis about some very un-Hollywood- looking grafitti that didn’t look like it belonged on a movie set, and she explained that the station has become a target in recent years for “urban infiltrators”-those looking to explore urban space off limits to the general public.
Tsirlis said that TTC security routinely catches trespassers in the tunnels leading to the abandoned station. Even though the track between Museum and Lower Bay is not in regular service, Tsirlis said it is still used to transport equipment from time to time and that this, coupled with the hazard of an electrified third rail running along the floor of the tunnel, make an unauthorized excursion to Lower Bay a potentially life-ending proposition.
“The rails are always live,” she said, “I don’t know why anyone would take the risk.”
Back at the base of the stairs, Tsirlis brought our hour-long sightsee to a close, and we headed back up to Lower Bay’s populated doppelgänger. As soon as we were back among the public, a disgruntled elderly commuter, seeing the TTC pin on Saundercook’s lapel, rushed up and began to offer his acerbic opinions about the demise of the St. Clair streetcar right-of-way. It was clear my ride, out of the ordinary as it was, was over. I looked back at that innocuous steel door and wondered if Lower Bay might might some day be known not as a dysfunctional station that the TTC lost, but an idiosyncratic treasure that was found again.
