[URBAN NOTE] "'It was 50 years ago today...' University subway opened February 28, 1963"

[rfmcdonald]

Days after celebrating the 47th anniversary of the Bloor-Danforth subway line, Transit Toronto's Robert MacFarlane commemorated yesterday the 50th anniversary of the University line. In his telling, the University line running north up University Avenue to Bloor Street was a bit of a white elephant until the construction of the Spadina line north of Bloor fifteen years later.

One of my earliest memories of traveling by transit in Toronto stems from the early 1960s. While riding along a Queen streetcar heading toward downtown with my mother and my aunt, the car clattered across the sturdy wooden blocks that carried traffic on Queen Street across the excavation for the future Osgoode subway station at University Avenue.

“Are they really building a subway on University Avenue?”, my mother asked her sister. “Who’s going to use that thing? There’s already a subway a few blocks away!” Then she rolled her eyes — as she still does today — whenever examples of bureaucratic folly confront her.

For many years, the University subway, which opened 50 years ago today, must have, indeed, seemed like folly. The line extended the successful Yonge subway beyond Union Station and then northward, back the way it came to end at St. George. For many people, the six-station line seemed a waste of time and money, a line that, in most peoples’ eyes, really “went nowhere”.

After Toronto opened its first subway between Eglinton and Union in 1954, politicians argued intensely about where to build the next line. To simplify the debate, some wanted an east-west line along Queen Street, while others favoured the more northern Bloor line. The Queen line supporters argued that Bloor was much to far to the north to benefit downtown.

Eventually, of course, we ended up with the Bloor line — but not without compromise. The compromise was the University line was an effort to compromise between the two camps, with the University line designed eventually as a way to divert some of those crosstown Bloor trains downtown.