[URBAN NOTE] On Lower Queen station, legacy of a failed Toronto subway

[rfmcdonald]

Discussion of a subway line along Toronto's Queen Street dates back to at least 1911, and even after Bloor Street was settled upon as the main west-east route discussion of a Queen Street subway lasted well into the 1960s (as Transit Toronto notes). Writing in the Toronto Star this Monday past, Tim Alamenciak describes this history as well as the current status of the abandon Lower Queen station that is the Queen Street line's only extant legacy.

Queen Lower remains part of the TTC’s infrastructure. It is laced with conduits and houses elevator shafts for the functioning subway station that sits above it. Reclaiming it for anything else would present a massive engineering challenge, said TTC spokesman Brad Ross.

“The shell, as it stands, would not be useable as part of a station. There’s a lot more work that would need to be done,” he said.

Ross and TTC CEO Andy Byford toured the station for a YouTube video last month.

Another challenge to using the station is that a portion of it now forms a pedestrian passageway from the northbound to southbound sides of the tracks.

“TTC erected walls to make that more accessible many, many years ago, so that you can transfer between north and south, and south and north,” said Ross. “You’re actually walking through what was once Queen Lower,” he said.

To this day, the abandoned streetcar station’s very existence makes it alluring to transit watchers, said Steve Munro, transit advocate and blogger. But it’s unlikely that it would be ideally placed for a much-discussed downtown relief line, which is increasingly referred to simply as the relief line.

“It’s got this wonderful attraction for people to draw lines through it, because it’s there. The problem is that, since it was built, the centre of downtown has moved further south,” Munro said.