[PHOTO] Memory of the Queen Street subway that could have been

[rfmcdonald]

The commemorative monument at the centre of the photo, erected on Queen just east of Dufferin dedicated to the "Queen Street Subway" with a date of 1897, is, as Derek Flack noted in 2010 at blogTO misleading: "Subway" was the word that the late 19th century used where we would use "underpass". People who are informed about the history of mass transit in Toronto could be easily confused, since discussion of a Queen Street subway line goes as far back as 1911, with one proposed route extended from Trinity-Bellwoods Park in the west to Logan Avenue in the east.

Flack's blogTO essay goes into the history of this proposed route at some length, while James Bow at Transit Toronto describes how Queen Street contended with Bloor-Danforth throughout the mid-20th century to be the location of the main west-to-east subway route in Toronto. Get Toronto Moving also has an extended overview of proposals to build the Queen line, noting how this has morphed over time into the Downtown Relief Line. The only physical vestige of this line is the Lower Queen station at Yonge, described by Bow at Transit Toronto here and by Tess Kalinowski at the Toronto Star in 2007 here.

James Bow's Transit Toronto essay "What if the Queen Subway was built instead of the Bloor-Danforth?" is a fascinating exercise in alternate history, considering how Toronto's transit system would have evolved in this case. The effect on Toronto's urban geography would have been equally noteworthy. Perhaps the waterfront would have been developed earlier, with Queen Street being the main street of the city, with places like Bloor--never mind St. Clair, or Dupont--lagging?