Urban Affairs

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Signage at Eglinton Station [Updated Again]

[Updated Monday, July 9 at 10:45 pm]

I have been advised this evening by Adam Giambrone’s office that the Paul Arthur signage will not be removed at St. George Station.  This will not be considered again until this station comes up for modernization, something that is not in the cards for the near future.

The removal had been planned as part of a general cleanup of the station, something that was long overdue. 

[Updated Monday, July 9 at 1:10 pm] 

The proposed work at Eglinton Station does not involve moving the outer walls of the station back two feet.  What is proposed is that safety alcoves 5 x 7 feet will be cut into the walls to provide refuges for workers when trains come through the station.  With some careful placement, the existing signage should not be disturbed at all.

As for other stations, there is a press conference later this week that will cover already approved changes at various locations.

[Original post follows] 

Earlier today, a reader asked me to comment on the proposed redesign of Eglinton Station and the need to preserve original signs.  In writing this, I hope not to engender a slugfest among the design mavens of this town, but we shall see.  Worthwhile comments will be posted, repetitive rants will not.  If you must rant, at least be original about it.

First, it’s worthwhile asking just what we are asked to preserve, and to that end I visited Eglinton Station earlier tonight.  The only original signage still in place is the repeated word “Eglinton” on the station walls in large letters, and along the banner at the top of the wall in a smaller version of the same typeface.

For those who remember the original signs, there were not many, and they disappeared one by one from the station.  They included the “Way Out” signs to Duplex and to Yonge Street (pre Canada Square building) as well as the signs at the washroom entrances.

Completely separate from this debate (and the subject of previous threads here — please don’t post again) is the matter of hand-written signs and tattered, out of date announcements.  That is a different issue affecting the entire system including surface routes.  With luck, nobody will find a service change sign so antique that it qualifies for historic preservation.

Continue reading →

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“Doors Open” at the TTC

Doors Open Toronto is coming up this weekend, and there are two TTC sites open for visitors.

Lower Bay Station

Lower Bay recently had weekend subway service during the diversion around tunnel repairs between Bay and St. George Stations, and it will be open for walking visitors on Saturday, May 26 from noon to 3:00 pm.  Note that this site is not accessible as there are no working escalators to the lower level.

Here is a note from the TTC with the details:

Entry into Bay Lower station will be from inside Bay Station – we will have volunteers and security staff guiding people into Bay Lower from the collector’s level.  As there are two sets of doors into Bay Lower station we will be using one for entry and the other one for exit – we therefore will have a continuous line into the station going straight through and out the other end.

We will have the crash gate open on collectors’ level and we will line people up starting at that location – there will be some signage around the station to indicate the start line as everyone will start in the same spot no matter where they entered the station.

We hope to be able to accommodate everyone who comes to visit us that day.

Harvey Shops

The main repair shops at the TTC’s Hillcrest complex will be open from noon to 3:00 pm on Saturday.  (The last time I was inside this building, they were rebuilding PCCs and it’s time for another visit.)

The full site listing is available at the Doors Open website.

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Jane’s Walk 2: My Home Streetcar Lines — Mt. Pleasant & St. Clair

Back in the days when goodly chunks of “the suburbs” were still farms, I grew up in North Toronto near Mt. Pleasant and Eglinton.  This neighbourhood dates from the building boom of the 1920s, although our house was older, 1906, the third one built in our block.  The old farmhouse up the road was replaced by two monster homes a few years ago, and now ours is number 2 in seniority.

When I was young, I spent a lot of time down at Mt. Pleasant Loop watching the streetcars.  This was a typical old style TTC loop with trees and benches, a house to the north and a BA gas station to the south right on the corner.  All of that’s gone now, and the loop is simply a hole in the front of seniors’ building where, infrequently, one can find a Mt. Pleasant bus.

The other corners held Ted’s Restaurant (gone — replaced like other stores around it with an ugly midrise office block), Eglinton Public School (replaced by a new building that turns its back on the intersection with a dead wall where once there was a playground), and the Bank of Commerce (now a Second Cup, but at least the original building).

Tracks ran west on Eglinton to Yonge, but these were never used for revenue service.  These had been installed in 1930 to allow operation of the St. Clair line from Eglinton Carhouse, but this never happened.  The junction at Mt. Pleasant came out in 1959, but the track to Yonge, buried under pavement, remained years longer until Eglinton was repaved. Continue reading →

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Jane’s Walk 1: The Early Days of the Streetcar System

Before I start to write about individual parts of the streetcar system, here’s a bit of historical background.  Today, people see only the network downtown, small one compared with the size of Toronto, not to mention the GTA, but the system was much larger before the combined effects of automobiles, suburbanization, expressways and subways.  This is not going to be an exhaustive history (much has been written on this including books cited at the end), but will give a taste of what was once in our city.  I will bring in more details when I write about neighbourhoods and their streetcars.

Please be sure to read the string of comments that has accumulated at the end of this post.  Many readers have added information that I had left out in the interest of space, or had simply not known of before.

Streetcars have been around in Toronto for a long time especially if you count the horse car days.  The Toronto Street Railway was granted a 30-year franchise in 1861, and began its operations with a short line in the oldest part of the city running to the St. Lawrence Hall and Market, the City Hall before the “old” City Hall of the 1890s still standing at Queen & Bay.  The Market Gallery (now showing an exhibit from the Spadina Expressway battle) was the original Council Chamber, although only the shell of the building remains. Continue reading →

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Jane’s Walk

Friday, May 4th will be Jane Jacobs’ birthday, and in her honour on Saturday, May 5th there will be many walks around neighbourhoods in the city.  You can read all the details at the event’s website.

In 2005, I received the Jane Jacobs Prize in recognition of decades of work as a transit advocate in Toronto, especially for my part in saving the streetcar system and urging that Toronto make better use of this mode of transport.  It took a long time, but with Transit City there’s some hope we may see an LRT network in the suburbs.  Better late than never.

Jane’s Walk arose from the combined desire of the prizewinners to do something in Jane’s memory, something that would be informal, that would not turn into a nightmare of publicity and organization, something that people could all do in their own way.  Her love of neighbourhoods and of observing the city around us made the choice obvious — walks through neighbourhoods conducted by people who know and love them.

When we started talking about this, I was asked about a “walk” (well, a ride) of the streetcar system.  This brings serious problems both because it’s impossible to visit all the places I would go in only 90 minutes, and the last thing the TTC needs is a crowd of people showing up at random locations all trying to pile into the Saturday afternoon service.  I spend enough time griping about service quality, and would never live it down if the TTC could trace a string of delays to my tour group.  Chartering a streetcar is expensive, almost verges on the territory of “formal tour”, and has the tiny problem that you can’t visit places the streetcars don’t run any more.

My contribution to Jane’s Walk will be a series of pieces here suggesting places you might like to visit in a trip around the city that are mostly related to the streetcar system.  I don’t know yet how many there will be, and some may be written after May 5th has come and gone.  The advantage of a self-conducted tour is that you can do it any time!  Originally, I had thought of linking my writing to the actual walks planned by others, but the way they are shaping up we would miss parts of the city completely.

All of these will be filed here under the topic “Jane’s Walk” and you will be able to pull them up at any time from the menu in the sidebar.

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Can We Redecorate the Toronto Subway?

The post about artists decorating a New York Subway car reminded me of a conversation earlier this week at a gathering of the Jane Jacobs Prize winners.  A few of us were talking about ideas for getting stories of the transit system’s history out where people could easily find them, and I brought up the issue of subway station decor.

Decor is not quite the word I would use when describing the TTC, but the mathemeticians among you will understand the concept of the null set.  Even the total absence of decor is a form of decor itself, minimalism taken to the extreme.

This brings me back to a topic discussed here in the early days of the site, subway station beautification.

Why can we only have subway station makeovers when someone wants to drop millions of dollars, and a lot of capital-D Design on a few stations? The current proposals for Museum, St. Patrick and Osgoode involve complete makeovers with a high ratio of design and construction effort to finished product. Will they stay relevant in five, ten, twenty years, or will they fizzle out from staleness of content and indifferent maintenance like Arc en ciel at Yorkdale Station?

Why must decor take on the character of a station domination advertising campaign?  Indeed, could future proposals run aground for fear that they would compromise the TTC’s ability to sell entire stations to advertisers?  Imagine Union Station bereft of advertising and full of imagery of transportation!

The Poetry on the Way program is a tiny, occasionally heartwarming touch in the sterile subway environment, but it’s far too little.

Toronto is in the midst of considering a complete makeover of its street furniture, a scheme designed to sell every square inch of the city for advertising revenue.  Wouldn’t it be nice if there were places in the subway, prominent places, not just out of the way corners in stations like Bessarion or Ellesmere, where we could see images of the nearby city past and present?  With a bit of thought, the design of such presentations could even fit in with the character of each station.

An even more aggressive scheme would involve actually changing these displays from time to time.  Yes, panels cost money to fabricate and install, but think of it as part of the cost of making the system attractive.  “Hey, look, that picture wasn’t there yesterday!”

I throw this out as a challenge to all those would-be benefactors of arts and urban life.  Instead of building up funds for mega-construction projects, think small, but on a big scale.  Don’t try to put the same cookie-cutter generic Toronto photo in every station, don’t just slap a cheap piece of cardboard or plastic in an advertising frame as filler during the off-season, put in something that will last.  And do it everywhere so that art, decor, a bit of warm feeling about our city, aren’t just the preserve of a few stations dedicated to grand construction on the University line.

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A Toronto PCC in San Francisco?

Christopher Dunn sent me a link to a few pages dealing with historic streetcar operations in San Francisco.  Everyone knows about the cable cars, but there is a large fleet of antique cars including many PCCs.  The PCC fleet is painted in colours of many different transit systems, one of which is Toronto.

You can read about the F-Market historic streetcar route here:  http://www.streetcar.org/mim/streetcars/index.html.

Be sure to follow all the links to different parts of this site to see the fleet and the sheer effort that has gone into making this an integral tourist attraction and part of the transit system. 

Not to be missed is the section on the “E-line”, the new line on the Embarcadero (the place where they tore down the inner city expressway).  Anyone thinking about how we might build on the waterfront and what transit can look like needs to visit this page.

Oh yes — the “Toronto” car (really ex-Minneapolis by way of Newark) is here:

http://www.streetcar.org/mim/streetcars/fleet/pcc/1074/index.html

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Revue Cinema Marquee Collapses

This post is for the benefit of those from afar who have an interest in theatres.  The Revue Cinema, closed since last June, suffered a horrible loss on Sunday when its marquee collapsed under the weight of snow and ice.  The Torontoist site has a full writeup and links to photos new and old.

I’ve always loved the Revue and remember learning all about “foreign” films there decades ago. 

http://www.torontoist.com/archives/2007/02/revue_cinema_ma_1.php