What does Toronto look and feel like? Unlike in New York (tall, busy) or Paris (Parisian) the question here doesn’t inspire an immediate answer. Like its population, Toronto is a patchwork of styles and cultures and eras (“a city of neighbourhoods”), and grasping the sum often requires considering the parts.

But our totems carry no less resonance: we’re a city where a minutes-long ferry ride takes you to a residential village of cottages in the middle of a park, where an entire block of the financial district is occupied by Mies van der Rohe’s breathtaking black architectural statement, where a giant, weird space needle stands a few blocks from a colonial military fort and the forward-looking, futuristic internationalism of City Hall neighbours the powdered-wigged common-law heritage of Osgoode Hall. You can see an irrigation tunnel painted like a rainbow from the highway and then, just up the road, spot the Indo-Islamic spires of a mosque. Low-rise ethnic commercial districts, overstuffed sidewalk patios, rumbling streetcars, a water filtration plant that plays a palace in the movies — that’s what Toronto looks like, and what it feels like. We contain multitudes.

At every stop along the way, you see the work of visionaries who’ve had the confidence in their city to build it up, to set down roots, to look to the future.

Consider the Prince Edward Viaduct, which spans the Don Valley and connects Bloor Street to Danforth Avenue. Not only did this engineering and construction triumph connect the city to its east end and allow it to grow, its designer, Edmund Burke, also roughed in a subway passage decades before Toronto had a subway, anticipating the city’s growth and building to serve the city that Toronto would become.

Today the viaduct carries hundreds of trains a day across the once-formidable valley on the Bloor-Danforth subway line. If you look at that line itself, you can see the same civic spirit at work in the very design of the stations, humble though it may at first appear. As activist Joe Clark has documented over the past year (see www.joeclark.org/ttc), the Bloor-Danforth line’s station designs represent a single achievement, decorated from one end to the other with tiles in alternating colour patterns for both wall tiles and trim, with an elegant, custom-designed font etched into the walls. The terminal stations match each other and the stations in the middle show a constant, minimalist aesthetic. Looking at that, you see a transit commission that once planned and designed entire lines at once and set to work building.

That “type and tile heritage,” as Clark calls it, is one of the most iconic visual elements of Toronto. For the millions of locals who spend part of every day on the TTC, the familiar station design is a key part of what Toronto looks like. Indeed, Spacing magazine has sold tens of thousands of lapel pins bearing the distinctive tile patterns and lettering of those subway stations, a handy gauge of the strength of our civic association. Recently the Toronto Preservation Board began considering declaring the entire Bloor-Danforth line and parts of the Yonge-University-Spadina line heritage properties.

How sad then, that at a meeting on March 26, the Toronto transit commissioners were to vote on whether or not to completely gut that heritage by authorizing the entire overhaul and “modernization” of each station (except six, which would be preserved as curios from a bygone era).
Commissioners show an upsetting small-mindedness in seeing no value in the austere simplicity and coherence of the line as it is — Joe Mihevc uttering inaccurate clichés about public washrooms and the TTC chair, Adam Giambrone, calling the achievement of past generations of visionaries a “mistake.” He’d do well to consider that they actually built subways, while he can’t even keep them clean.

Those who would vandalize our heritage point to the cartoonish redesign of Museum station as their model — a TV-makeover-style reno featuring pillars made to look like ancient Egyptian sarcophagi, a waste of money that would be right at home in Disney’s Epcot Center and ignores Toronto’s past, present or future.

Giambrone, 31, may be too young to remember when the last generation of tear-down-the-past commissioners sought to screw with the TTC’s unique elements. In the 1970s, they set out to get rid of streetcars, which they viewed as silly relics of the past, an ugly, inefficient mistake inherited from previous generations. Then, transit activists were able to argue that streetcars were a key part of Toronto’s identity. Today, they are not just iconic, they represent a key element of the Mayor’s transit plan.

There’s no need to submerge the city in formaldehyde. But neither is there a reason to pointlessly erase our traditions. If stations need renovating, that’s fine. But why tear them down and start anew when what we have is so useful, so comforting, so much a part of our city? There is much transit left to build in Toronto; let the new, postmodern individuality the TTC so craves be represented in its new building projects.

By the time this paper hits the street, the TTC will have voted on the resolution authorizing the destruction of our underground heritage. You can check our City Hall blog at eyeweekly.com to see how that went.

We hope that by the time you read this the TTC will have come to its senses and moved to preserve that which past generations have done right. The type and tile of the subway stations are worth preserving. It is, for many of us, what Toronto looks like. What it feels like. We should not tear it down. 

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