When the snow piles high and the wind blows cold, you can get yourself around in the underground of Toronto without ever coming up for air.There's a whole world down here and its called the PATH.
The PATH led me to my first job downtown, my first attendance to a Convention and Trade show and to my first husband, but not necessarily in that order and not all in the same day!
The P A T H starts from Dundas Street from the north at the Eatons Centre (future plans are to continue north to College Street) to Queens Quay in the south (south of the Gardiner Expressway) and from Simcoe Street in the west to Yonge Street in the east.
You can check out any map of Toronto yourself to see that that is a pretty impressive underground trek, don't you think?
In order to follow the P A T H, each color represents a direction (Red-South; Orange-West; Blue-North; Yellow-East).
During the week, this underground world is saturated with hundreds of thousands of people commuting from the local transit systems (TTC) to the GO Stations (Metrolinx) at Union and to the VIA trains or the Toronto Coach Bus Terminal at Bay Street, which can take them out of the city's core altogether.
Workers, shoppers, and tourists pack the P A T H more so during the week days. On weekends, you may have a little more elbow room especially if you plan on taking pictures as the Office Towers close down except for the odd bored security person.
The P A T H links to some of the most visited tourist attractions in Toronto, like the Eaton's Centre, which brings in millions of holiday shoppers; Air Canada Centre, Ripley's Aquarium, Skydome (I still refuse to call it the Rogers Centre :) and of course the CN Tower.
Some of the major performing arts centre, like the Four Seasons Centre and Roy Thompson Hall are accessed on the path as well. Although I do enjoy most movie soundtracks which apparently were inspired by classical composers, I don't enjoy most classical music unfortunately so don't go to Roy Thompson or others like it very much.
When I worked downtown, I loved the convenience of the P A T H as it took me to many hotels, some for business, others for pleasure. I was in the Convention and Trade Show industry that hosted Toronto for international exhibitors. This was of course before Free Trade, when Trade shows and Conventions were a very busy industry not only for for tourism (still are) but for the Custom House businesses.
Conventions are awesome for local economies obviously because when exhibitors come to your city, they often put money into hotels, spend lots in shops and restaurants and list goes on.Today, the Metro Convention Centre hosts most of the Conventions in the city and has a hotel built directly beside called the InterContinental Toronto Centre Hotel. Hotels like the Sheraton or the Royal York or Hilton, which once were the only game in town have lost out to that income on a private corporate level.
Sometimes in bigger shows though, there is always the much needed extra capacity for rooms for which they are necessary.
The bigger shows kept us up sometimes over 24 hours straight working on booth setups, and coordinating with Customs to bring shipments in for the show. It was great fun.
Back to present day, the holidays dress up the main lobbies of many of these Corporate Towers, like the Royal Bank Plaza, The Toronto-Dominion Centre, First Canadian Place and the beautiful Exchange Tower. It was a treat looking at them again.
Historical value? I didn't want to research too much on this underground world, but rather give credit to those who have by linking you to this site.
We came here just for fun for me to take pictures and share them as I love to do. So here are some of what we saw today.
