P A T H - Toronto's Underground

 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.

Toronto City Hall

It was in the middle of the afternoon on a blustery Saturday, so not really expecting to find our illustrious Mayor Ford, but since it seems he does a lot of unexpected things, you never know.

Our walk began off Queen Street at University Avenue where we spotted the old historical Campbell House.  The owner of the house, Sir William Campbell was born in 1758 near Caithness Scotland.  He fought with the British forces during the American Revolution but was taken prisoner at Yorkton in 1781.  Three years later he was practicing law in Nova Scotia where in 1799 he was elected to the House of Assembly.  He later moved to Upper Canada in 1811 and accepted  a judgeship on the Court of King's Bench.  He did this until 1825 when he was made Chief Justice of the Province.  Four years later he received the first knight ever awarded a judge in Upper Canada.  He built this brick house you see in 1822.  It was originally on Adelaide where he lived but was moved in 1972 by the historical society to its present location on University.

Okay so on to the next interesting point of interest.  This very ominous shrine stands right in the centre median of traffic going north and south on University.  Impossible to miss, and it is in honour of the Canadians who died defending the Empire in the South African War between 1899-1902.


Moving now across the street you can see the opens gates of Osgoode Hall.  This is an absolutely stunning property of law and order.  It's a popular site for photographing at the 'Doors Open' in Toronto as they have a stunning library that was constructed in the famous Victorian Era.

Osgoode Hall began construction in 1829 and was named after William Osgoode, the Province's first Chief Justice.  In here are the Court of Appeals and other legal and judicial offices.   Years ago Osgoode Hall provided accommodations for young lawyers and students.  It was severely damaged during the six years in which provincial troops were stationed following the Rebellion of 1837.  Later in 1844-46 it was remodelled and new wings were constructed.

Today Osgoode Hall remains one of the first examples of Victorian Classical architecture in Canada.  I've added a few night shots I took as well which show a little more of the expanse of the building.  Walking through here is very nostalgic, at any time of day or night.

Once you leave the property at Osgoode, you can see the skaters off in the distance on the ice rink in the square, known as Nathan Philips Square which utilizes three quarters of the space dedicated to Nathan Phillips, who was credited with the vision to initiate the City Hall project in the first place.

Skating in the winter months has been an annual tradition of Torontonians as long as I can remember.   Along with skate rentals, hot chocolate and ice that is always perfect (I still fall down...)There are constantly festivities being held at the square including the festival of lights, and of course bringing in the New Year.  It is to Toronto what Times Square is to New Yorkers.

Now at last entering City Hall.  There are some interesting pieces of artwork both surrounding the 12 acres of land where City Hall lives.  Once you step inside the main saucer-like concourse you will immediately notice the low ceiling and wide expanse of the front foyer.  This section features the podium and the council chamber which appears to float above the podium.  It sits between 2 crescent shaped office towers.  It's hard to believe that City Hall is now almost 50 years old now, as it opened its doors on Sept 13 1965 and instantly became Toronto's identifiable landmark.  The building was way ahead of its time looking into modern architecture and was noted for its experiments with 20th century building technologies. 

Its unique design was chosen from an international competition held to determine the right choice and saw a multiple of design ideas from over 500 competitors in 42 difference countries.  In the end, it was an architect named Viljo Revell (1910-64) of Helsinki, Finland who won.

As of 1991, this was designated as a property of heritage significance under the Ontario Heritage Act, so even if an idea to rebuild does enter the minds of men, this place isn't going anywhere.

Just wanted to also mention Old City Hall, located at Queen at Bay Street.  It is still fully functional and used as a court house now.  It still has squeaky and noisy floors and hallways that echo which its massive ceilings as you can hear every footstep from your clackity high heels.  Edward James Lennox was chosen as the architect.  It took him three years to design it and over ten years to build it.  It served as both a City Hall and a Courthouse at one time and the cost to build was more than two million dollars.  It was completed by the late 1800's and at that time was the largest building in the city. 

Now that the quest to find Rob Ford was over, we found plenty of Rob Ford paraphernalia, his office, and lots of photographs of him, but no Rob Ford.  Not too surprising, but I think he can't be that bad of a guy: after all his office houses a fish tank in the corner and I've been told he makes a point to feed them everyday.

Cold Port in Toronto

Winter, snow and ice never stop the Ships in the Port of Toronto from connecting the city to every continent on earth!  In fact this has been a system of a seamless network of inter modal links to road, rail and air transportation for over 100 years in the downtown core.

On average there are over two million tonnes of cargo that pass through this Port relieving our already congested highways of over tens of thousands of truck off the roads.

The Port also does warehousing and staging.  As well, there are cruise ships and passengers from around the world who pass through the International Marine Passenger Terminal.

The picture below of the pipe converging in the centre is the location of the now de-commissioned Richard L. Hearn Generating Station on January 3, 2012.  This turned out to be one of my favorite pictures I've taken, only because of the nostalgia to me.

The steam you see in the foreground drifting past the old stack is from the Portland Energy Centre.  the Portland Plant uses natural gas to produce electricity and the old Hearn plant originally used coal but was using natural gas as well prior to being shut down in 1983.

There is also a nice view off of the Outer Harbour Marina on Unwin Avenue looking across the Lake Ontario.  Not much activity these days, that'll all change soon though.

Finally, another picture of the iconic Life Guard House, which does stand out on Cherry Beach now that the swimmers and sunbathers are gone and there is nothing but snow and ice.  The house has been here since the 1930's and other than the occasional wood treatment or paint job, it remains exactly as it has always been.