Two Downtowns, Stacked: Toronto's Towers and the PATH Beneath Them

Stand in front of Union Station on Front Street and look north. Up Bay Street rise the bank towers of Toronto's financial district: dark steel and glass, gold glass, white towers, glass atriums. Now look down. Under the pavement, a second downtown runs through the basements of those same buildings. It is called the PATH, and on a cold January morning many office workers cross the whole district without stepping outside.

The downtown below

The City of Toronto's own description of the PATH is the best place to start. It spans more than 30 kilometres of restaurants, shopping, services and entertainment, with about 1,200 restaurants, shops and services. More than 75 buildings are connected, including six subway stations, three major department stores, nine hotels and Union Station.

It was not planned as one system. The City dates the first underground link to 1900, when the T. Eaton Company joined its stores with tunnels, and says the network grew quickly in the 1970s. Ownership is the key fact. Each segment, the City says, is owned and controlled by the owner of the property it runs through, and about 35 corporations are involved. The City coordinates the system and owns the PATH name and logo, but the corridors themselves are private property.

That is why the PATH feels the way it does. Each building's stretch has its own floors, lighting and shop mix, and the signs that tie them together are the one shared element. It is a city made of basements, joined at the property lines.

The tower that set the pattern

Above ground, one complex shaped the look of the district. The Toronto-Dominion Centre was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, with Alfred Caldwell on the landscape, according to The Cultural Landscape Foundation. Allen Lambert, the chairman of the Toronto-Dominion Bank, worked with the real estate company Fairview Corporation to assemble the site. The first tower was finished in 1967, for Canada's Centennial, and two more buildings followed by 1969. The Foundation calls it the last of Mies's major commissions.

The design is a short list of parts: black steel, dark glass, a regular grid, and a broad granite plaza with lawns and trees. The plaza sits on top of a parking garage and a retail concourse, so the complex was built from the start with a downtown below it as well as one above. The site was designated under the Ontario Heritage Act in 2003, and in 2004 its courtyard was renamed Oscar Peterson Square. For a closer reading of the building itself, see The TD Centre: Mies van der Rohe's Grammar.

The towers that came after it each answered it in their own way. Across Bay Street the glass of Royal Bank Plaza carries real gold in its windows, and its colour shows from Front Street.

Two levels, one trade

The two downtowns trade with each other. The concourse below gives office workers warmth, lunch and a direct route to the trains. The street above loses some of the foot traffic that would otherwise fill its pavements. Because the corridors are private, their hours and rules belong to the buildings, not to the City. Whether that trade is a good one has been argued in Toronto for decades. What is not in doubt is how it was built: one property at a time, each owner deciding to connect to the next.

How this connects to a walk

No Roamer tour goes underground or walks the financial district. The CN Tower and the Waterfront walk begins at the PATH's southern anchor, Union Station, finished in 1927 after fourteen years of work, with its row of 22 limestone columns along Front Street. From there it heads south, under the tracks, to the CN Tower and the lake, nine stops over about two and a half kilometres. The TD Centre and the bank towers are a few minutes' walk north of the station, so you can look at them before you start, and the station's own PATH entrances lead into the network below.