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The Toronto Underground
Urban explorers feel attraction of subterranean world below
People you pass on the street undoubtedly entertain all manner of fantasies. Some, like Phil Goldsmith, think about the hidden world beneath them.''Sometimes, when I'm walking around in Toronto, I just for fun imagine that the ground plane is transparent,'' the 55-year-old architect says. ''People would get vertigo at some places, were the ground actually transparent, because some of the subterranean elements are so deep.
"What you're walking on feels like solid ground, but what you're actually walking on is this skin -- this crust -- over top of cavernous basements that go down five or six levels."
It's a city beneath the city -- the veins, arteries, ganglia and bowels of the surface world.
Parts of it are familiar to hundreds of thousands of Torontonians: the subway platforms and tunnels (rectangular where trenched, round where bored), the shops, food courts and passages of the PATH pedestrian maze, the parking labyrinths (some of them eight levels deep) under the big downtown buildings, and the below-track concourse at Union Station where, legend has it, live-at-home lovebirds in 1930s Toronto would cop a smooch while pretending to meet after long journeys.
Other parts are known to fewer: a truck elevator at First Canadian Place that takes highway-sized tractor-trailer rigs to a subterranean reception area beneath the city's tallest office tower; the cavernous loading docks below Eaton Centre; 17 radiation treatment machines in concrete bunkers under Princess Margaret Hospital; a long-abandoned Bay Lower subway station, available for movie shoots, where giant mutant people-eating cockroaches stalked but, as luck would have it, did not eat Mira Sorvino in the 1997 creature feature Mimic.
The maps to this world are the utility diagrams used by repair crews, engineers and architects such as Mr. Goldsmith, founder of a Toronto firm with a specialty in historical preservation.
"You look at these drawings and there's layers and layers of water pipes and sewer pipes and gas lines and hydro trunks and telephone trunks and storm sewers and sanitary sewers and so on," Mr. Goldsmith said. "There's just this vast array of pipes that form this organized but very, very complicated layer of spaghetti that goes down quite far in spots.
"If you want to think about the streets, the streets are like these little elevated causeways. If you joined all of the basements of all of buildings downtown, the real ground plane is down three or four storeys and the streets are these little causeways of dirt filled with pipes and wires snaking between all of these basements. I have fun with that one sometimes."
Visiting such places -- that is, trespassing on them -- is a passion shared by even smaller numbers, some of them within a sub-basement subculture known as urban explorers. One is a Toronto office worker with the Web name Ninjalicious who chronicles his feats in a self-published newsletter called Infiltration, "the zine about going places you're not supposed to go."
"I actually tried to run a contest in my magazine once that was called 'How low can you go?' " he said. "It was like, submit your story of the deepest you've ever gotten in Toronto, but the most interesting answers were just really deep parking garages, so it wasn't that interesting."
Like Mr. Goldsmith, he marvels at the tangle of phone lines, hydro lines, fibre-optic cables, steam pipes, water pipes, gas pipes, ducts, conduits, vaults, chambers, drains and sewers under the street, some of which he inspected during construction of the Sheppard subway line, now two years old.
"When they tore up Yonge and Sheppard, that was one of the most spectacular things I've ever seen," he said.
"Like how deep they had to dig to get at everything. The pit must have been seven storeys down at Yonge and Sheppard, and so full of so much stuff, wiring and piping.
"They just had to relocate all of it. First they had to move it all to the left and build and then they had to move it all to the right and build it back. I'm sure that's where most of the billions of dollars that were spent on that project were consumed, at that one intersection, because it was unbelievable."
He speaks not as a sidewalk superintendent, he specifies, but as one who repeatedly donned hard hat and safety vest to go down the hole. "Yeah, I followed that from beginning to end. All the time. There were some areas that I couldn't get to unless workers were there, so I had to do it during the daytime."
The underbelly of Yonge and Sheppard underlines one thing above-ground and below-ground Toronto have in common: Space is tight.
"Real estate is at a premium in the underground, especially in the downtown core," said Greg Atkinson, head of underground reactive repairs for Toronto Hydro.
"If we run into a very congested area, what we will do is try to make the cable chamber larger . . . but the designers are very pressed as to the dimensions they can make these things based on what's buried in the ground between gas and Bell and water."
December 29, 2004 in Mortgage Financing | Permalink
