If you are caught in a rip, as any beach-loving Australian will tell you, the trick is to stay calm. Those sudden, wily currents sweep people right out to sea and panic only makes things worse. Angle yourself toward land, edge your way out of the worst of the pull and eventually you should wind up, if not where you started, at least on safe ground.
As a torrent of commuters floods the tunnel from Union Station, my mind is dredging up beach advice from childhood. But this isn't Down Under. These are the convoluted bowels of Toronto's financial district, and I am clearly going against the tide.According to senior planner Al Rezoski, the city's mandate for PATH right now is to make it more tourist-friendly, attempting to capitalize on the city's already strong draw (according to a report this week, Toronto had 10.6 million overnight visitors last year.) As such, two major extensions - one connecting to the future Bay Adelaide Centre tower and the other joining the Air Canada Centre to Maple Leaf Square - are due by 2010, the same time that the Trump Tower will be completed and linked in as well. Mr. Rezoski says there will be an effort to "add more public art to make the PATH experience more pleasurable," and that the extension at the ACC will feature skylights and glazed glass walls to bring the sunlight in. Besides adding a touch of nature, Mr. Rezoski says the openings "will help people with wayfinding," as they can use the skyline above to help situate themselves. "It can be very confusing down there," he admits.
But even with aesthetic improvements planned and a few more connections, the question remains: Is there anything on offer down there, or is it just a warm, dry place to pass through on your way somewhere else?
It's rush hour in PATH, and I will be spending the next eight hours exploring life inside this teeming warren - if I can survive the morning commuter crush, that is.
THE LABYRINTH
I find some space to breathe beside a Starbucks with 10 workers satiating the caffeine lust of a seemingly endless queue.
I almost didn't make it this far. Self-congratulations for finding PATH's most westerly entrance, tucked below King Street behind Metro Hall - no mean feat, thanks to the system's so-unobtrusive-it's-almost-invisible signage - were quashed within minutes. I faced a doorway that will one day give entry to Simcoe Place and the future Ritz Carlton Hotel, but today is a paper-covered panel apologizing for the inconvenience. I cursed the piped-in Muzak and frowned at the PATH map, which shows that, to go south, one must first trek north and then east.
"That's one of the secrets: All of the little paths on the map aren't necessarily real." Tim Radford gives me some insider tips to PATH during an impromptu, 9:40 a.m. tour of Commerce Court North, under King, between Bay and Yonge. We are inside a terrazzo, granite and wood-panelled cavern that was once a bank vault and is now arguably the most beautiful part of PATH.
Working for Tidy's Flowers in this charming patch for three years has taught Mr. Radford a few things: You never know if it snowed during the day; one regular customer always asks for orchids on Friday afternoons; and almost everyone gets lost on the way to the Eaton Centre.
"The PATH map shows a link from Scotia Tower [at Adelaide and Yonge]through to the Hudson Bay Company to the Eaton Centre that doesn't exist. You have to go around, and it ends up being about 16 or 17 blocks," he warns.
Those ghost paths are slowly becoming real, though. Besides the Bay-Adelaide link and the extension to Maple Leaf Square, an environmental assessment of a western connection from Union Station up to Wellington and York will go to council in April. That major connection aims to capitalize on the planned $388-million renewal of Union Station, which could include a new underground retail concourse.
As it is, the PATH system is the world's largest underground shopping mall, stretching 27 kilometres under the city. (While Montreal's system may be longer, it is not one continuous entity.) It all began when Eaton's built a tunnel from the main store to its bargain annex in 1900. By 1917, the downtown core had five tunnels, and 10 years later Union Station was connected to the Royal York Hotel. Then, the real explosion came in the 1970s when the Richmond-Adelaide and Sheraton Centre burrowed into the mix.
Its four million square feet of retail space is now filled with toy stores and cigar shops, hairdressers, supermarkets and book chains, high-class tailors and discount dress stores, countless coffee bars, a world of snack foods and a disarming number of dentists.
The City of Toronto says 100,000 commuters walk the PATH corridors each day, a whopping 20,000 entering from Union Station during each morning's peak hour. And that number is expected to rise as GO Transit expands its services, Union Station is revitalized and York Street developments take PATH closer to the waterfront, city transportation planning officer Jeff Bateman says in a phone interview. "I think the PATH system is one of the most undervalued assets of the city," he adds.
More than 125 street-access points descend into a hodgepodge of areas owned by the buildings above, united by a snazzy colour-coded signage system. Attempting to follow these hue cues, I fail to find one washroom, mistakenly discover another and finally seek shelter in a hum of people at Tim Hortons.
CAPTIVE SHOPPERS
At 10 a.m., my map is dog-eared and I am beginning to suspect I am the victim of a cunning plan. Each building only points to the next building. Want to get from the Eaton Centre to Union Station? Follow the signs to the Bay, the Richmond-Adelaide Complex, through Lombard Place, First Canadian Place, the Toronto-Dominion Centre and Royal Bank Plaza, and there the word "Union" finally makes a heart-soaring appearance. I later discover that the building owners don't even have to update the wall-mounted PATH maps if they don't want to.
To me, it seems in each building owner's interest to keep people confused, in the hope they'll linger and spend.
And they do - though Brian Wortsman, manager of European Jewellery in the TD Centre, says his branch's success is mostly a result of having a regular clientele. Mr. Wortsman has worked at that location for more than 15 years, and now, he says, when he walks down the halls, "people hand me their jewellery." Not to keep, of course, but to repair. "We're talking about items in the tens of thousands of dollars."
But a captive shopping community doesn't always equate success. Rents are higher here than at street level, thanks to shared common-area costs, I am told by independent retailers Ravinder and Vijay Jains.
I'm one of two people browsing their store, Kitchen Roots, at 10:30 a.m., which gives Mr. Jains time to explain the ramifications of moving the shop to the Richmond-Adelaide Complex four years ago. "People who were regulars just walk by now. It's so hidden," Mr. Jains says after fielding a question about knife-sharpening stones, which he sells for $10 less than The Bay, nearby. "Sometimes for hours and hours there are no customers."
The couple dropped their two employees, honed their stock to small items, and rely on their other store in Milton for bigger sales. They will decide this year whether to renew the lease, but say that, at their age, running a quiet business in the city's underground isn't too bad an option. "We are okay. With just the two of us, we can take a wage and get by. We are here just killing our time," Mr. Jains says.
THE MOLE LIFE
Dan Gratton is also killing time, taking a post-lunch break at the shoeshine stand below his workplace in the Ernst & Young Tower. Mr. Gratton doesn't get out much in winter. He doesn't have to. He lives across the road from PATH.
With its access to most of the downtown core the account executive's twice-daily dashes across the street relieve him of winter coats. "For me, it's handy," he says. Sure, he still gets a bit lost sometimes, and it takes a little longer to reach work than if he were to use the sidewalk, but it's warm and clean and his freshly buffed shoes never get sullied. It's a favourite secret of the city, he says. "You wouldn't know it was here."
The City of Toronto knows PATH is a tough sell. Sure, when some of the first "C" in CIBC fell off Commerce Court in January, it was the only permitted pedestrian access to a large downtown area. And PATH also reduces crowding on the sidewalks above ground, and provides an unobstructed view of the duck that makes the Roy Thomson Hall wading pool her home each spring (with ducklings in tow).
But PATH is not yet a "destination," Mr. Rezoski admits. And although he's hoping public art and views to the outside will enhance its appeal, he also says improvements need to strike the right balance. "We don't want to attract people to the PATH to the detriment of [the businesses]above grade."
Standing in a tunnel under Richmond Street at 11 a.m., it's hard to imagine anyone being lured into this place. It's hard to imagine anyone else exists.
This tunnel drops from the Yonge-Richmond Centre and rises into One Queen Street East. Elsewhere, the lunch rush is building and food courts fill with 20-deep queues and packed tables. Here, in the empty peach-tiled corridor book-ended by glass doors, one fluorescent light buzzing behind an advertising panel, Toronto is post-apocalyptic. I scurry away.
Seventeen minutes later, I discover a murky tunnel to Bell Trinity Square tucked next to the Laura Secord store in the Eaton Centre. No advertisements interrupt the brown floor tiles curving up to meet brown wall tiles. It is so dated, it has become the most artful site in the PATH, all linear strata of stairs, rails and
panels.The afternoon degenerates into a miasma of boredom. I channel Bill Murray in Groundhog Day as I again face the massive TD Centre food-hall sign or find myself browsing the same shoe store for a third time. A RICH EXPERIENCE
Hope comes in the form of a door handily emblazoned HOPE. Inside, Pat Kimeda sits quietly behind the desk of the King-Bay Chaplaincy, an interdenominational Christian chapel tucked below escalators in the TD Tower. Ms. Kimeda says many downtown workers come to deal with relationship issues, others in a daze after being dismissed. "All types of people come, and sometimes the problems are not so different," she says. "Whether it's family or work, often people are dealing with stress for one reason or another."
But is it odd, expecting people to find faith in the heart of the country's biggest financial district? Ms. Kimeda pauses. "It's Bay Street. It's money, money, money," she says. "[But]not every person walking down here is like that. A lot are very, very deep."
Wandering back through the shopping maze, where winter boots languish on sales racks and a bottle of wine can cost $439, some kind of signal seems to issue. The first trickles of the afternoon rush start flowing south at 3:58 p.m. I keep afloat this time, negotiating the tide as it sweeps around a besuited man having his hand tended beside a shattered glass doorway. He hit the door at the wrong angle, a security guard informs me as the man slips under the caution tape and disappears upstream. At the base of the escalators, Chris Tyson holds a cup and quietly asks for change.
"They're nice," Mr. Tyson says of the commuters, some of whom wade back to hand over coins, most of whom pass by without making eye contact. The building security doesn't like him being here, but Mr. Tyson has been coming back to this spot for 10 years. "It's the richest part of Toronto," he states simply. He is polite and undemanding in a sea of wealth, which is set to get even richer once the Trump Tower is connected. Usually he manages about 15 or 20 minutes before he's asked to leave, he says.
I am swept to Union Station - so beautiful, so mundane - and watch the day fade through high windows, finally above ground but not yet free from PATH. Shoe shiner Lola Taylor, another Aussie in the underground, had directed me here, lauding the Skywalk's view of Lake Ontario with the typical antipodean enthusiasm for water views, while explaining her love of PATH.
"Of course, from Australia I've never seen anything like it in my life. It's like a whole other world," Ms. Taylor says with a broad, easy grin. "During the day, it's a microcosm. It's a little city underground and you wouldn't know about it unless you go down one of the hidey-holes. It's alive with people. Then, after 6 o'clock, there's no one around. They're pretty much gone." Polish. Grin. "I just wish it was signposted
better."
*****
Lost in the underground
Globe writer Tenille Bonoguore found that the 27 kilometres of underground PATH walkways were a bit more complicated to navigate than the PATH brochure's map makes them out to be.
Some points of interest from her journey:
1. Union Station, where a proposed $388-million revitalization project could include a lower-level mall
2. Future entry to Simcoe Place and the Ritz Carlton Hotel
3. Tidy's Flowers, built inside of an old bank vault
4. The future Bay-Adelaide link, to be completed in 2009
5. Proposed connection from Wellington St. to the Royal York
6. Planned extension from Air Canada Centre to Maple Leaf Square
7. Tunnel from Union Station to Royal York Hotel, built in 1927
8. Kitchen Roots
9. Tunnel to the Bell Trinity Tower: "the most artful site" of PATH
10. Toronto-Dominion food court
11. King-Bay Chaplaincy
12. Skywalk view of Lake Ontario
13. Trump Tower (ETA 2010): Will likely be linked into PATH
SOURCE: CITY OF TORONTO