The Lost Station

All aboard: 1. The 180th Battalion leaving for war in 1916. 2. The Great Hall. 3. Mayor William Dennison and CP Rail president Norris Roy Crump in 1968, discussing a proposal to replace Union Station with a complex of office towers and apartment buildings. 4. A barricade marking the construction site of the Union subway station in 1951. 5. A view of Front Street, 1931 (Images: 1 and 2 from William James Fonds/Toronto Archives; 3 by Jeff Goode/Toronto Star; 4 from Brigdens Ltd./Toronto Archives; 5 from TTC Fonds/Toronto Archives;)

Union became such a focal point for the city during the war years that organ recitals took place every afternoon and evening in the Great Hall. It was a public space in the classical sense: a location in which civic experience, shared by many different strands of society, was woven together. In the post-war years, virtually all new immigrants entered the city at Union Station, usually after a long train journey from Halifax, where their ships had docked. Toronto of the late 1940s, although not yet as multicultural as today’s city, may have been more cosmopolitan. The menu in the station café was in nine languages. In November 1948, the Globe and Mail suggested that “the United Nations would do well to hold its next assembly in the lobby of Union Station.” Journalist Bruce West reported, “Redcaps, porters, baggage room employees and even floor washers, who are now Canadians but who still speak the native tongues of many far-off lands…are called in as translators to assist the constant stream of frightened, worried immigrants who each day arrive from distant corners of the world.”

After two years of planning and construction, on May 23, 1967, inaugural GO trains arrived from Oakville and Pickering. Yet even before the first commuters disembarked, Canadian National and Canadian Pacific had declared Union Station “inefficient and outmoded” and called for its demolition. By the early 1960s, most of the station’s freight yards had moved outside the city, opening up 75 hectares of land. On December 19, 1968, in the ballroom of the Royal York, the Metro Centre Developments group, a company set up by the two railways, unveiled a six-metre-long scale model of what the area would look like in the future. “Merry Christmas!” exclaimed Stewart Andrews, the president of Metro Centre, as he welcomed guests to the ballroom. Those who looked for Union Station in the model found in its place six octagonal office towers ranging in height from 18 to 36 storeys. A new rail, subway and bus terminal was to be built beside the Gardiner Expressway. The necessary step in creating a modern city, Andrews announced in a burst of Christmas cheer, would be the demolition of Union Station.

6. British film star Anna Neagle and director Herbert Wilcox surrounded by fans as they leave the station in 1939. 7. Immigrants arriving at old Union Station in 1910 (Images: 6 from Alexandra Studios/Toronto Archives; 7 from National Archives of Canada/Pringle and Booth/CP)

The railway companies’ proposal was the largest downtown redevelopment scheme in North American history, and it needed city council’s approval to make the leap from scale model to construction project. In 1972, after a five-day council debate, the proposal was approved. Only councillor John Sewell voted against it. But the marathon deliberations caught the public’s attention, and opposition began to grow. Exasperated Metro Centre officials blamed the protests on an anti-development bias that they claimed had emerged over the Spadina Expressway and the proposed demolition of Old City Hall. Newly elected Mayor David Crombie crafted a compromise that incorporated the demolition of Union Station into a scaled-back version of the original proposal. Council rejected Crombie’s compromise, and Ontario Premier Bill Davis, concerned that Toronto’s infrastructure development would be paralyzed, intervened and struck an intergovernmental committee to study the city’s future transportation needs. In May 1975, to the relief of preservationists and anti-development protestors, the committee recommended retaining Union. Only a few features of the original Metro Centre proposal were ever built; one of them is the CN Tower. The railways, meanwhile, were left to figure out what to do with a station whose disappearance they had been counting on for nearly a decade.

The current renovation project is happening despite a bitter, confrontational rerun of the Metro Centre polemic that pitted developers against conservationists. Even some of the antagonists are familiar. John Sewell, who fought the Metro Centre project and later served as mayor from 1978 to 1980, is one of the most vocal opponents of the current plan, which he believes caters to the interests of developers rather than serving the desires of citizens.

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