Toronto Through My Lens

Category: Transportation

Museum Subway Station

In a city of drab subway stations, the Museum station on Line 1 is currently a welcome exception.

Museum station opened to the public on February 28, 1963 as a stop on the University subway line. Located south of the intersection of Queen’s Park and Charles Street West it served, as its name implies, the Royal Ontario Museum.

Fast Forward…

In April 2008, a major renovation by Diamond and Schmitt Architects and Jeviso Construction Corporation transformed the platform level to mirror exhibits in the Royal Ontario Museum.

This renovation replaced the original tile scheme. Supporting columns were redesigned to evoke various historical and cultural figures, including the Egyptian deity Osiris, Toltec warriors, Doric columns, Forbidden City columns, and Indigenous Northwest Coast house posts.

The walls were re-clad with mauve aluminum panels by Ontario Panelization. This incorporated painted 1/4″ fire-rated Lexan into the panels composing the large MUSEUM lettering on the walls with a historical hieroglyphic inscription from the ROM. The walls and ceiling colours were also updated to complement the new look, making the space feel more like a museum exhibit than a transit stop:

On an interesting footnote, the Museum subway station has been named among the ten most beautiful metro stations in the world by The Guardian newspaper.

Lower Bay Station

Below the main platform of Bay subway station there is an additional platform which has long since been abandoned. The platform was used for only six months in 1966 when the TTC experimentally ran trains whose routes included portions of both the Yonge–University and Bloor–Danforth lines.

This abandoned platform is sometimes referred to as “Lower Bay” by the general public or “Bay Lower” by the TTC.

A few years ago the station was opened to the public during the Toronto Doors Open event, and there were a ton of interested people – myself included – exploring the station.

At the entrance to Lower Bay Station
Heading down into Lower Bay station

The platform was in service from February to September 1966, after which time it was shelved. The experiment (called “interlining” in transit-speak) was deemed a failure, largely because delays anywhere on the subway line quickly cascaded to affect the entire system. Also, as the stations had not been laid out effectively for cross-platform interchange, trains travelling east from St. George and west from Yonge alternated between the two levels, leading passengers to wait on the stairs in-between the levels, since they were unable to tell which platform would receive the next train.1

A Second Life As A Film Set

Lower Bay and the tracks leading to it still exist and are now used to train new operators, to move trains between the two current lines, for platform-surface experiments, and to allow filming in the subway without disrupting public service. For film sets, the station has been modified several times to make it look like a regular North American subway station.

Notable movies shot at Lower Bay include The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Don’t Say A Word, Johnny Mnemonic, Bulletproof Monk, Mimic, End of the Line, The Recruit, and The Sound. The sandwich boards for the movies shot at the station were prominently on display that day:

Lower Bay did not look terribly different from the regular, upper platform, but it was an interesting experience nonetheless.

1Wikipedia

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