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A trip on Canada's oldest subway is a trip around the world
By: Abel, Allen, Canadian Geographic, 07062168, Jan2004, Vol. 124, Issue 1
THE SLOW TRAIN to China -- and to Poland, Korea, Barbados, Greece, Peru and the Azores -- slides with a screech from a fluorescent' terminus, northbound on a weekday noon.
With me in the long, steel car are about 70 other passengers, most of them immigrants like me, strangers to each other and to this country, each of us making up less than a millionth of the great lakeside city beneath which we ride.
The car is rather crowded, yet nearly all of us today are riding alone. We are solitary travellers on a two-dollar, round-the-world ticket, our skins and stories far more colourful than the tired, tiled stations through which we pass.
I look at the faces around me, and I wonder -- who has just landed the job of her dreams, and who has been let go? Who is newest to this cold, flat city, farthest from his home, farthest from her children, closest to a dream? Who is speeding toward a secret love affair, and who is running away?
But this is the subway. I keep my precious seat, flip through my paper, count off the stations and dare not ask. And no one asks me.
What are we doing as we stutter from stop to stop, and from nation to nation, below Toronto's ethnic archipelago? Drinking chocolate milk, studying Parts of Speech and the senior volleyball schedule of the Public School Girls Athletic Association, making a quick phone call when the train leaps from its tunnel for a two-stop breath of air. Or we are reading: Robert Heinlein, Ian McEwan, Mary Higgins Clark; The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, The Korea Timer; Memoirs of a Geisha, The Wandering Fire, Introduction to Microsoft Exchange Server, Your Wedding File, Steps to Christ.
The stations slip past in a blur of bill boards: Jennifer Lopez's Still perfume, the ESP Psychic Expo, Parasuco Jeans. After a quarter-century on these trains, I need only glimpse the station walls for an instant to know exactly where we are: the brown bricks at King Street; the bilious green of Dundas; the murals of the Maple Leafs and Canadiens at College, where big-league hockey was played (at least by the visitors) for nearly 70 years.
Then suddenly, amid the bustle of the transfer point, where the two main lines meet at Bloor and Yonge streets, there is music -- a two-stringed Chinese erhu, haunting and high-pitched above the rumbling and squealing of the trains -- crying out a melody familiar, I suspect, to half the people in my car.
For me, this accidental concerto conjures other well-remembered reveries: standing stock-still amid the rush-hour madness at Union Station one winter morning, my eyes welling as a brilliant Russian violinist played the sweet, sad "Meditation" from Massenet's Thaïs; a guitarist at the Bay Street station one spring night singing Hank Williams' "I Saw the Light" with such joy and spirit that I had to run to phone the woman I loved.
If this is your city, every stop of every ride returns a memory. (The dentist's office at Davisville? A court date at Osgoode?) If it is not, then each opening of the doors invites the explorer to exit and taste what lies above.
So get out:
At patrician Rosedale, a neighbourhood so eager for its magnificence to be envied that it pulls the tracks out of the dark ness and into the sun.
Or at Eglinton, where the smell of cinnamon buns from the bakery upstairs fills the cars with longing.
Or change trains with me at Bloor and Yonge, and head west ward, just five stations, to another world -- to Christie Street for a Korean lunch and the scorching stone bowl of rice and vegetables and chili paste that is known as bee-bim-bap.
For dessert, we can buy a bag of walnut cakes, tiny delights filled with sweet, creamy paste and baked on a long conveyor belt that passes through an oven imported, like almost everyone who gets off the train at Christie, from South Korea.
Then back on the subway: "I'm hungry and you send me flowers. I cannot eat the iris."
"I wish I could walk around with my shirt off and feel comfortable."
I'm looking up at the advertising posters now and two quotations that face each other across the car. One is poetry ("Say It With Flowers" by Janice Kulyk Keefer) and the other is a placard for a hard-rock radio station that calls itself "The Edge."
I'll let you deduce which one is which.
Otherwise, there's not that much to see. There is no confusing Toronto's utilitarian tube with the grandeur of the Moscow subway, with its chandeliers and marble halls, or the silver-bullet rocketry of Hong Kong or the avant-garde (circa 1966) artistry of the Montréal Métro. Canada's oldest underground has been conveying commuters since 1954, which makes it far older than Toronto's new-found fascination with itself.
Newer stations such as Yorkdale, with an overarching rainbow of neon, and Eglinton West, with its giant murals of Toronto's beloved streetcars, offer some visual relief. There are a few open-cut stretches, including a simultaneous vista of the Davisville yards and Mount Pleasant Cemetery, allowing us to see the eventual destination of both the cars and the people who ride in them. But the evocative elevated tracks of my New York City childhood exist only on a rapid-transit branch line in the far northeastern suburbs. To wreak havoc on Toronto rapid transit, King Kong would have to ride all the way out to Scarborough and change trains at I Kennedy Station.
This hardly matters -- the passengers provide fascination enough. The racial and linguistic diversity is astonishing, especially at the extremities of the long east-west line, where the tracks stab deeply into the low-rent, high-rise immigrant quarters that orbit the city's leafy European core. Fittingly, the map of the system closely resembles the Chinese character for "world."
It is up to each rider to decide what part of that world he or she wants to devour. Korean bee-bim-bap at Christie or Greek souvlaki at Pape. Polish tripe soup at Dundas West or Portuguese pork and clams at Ossington. Don Mills or York Mills; High Park or Queen's Park; St. George or St. Clair or St. Patrick.
Nowhere in the world does a two-dollar ticket offer such an amazing array. But there is one other station that the system serves. It is the most important destination of all, no matter where we board our train, no matter how long we ride.
And that's the stop called Home.
By: Abel, Allen, Canadian Geographic, 07062168, Jan2004, Vol. 124, Issue 1
THE SLOW TRAIN to China -- and to Poland, Korea, Barbados, Greece, Peru and the Azores -- slides with a screech from a fluorescent' terminus, northbound on a weekday noon.
With me in the long, steel car are about 70 other passengers, most of them immigrants like me, strangers to each other and to this country, each of us making up less than a millionth of the great lakeside city beneath which we ride.
The car is rather crowded, yet nearly all of us today are riding alone. We are solitary travellers on a two-dollar, round-the-world ticket, our skins and stories far more colourful than the tired, tiled stations through which we pass.
I look at the faces around me, and I wonder -- who has just landed the job of her dreams, and who has been let go? Who is newest to this cold, flat city, farthest from his home, farthest from her children, closest to a dream? Who is speeding toward a secret love affair, and who is running away?
But this is the subway. I keep my precious seat, flip through my paper, count off the stations and dare not ask. And no one asks me.
What are we doing as we stutter from stop to stop, and from nation to nation, below Toronto's ethnic archipelago? Drinking chocolate milk, studying Parts of Speech and the senior volleyball schedule of the Public School Girls Athletic Association, making a quick phone call when the train leaps from its tunnel for a two-stop breath of air. Or we are reading: Robert Heinlein, Ian McEwan, Mary Higgins Clark; The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, The Korea Timer; Memoirs of a Geisha, The Wandering Fire, Introduction to Microsoft Exchange Server, Your Wedding File, Steps to Christ.
The stations slip past in a blur of bill boards: Jennifer Lopez's Still perfume, the ESP Psychic Expo, Parasuco Jeans. After a quarter-century on these trains, I need only glimpse the station walls for an instant to know exactly where we are: the brown bricks at King Street; the bilious green of Dundas; the murals of the Maple Leafs and Canadiens at College, where big-league hockey was played (at least by the visitors) for nearly 70 years.
Then suddenly, amid the bustle of the transfer point, where the two main lines meet at Bloor and Yonge streets, there is music -- a two-stringed Chinese erhu, haunting and high-pitched above the rumbling and squealing of the trains -- crying out a melody familiar, I suspect, to half the people in my car.
For me, this accidental concerto conjures other well-remembered reveries: standing stock-still amid the rush-hour madness at Union Station one winter morning, my eyes welling as a brilliant Russian violinist played the sweet, sad "Meditation" from Massenet's Thaïs; a guitarist at the Bay Street station one spring night singing Hank Williams' "I Saw the Light" with such joy and spirit that I had to run to phone the woman I loved.
If this is your city, every stop of every ride returns a memory. (The dentist's office at Davisville? A court date at Osgoode?) If it is not, then each opening of the doors invites the explorer to exit and taste what lies above.
So get out:
At patrician Rosedale, a neighbourhood so eager for its magnificence to be envied that it pulls the tracks out of the dark ness and into the sun.
Or at Eglinton, where the smell of cinnamon buns from the bakery upstairs fills the cars with longing.
Or change trains with me at Bloor and Yonge, and head west ward, just five stations, to another world -- to Christie Street for a Korean lunch and the scorching stone bowl of rice and vegetables and chili paste that is known as bee-bim-bap.
For dessert, we can buy a bag of walnut cakes, tiny delights filled with sweet, creamy paste and baked on a long conveyor belt that passes through an oven imported, like almost everyone who gets off the train at Christie, from South Korea.
Then back on the subway: "I'm hungry and you send me flowers. I cannot eat the iris."
"I wish I could walk around with my shirt off and feel comfortable."
I'm looking up at the advertising posters now and two quotations that face each other across the car. One is poetry ("Say It With Flowers" by Janice Kulyk Keefer) and the other is a placard for a hard-rock radio station that calls itself "The Edge."
I'll let you deduce which one is which.
Otherwise, there's not that much to see. There is no confusing Toronto's utilitarian tube with the grandeur of the Moscow subway, with its chandeliers and marble halls, or the silver-bullet rocketry of Hong Kong or the avant-garde (circa 1966) artistry of the Montréal Métro. Canada's oldest underground has been conveying commuters since 1954, which makes it far older than Toronto's new-found fascination with itself.
Newer stations such as Yorkdale, with an overarching rainbow of neon, and Eglinton West, with its giant murals of Toronto's beloved streetcars, offer some visual relief. There are a few open-cut stretches, including a simultaneous vista of the Davisville yards and Mount Pleasant Cemetery, allowing us to see the eventual destination of both the cars and the people who ride in them. But the evocative elevated tracks of my New York City childhood exist only on a rapid-transit branch line in the far northeastern suburbs. To wreak havoc on Toronto rapid transit, King Kong would have to ride all the way out to Scarborough and change trains at I Kennedy Station.
This hardly matters -- the passengers provide fascination enough. The racial and linguistic diversity is astonishing, especially at the extremities of the long east-west line, where the tracks stab deeply into the low-rent, high-rise immigrant quarters that orbit the city's leafy European core. Fittingly, the map of the system closely resembles the Chinese character for "world."
It is up to each rider to decide what part of that world he or she wants to devour. Korean bee-bim-bap at Christie or Greek souvlaki at Pape. Polish tripe soup at Dundas West or Portuguese pork and clams at Ossington. Don Mills or York Mills; High Park or Queen's Park; St. George or St. Clair or St. Patrick.
Nowhere in the world does a two-dollar ticket offer such an amazing array. But there is one other station that the system serves. It is the most important destination of all, no matter where we board our train, no matter how long we ride.
And that's the stop called Home.