Once Upon A City: The division over Union Station

For years in the 1960s and '70s, the wrecking ball loomed over Toronto's beautiful transportation hub

Thestar.com
Aug. 4, 2016
By Carola Vyhnak

Union Station was doomed. A dazzling new waterfront development was going to be built and the Beaux Arts beauty on Front St. was in the way.

“Merry Christmas!” project leader Stewart Andrews greeted 200 guests eyeballing a six-metre-long scale model at the Royal York Hotel on Dec. 19, 1968.

The planned Metro Centre, a $1 billion joint project of Canadian National and Canadian Pacific railways, was the biggest single downtown development in North America.

The proposal was “nothing less than the creation of an entire new city within a city,” CNR chairman N.J. MacMillan told the crowd.

If Union Station had to be destroyed to make room for office towers, well that was the price of progress, Andrews said. And so the countdown began on the last days of “the soul and heartbeat of Toronto,” as author Pierre Berton once called it.

In truth, the landmark was the city’s third Union Station. The first was built in 1858 between Simcoe and York Sts. but replaced with a bigger version about 15 years later.

The turn of the century saw the number of trains and passengers growing rapidly, necessitating a still bigger facility, and when the Great Fire of 1904 wiped out most of Front St. between Bay and York, a site presented itself.

But Union Station number three was a long time coming. Squabbles among property owners, governments and Toronto Terminals Railway - the company formed by Grand Trunk Railway and Canadian Pacific to build and operate the station - held up construction until 1914 but more disputes and the First World War delayed completion until 1921.

The city’s new gateway didn’t open for another six years, however, as legal wrangling stalled work on platforms, tracks and other components.

So it was a momentous occasion when Edward, Prince of Wales, brandished golden scissors to cut the ribbon on Aug. 6, 1927.

One press report joked that it took the prince just eight and a half minutes “to accomplish what all of Toronto has been trying to do for the last six years.”

The admiring crowd deemed it worth the wait when the doors opened to the “largest and most opulent station erected in Canada,” as the City of Toronto website describes it.

From the Great Hall’s Tennessee marble floors to barrel-vaulted ceiling of Guastavino tile, and a supporting cast of 12-metre columns across the front, the $12 million edifice was “palatial,” according to the Toronto Daily Star.

The iron horses started running five days later, heralded by the front-page banner: “New Union Station hums with life today.”

Among the first passengers that month were a porcupine, giant hornbill and several “coloured geese,” part of a shipment of rare birds and beasts arriving from South Africa via New York for Riverdale Zoo.

One Star reader found the scene outside a bit of a zoo too, as rows of taxis constantly clogged the street.

“What chance has a foot passenger against this throng of motors?” he complained, accusing the city of favouring private interests over public safety.

But Union Station evolved into the main downtown transportation hub, welcoming throngs of commuters, visitors and newcomers into its limestone walls. The Second World War brought daily organ recitals to entertain the masses and waves of soldiers, some leaving for duty, others wounded or returning home, and still others bound for PoW camps in Northern Ontario.

Toronto writer Morley Callaghan penned a vignette for Maclean’s magazine as he imagined a soldier on leave waiting for a date at the station: “He can go into the drugstore and buy himself a bottle of eau de cologne, if he wants to smell like a rose, and then go downstairs and take a bath. Then he can come up to the barber shop and be freshly shaved.”

In 1954, major changes and more users arrived when the Toronto Transit Commission opened a Union terminal at the bottom of its new subway line. A dozen or so years later, GO Transit got on board with regular passenger service.

Then Dec. 19, 1968 arrived and with it were the plans for Metro Centre and the station’s demise.

Dubbed “bold and imaginative” by the Star, the development covered 77 hectares of railway land bounded by Front, Yonge and Bathurst Sts. The project called for a telecommunications tower, convention centre, hotel, housing for 20,000 and a transportation centre bringing together rail, GO commuter, subway and bus lines. And, of course, the cluster of towers where Union Station stood.

“It has an excellent chance of actually getting built,” a newspaper editorial predicted.

Three years and a five-day marathon debate later, city council approved the proposal, with councillor John Sewell the lone dissenter. But myriad roadblocks littered the path to redevelopment, with the station and its proponents arguably the biggest.

Letter writer Carl Schaeffer railed against erecting “tiresome shoebox towers” in place of a landmark of architectural and historic importance.

“To demolish this building would be a crime,” he opined.

For another three and a half years, the wrecking ball dangled as wrangling over various aspects of the project dragged on. But Union had friends in high places, including the provincial government and in 1975, Premier Bill Davis announced it would not only be saved but expanded in a $60 million update. That same year the imposing structure was declared a national historic site.

It was the end of the line for Metro Centre plans - although the 40-year-old CN Tower was one of the few features to be built.

Union Station’s 89th birthday on Aug. 6 finds it still undergoing a massive years-long makeover. But with completion expected in 2017 or 2018, there’s light at the end of the tunnel.