TheBulletin.ca Journal of Downtown Toronto
Eric Morse —
The construction and traffic horror that is currently Front St. is not Dave Barrington’s fault, he makes clear. That’s somebody else’s mess, specifically the TTC’s, in the vital but disruptive work involved in adding a second, capacity-doubling platform to Union subway station.
Barrington has his own complexities and challenges, and they are all to do with the revitalization of Union Station, a series of concurrent projects which—taken all together and including the TTC platform project—will cost around a billion dollars when complete. And while he can put a price tag on the project, he is carefully non-committal as to a completion date.
The full project will convert the early-20th-century beaux-arts structure (originally completed in 1927 and now a designated Parks Canada heritage site) from a sleepy legacy railway station that sort of accommodates commuter traffic to a high-flow, high-capacity commuter rail transit hub that efficiently accommodates inter-city rail links.
In the meantime, the commuters keep commuting and the trains keep rolling through, and Barrington and his people have to see that it all happens safely, continuously, and as efficiently as possible in the circumstances.
On Dec. 9, Barrington, vice president of project management at NORR Architects, Planners and Engineers, described the project to the Toronto Dollar Supper Club, a St. Lawrence Neighbourhood charitable association which invites about ten high-profile speakers per year.
NORR is one of the major firms in charge of delivering the complex revitalization project for the terminal building itself. Despite the firm’s experience, the Union Station project is the largest and longest-lasting that Barrington has ever tackled.
ORR began working with the city in 2007 and the project will continue well past the 2015 Pan Am Games, even as major developments continue to grow around it on all sides.
Improving (and describing) a hundred-year-old technology has its interesting moments; for instance, when Barrington apses into designer jargon, some of it belongs to the late Victorian period: “head house” is the station building, (which in most European railways stood at the head end of the tracks); “teamways” are the Bay and York St. loading zones below track level where horse-and-buggy teams would deliver the masses of checked passenger baggage; and the “moat” is that big, deep trench between Front and the station itself that you cross to get from GO to TTC.
These days, 43 million passengers a year (2,500 per train) use GO transit; inter-city rail traffic is a comparative trickle. Another 20 million pass through Union subway station. The early 20th-century design function (where inter-city had priority of place) has to be reversed to allow for an eventual doubling of traffic in the next 20 years.
The station revitalization itself is one component in a series that includes the TTC station doubling and the revitalization of the train sheds with a green roof and a glass atrium (now that coal engine smoke is no longer an issue). A northwest link to the PATH system—absolutely never referred to as the “Northwest PATH-age”—is now under construction at York and Front.
Plans also include deep-water cooling for the station building itself (which historically never had a cooling system), solar heating, and major storm-water drainage systems since so much of the facility is below street level.
“Street level” itself is a mutable concept.
The station was built on a slope to begin with. In the original 1920s-era-project, the existing trackage was built on a raised viaduct (Bay and York streets run under it, and this is where you find those “teamways” plus the lower concourse of the existing station with escalators up to the platforms).
The truly innovative, gargantuan feature of the project, carefully masked behind hoardings while the GO and VIA concourses keep working, is the construction of a second, lower retail concourse beneath all the existing levels. This involves—it began in October 2010—the construction of scaffolding around every load-bearing column, then digging around each in a confined space—“excavating with a teaspoon”, Barrington calls it—severing the column at the original floor level, and inserting an extension beneath, all while the trains are running overhead with 2,500 people each on board.
Stability risk? There’s an app for that, says Barrington. A complex monitoring program with laser sensors for every column feeds notifications through to the chief structural engineer’s Blackberry if there’s any movement outside tolerances. So far, the system has sent a few notifications but all were false alarms. The trains keep rolling.
The founders designed well in terms of traffic flow, says Barrington, and to the casual eye, the traffic flows that will result when the project is completed will be very similar, though on a vastly expanded scale. The Great Hall of the station is being preserved both as a heritage interior (with upgraded lighting) and a major pedestrian traffic corridor, though the later adhesions like retail stalls and ticket counters will be generally restored to their 1930s appearance.
Barrington expects work on the York concourse to be finished in the next year, and the tricky part will be switching an uninterrupted pedestrian flow from the current Bay GO concourse to the new York concourse, while keeping the VIA operation flowing, in time for the bulge in traffic that the PanAm Games will bring. The moat will be glazed over—no more wet dashes from subway to GO—and all levels and facilities (in response to an audience question) will be disabled-accessible.
The next Toronto Supper Club event will take place Jan. 13 featuring speaker Stephen W. Hwang of Centre for Research on Inner City Health of St Michael’s Hospital at the Hot House Restaurant.
For information contact diane.gasner@utoronto.ca.
