An Absence Of Vision

The Union Station revitalization could have given us an awe-inspiring building. Instead, Toronto will have to settle for an uninspired, utilitarian corridor.

On December 1, 2009, Mayor David Miller announced the signing of a head lessee agreement and selection of a construction manager to implement the much-vaunted Union Station Revitalization project. It was the culmination of a decade of heated controversy about the future of Union Station, and the outcome is frankly disappointing.

Union Station has been a symbol of arrival to the City of Toronto since its creation – both to the travelers disembarking in the “Big Smoke,” and to the city itself as the centre of commerce and industry in Central Canada. It was once a monumental place, one that evoked awe and splendor on the scale of Grand Central Station or numerous other great railway terminals world-round, but it is now tired and in desperate need of a makeover and a new vision worthy of the 21st century.

Everyone seems to agree that Union Station is a civic monument of national importance, and that its history should be preserved, protected, and enhanced. But to most people who pass through it today, it is little more than a utilitarian passage, one spot in the nameless experience of Toronto’s underground PATH system. The goal seems to be to get people through it as quickly as possible. Certainly no one stops to see Union Station as a place, and there is no part of the experience that recalls the wonder of getting off a train in Paris, London, or Milan – the experience of having arrived.

In this latest chapter of the Union Station saga, the city initially issued a call to the private sector for creative proposals to revitalize and operate the facility. An independent advisory committee eventually chose a consortium that presented a vision of Union Station as transportation hub, tourist attraction, commercial centre, and symbol of a revitalized Toronto within a revitalized regional mass transit system, but the process stumbled over dogma, politics, and finances. The proposal was attacked by community activists for whom private control over Union Station was anathema, by politicians who could not resist trying to score political points, even at the cost of killing the golden goose, and by the inability of the city to articulate its goals clearly and to reach decisions in a timely manner.

So, after more years of wrangling, what the city has before it today is a pedestrian proposal to give the building a facelift to service just one function: the arrival and departure of rail travelers (both intercity and commuters). The current plan has no vision of the past or the future, no big ideas, new or old. There is little celebration of the history of the place, little in the way of added value, little in the way of efforts to attract new businesses and activities to the place, or in the way of tying the structure into the fabric of the city.

The most telling evidence of this single-mindedness can be found on the city’s website about the new proposal, where a “virtual tour” of the concourse level has been posted. Nowhere is there a view of the original hall of Union Station. Rather, the focus is on the connection between the upper and lower levels, with loving attention paid to a bank of escalators. The fly-through is devoid of any images that would capture one’s imagination – no signage or indication of the kinds of services that might be available to traveler, tourist, or architectural heritage aficionado. But perhaps most telling is that although the video shows thousands of people passing through Union Station, no one is shown sitting, standing, or speaking to another person. All anyone in the video is doing is walking. The message is clear: we will get you through this horrible experience as quickly and efficiently as possible, and we will not trouble you with any stimulation of any sort – either positive or negative – that would give you something to remember, something that would connect you to a sense of place, a sense of community, or a sense of wonder.

We do not doubt the capability of the designers, leasing agents, or construction managers engaged by the city to implement this design. They have a long track record of designing successful transportation facilities, leasing retail centres, and constructing projects on time and on budget. What they produced is what the city asked them for – a functional but mediocre transportation hub. But we Torontonians cannot be faulted for hoping for more than the equivalent of an upgraded Bay Street bus terminal, full of glaring lights and unhappy faces.

The current plan for Union Station appears to be the product of engineers, bureaucrats, and politicians who have sought to eliminate every ounce of joy from the travel experience, who could not dream of spending public funds on trying to brighten and enhance those thousands of lives touched each day by Union Station. They sought to create a purely utilitarian experience destined to make the drudgery of getting from point A to point B as uninspired as possible. In that, they will have no doubt succeeded.