Subway Explorers
Lawrence West from David Topping’s 69 Days on the TTC
I’m a transit geek. I’m not a railfan—the mundane details of different train models and rail gauges doesn’t interest me—but I am fascinated by public transport. I pore over subway maps and admire ephemera such as old tickets or the unique, quietly confident typeface used in Toronto’s 1950s-era stations. I love how public transit—in the cities where it is a central part of life and not a marginal service for the poor—is a great social blender, bringing people from every different corner of the city together. In many ways, it is in the subway, not the streets, where the true face of a city is revealed.
That’s why I appreciate David Topping’s 69 Days on the TTC, an ambitious attempt to visit and photograph all sixty-nine of Toronto’s subway stations. Topping documents the subway’s details, captures its atmosphere and studies its users, revealing the breadth and complexity of Toronto’s urban landscape. “I’ve lived in Toronto’s west end since I was born,” he explains on Torontoist. “My Toronto—the part of the city that matters to me—has never extended further west than Kipling, further east than Yonge, or further north than St. Clair. I felt stuck.” By the end of his tour, he felt he had gained “a genuine curiosity for the city that I thought I knew everything about. There will always be more of Toronto to explore, always be more people to find and places to escape to.”
Underground café at Islington station, by David Topping
The motley band of Montrealers who run Midnight Poutine have attempted something similar, albeit in a less systematic and artistically rigorous fashion. Every so often, one its is dispatched to report on one of Montreal’s sixty-nine metro stations. The result is the Metro Roulette series, the best part of which is not its investigation of Montreal’s metro stations—a better job of that is done by translator and perennial NDP candidate Matt McLaughlin’s Montreal by Metro—but its irreverent exploration of the neighbourhoods that surround them. The best entries so far have been the one on Crémazie metro, from which passengers emerge unto a neighbourhood of elevated highways and strange taxidermist barbershops; and the one on Parc metro, with its crazy costume shops, hanging laundry and playground graveyards.
In my own travels on public transit here and elsewhere, I’ve been content to revel in the exotic ordinariness of it all, like the trilingual announcements on Hong Kong’s MTR, which evoke warm memories when I hear them, or the particular fondness of Londoners for reading newspapers in the tube. Often, it was on the bus or in the metro that I got the best sense of a city and its inhabitants — the full extent of Paris’ diversity is not apparent until you board a crowded underground train, for instance. As for Montreal, well, I haven’t been to every metro station, but I certainly enjoy the rides between them.
Bus terminal at Islington station, by David Topping
Tags: Montreal, Photography, Subway, Toronto
Justin Bur says:
The previous year (fall 2005), Craig White did a similar exercise, also posted on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/castelmar/sets/1169190/
His way of seeing the subway stations is quite different. A little starker, a little more architectural. There are plenty of stunning shots in his set too.
January 14th, 2007 at 1:52 pm