Built with a subway deck 48 years before there was a subway to put on it
The Bloor Viaduct
Officially the Prince Edward Viaduct, this 1918 bridge across the Don Valley was engineered with a lower deck for a subway line that wouldn't be built for another 48 years — one of the most farsighted pieces of infrastructure planning in Toronto's history.
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Most Torontonians call it the Bloor Viaduct. Its official name is the Prince Edward Viaduct, and it's one of the more quietly remarkable pieces of infrastructure planning in the city's history — a bridge built for a transit line that wouldn't exist for almost half a century.
Built in 1918, with a subway already in mind
Completed in 1918, the 494-metre steel-and-concrete arch bridge was designed by city Works Department staff and architect Edmund Burke, under city engineer Roland Caldwell Harris, to carry Bloor Street across the Don River Valley. Its most farsighted feature: a lower deck, built into the original design specifically to accommodate a future subway line — decades before Toronto had one. That lower deck sat unused until 1966, when the Bloor-Danforth subway line finally opened and put it to work exactly as planned.
A recurring character in Toronto fiction
The viaduct has shown up repeatedly in Toronto's cultural output — referenced in songs by Bruce Cockburn and the Barenaked Ladies, and most notably as a central setting in Michael Ondaatje's novel In the Skin of a Lion, which fictionalizes its construction.
The Luminous Veil (2003)
For decades, the viaduct's height and open sides made it one of the most frequently used suicide sites in North America, second only to San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Following sustained public health advocacy, the city installed the Luminous Veil in 2003 — a barrier of over 9,000 steel rods, five metres high, designed by architect Dereck Revington. It effectively ended the bridge's use for that purpose, and is now cited internationally as a real-world example of how physical barriers at high-risk sites measurably reduce suicide rates rather than simply displacing them elsewhere.
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Sources
- The Canadian Encyclopedia — Toronto Feature: Bloor Viaduct
- Wikipedia — Prince Edward Viaduct
- Spacing Toronto — Unveiling the Bloor Viaduct's Luminous Veil