Line 2 (Bloor-Danforth Subway)

Formal planning for a Bloor-Danforth subway accelerated in the late 1950s, following the success of the original Yonge subway, opened in 1954. The line was designed to replace the heavily congested Bloor and Danforth streetcar routes. Construction began in 1962, using mostly cut-and-cover methods, which caused major surface disruption along the corridor for years.

Opening day

The TTC officially opened Line 2 on February 26, 1966, with an initial segment running from Keele Station to Woodbine Station — 12.9 km and 22 stations. This doubled the number of stations on the Toronto subway network at the time, and produced the largest single cutback to the streetcar network since the Yonge line opened in 1954, since the Bloor and Danforth streetcar routes were discontinued the same day.

Extensions

Westward and eastward extensions were already under construction when the line opened, bringing the subway to Islington Avenue in Etobicoke and Warden Avenue in Scarborough by 1968. Today the line runs from Kipling to Kennedy, one of the two backbone lines of the modern TTC network.

Sources

• Transit Toronto — A History of Subways on Bloor and Queen Streets
• NOW Toronto — 60 Years of Line 2: Key Moments in Toronto's Bloor-Danforth Subway Line's History

Continue reading

Toronto's Streetcar Network

By the 1960s, most North American cities had scrapped their streetcars for buses. Toronto didn't — making the…

Queen's Park

Ontario's provincial legislature has run out of the same pink-sandstone Romanesque building since 1893 — a…

Barenaked Ladies

Ed Robertson and Steven Page started busking together in Scarborough in the late 1980s, and Barenaked Ladies…

The Globe and Mail

George Brown's Globe, founded in 1844, merged with the Mail and Empire in 1936 to create the paper widely…