Bloor-Yonge Station

Bloor-Yonge is a station on the Yonge-University-Spadina line and the Bloor-Danforth line of the Toronto, Ontario, Canada subway. It is located at 733 Yonge Street at Bloor Street West/East. It opened in 1954. Nearby landmarks include the Toronto Reference Library, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s The Bay Uptown department store, and the northern end of the Yonge Street Strip. The station originally featured a small retail concourse along the corridor leading to the exit for the south side of Bloor St. This concourse was closed and disappeared during the construction of the office building at 33 Bloor St. E. in the late 1980s. The only daytime bus route that serves Bloor-Yonge is the 97B Yonge. At night, this is a key transfer between the 300 Bloor-Danforth and 320 Yonge Blue Night Buses.

The station was originally simply named “Bloor”, and connected with a pair of enclosed platforms in the centre of Bloor Street to allow interchange with Bloor streetcars within the fare-paid zone. When the streetcars were replaced with the Bloor-Danforth subway in 1966, the station began to be shown on maps as “Bloor-Yonge”, but actual platform signs still show “Bloor” on the Yonge-University-Spadina line and “Yonge” on the Bloor-Danforth Line, following the style common in the New York subway. (Some maps over the years also showed the station with two names “Bloor” and “Yonge”, although the style “Bloor-Yonge” is now in use again.) Similarly, the automated station announcement system installed in 2007–08 refers to the station as “Bloor” on the one line and “Yonge” on the other. It is the only TTC station named in this way; all other interchanges share the same name for both lines.

Bloor-Yonge is the busiest station in the system, serving a combined total of approximately 362,280 people a day, and in 1992 the TTC took advantage of building construction over the station to open it out and widen the platforms on the Yonge-University-Spadina portion of the station. This was actually the first stage of a plan to eventually enable trains to open their doors on both sides: the tracks would next have been slewed outwards within the widened station, and a central platform built between them. The TTC does not currently intend to proceed with this, as it would require closing the station for many months. The Bloor-Danforth platforms were not widened and are heavily congested during peak times.

After leaving the station northbound on the Yonge-University-Spadina line and crossing under Church Street in a tunnel, the line returns to the surface, mostly in an open cut, for some 800 metres going through Rosedale station.

Immediately west of the station on the Bloor-Danforth Line, the second pair of connecting tracks from the University section of the Yonge-University Spadina line join onto the running lines from the inside. Within the station, the Yonge section of the Yonge-University-Spadina line crosses above the Bloor-Danforth line.

On weekends between February 24 and March 31, 2007, the Bloor-Danforth trains were rerouted through the lower level of Bay Station because of track construction.

East of the station, the Bloor-Danforth line goes into bored tunnel to cross to the south side of Bloor Street, and arrives at Sherbourne station.

Surface connections