Urban Exploration: Toronto City Hall

Written by Jeff Chapman - Infiltration.org

In 1957, the City of Toronto held the largest architectural competition ever, and invited 520 architects from around the world to submit their plans for Toronto's new City Hall. After a year of submissions and public debate, the avant-garde design proposed by Finnish architect Viljo Revell triumphed. The building was finally completed in 1965.

My friend Sean and I entered City Hall's wondrous subbasement by pushing forcefully on a door at the bottom of the north stairwell. Once inside we began exploring very tentatively. As can be seen on City Hall blueprints, the building's subbasement is mostly one gigantic room, so we were constantly worried that an employee somewhere else on the level would spot our mischievous feet beneath all the pipes and vents.

City Hall has its own set of steam tunnels.

After an initial survey of the area, Sean and I climbed up a small ladder and entered what appeared to be a small vent-filled crawlspace. We soon realized the crawlspace was actually quite large and complex. We found a fairly shaky wooden ladder propped against pipes and walls which led up at least two storeys into a promising-looking shaft, but unfortunately our nerves weren't up for that dangerous and possibly noisy climb. Behind a small metal door nearby, Sean discovered a series of dark concrete tunnels filled with vents and water pipes, quite similar to college steam tunnels except without all the heat. We traversed the tunnels for a while before eventually concluding that every route led either to a dead end or back to the main portion of the subbasement.

City Hall's gigantic subbasement can be traversed on the floor or through the ducts.

Emerging back into the main subbasement, we continued our quest. Among our many finds were several blue wooden chests, which unfortunately were filled with old junk rather than treasure, a large stockpile of hazardous chemicals in barrels, some gigantic vents I climbed up inside, and a glorious industrial area we dubbed Valveland.

We had explored less than a tenth of the subbasement and were still having a great time when suddenly we heard a clunk. Sometimes clunks are nice, don't get me wrong, but this was not a nice clunk, rather more of a nearby-employee clunk. This particular clunk upset us both very greatly, and caused us to scurry in search of an exit quickly, while peeking under all the pipes and vents for feet and expecting to see a troop of black leather boots goose-stepping towards us at any moment. Sean found an elevator and was just about to summon it to our rescue when I stopped him; elevators have a nasty habit of dinging when they arrive, and service elevators sometimes have eyes. We instead scrambled and climbed back to the way we had come in and ran off up the stairs to the next level up. I later discovered that this elevator was not a service elevator at all, but simply the easternmost of the 11 public elevators which service the building (and the only elevator with an "SB" button). It requires no passcard, but it does ding.

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