What Will Happen to Toronto's PATH?

Earlier this winter, if you were walking up Bay Street on a cold weekday, you could be forgiven for thinking that something was wrong. Where were all the people? They were there but twenty feet under the sidewalks in Toronto's underground PATH network. Every day, hundreds of thousands of downtown workers would flood the kilometres of corridors lined with shops and food courts. During my 30-odd years of working in Toronto's financial district, I got very familiar with the PATH. It was great for shopping and keeping out of inclement weather, whether it was winter's cold or heat, humidity, and rain in the summer. 

Now it's deserted and the stores and restaurants are hurting. 

From Bloomberg: 

To get an idea of the long recovery ahead for Toronto’s financial district, take a walk through the vast subterranean pathways that connect the city’s skyscrapers.

Covid-19 has turned the food court under the Brookfield Place office complex into a ghost town. Single chairs sit at empty tables, passenger-less escalators climb desultorily upward, and the click, click, click of a woman’s heels is all that can be heard in what is normally a cacophony.

 “It’s depressing,” said Subway franchise owner Ani, who declined to give his last name. Just one customer showed up in the first 15 minutes of lunch hour on a recent week day. “I feel horrible like everyone else. I miss the business. I miss the customers.”

In the years leading to 2020 B.C. (Before Covid), some 250,000 people a day would descend into the PATH to shop or grab a bite in the more than 30 kilometers (19 miles) of halls and subterranean plazas that snake under North America’s second-largest financial district. But as banks sketch out plans for an eventual return to their offices, the future looks a lot more bleak for the network below.

It's likely that workers will slowly trickle back to the office towers. What will remain of the businesses in the PATH remains to be seen, but there will almost certainly be fewer of them.