I QUIT

I have here the letter from Gary Webster of the TTC to Doors Open concerning its “participation” in the 2007 event. The only thing we are promised is that “the TTC will prepare Bay Lower for public tours on Saturday, May 26 from noon to 3:00 PM.” In the next paragraph, we are reminded of the TTC’s $8.50 day pass, implying that one will need to pay to get into the subway just to tour this disused station.

Obviously none of this is sufficient.

  • There will be an avalanche of interest in Bay Lower. Three hours aren’t gonna cut it. Remember, everyone travelling east or west last weekend or during the next five weekends will have glimpsed the station through closed doors. We started out with a large number of transit fans interested in the station; now everybody who takes the train during six weekends knows it exists. And we want in.

  • A three-hour tour window insults even the previous transit-fan base, whom the TTC has spent decades ignoring. After Transit Camp, I thought the TTC knew better than to ignore its most ardent fans. Don’t make us line up for hours (on what could be a hot day) only to tell us at some arbitrary cutoff point like 2:30 that nobody else is getting in. Forty years of disuse cannot be rectified by three hours of public access.

  • Of course the station needs to be upgraded slightly for safety. But once you do that, you can run tours all afternoon on both days of Doors Open.

  • Don’t charge admission of any kind. It is trivial to set up a line for Bay Lower tours that is separate from the entrance to Bay station.

  • Webster’s letter lists 18 TV commercials that were filmed at Bay Lower (of little interest) and 32 movies:

    1. Bait
    2. Bless the Child
    3. Broken
    4. Bulletproof Monk
    5. Caveman’s Valentine
    6. Claire’s Hat
    7. Cletis Tout
    8. Colony, The
    9. Darkman
    10. Don’t Say a Word
    11. Extreme Measures
    12. Hades Factor, The
    13. Hate
    14. Honey
    15. Johnny Mnemonic
    16. Judgement
    17. Last Night
    18. Loser
    19. Mimic
    20. New York Minute
    21. Paper, Scissors, Stone
    22. Quints
    23. Recruit, The
    24. Republic of Love
    25. Runaway
    26. 16 Blocks
    27. Take the Lead
    28. Thoughtcrimes
    29. ’Til Death
    30. Undercover Brother
    31. Walter & Henry
    32. You Stupid Man

    How many of those have you seen or even heard of? How many have Toronto standing in for New York or for an unnamed city? How many are actual Canadian movies? (By my count, three.)

Let’s not blow this, please.

The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2007.02.27 17:23. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. (If you are seeing this on a screen, then the page stylesheet was not loaded or not loaded properly.) The permanent link is:
https://blog.fawny.org/2007/02/27/bldo/

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