Historic Tunnels of Toronto

Neighbourhood: Downtown / Casa Loma / Spadina · Address: Casa Loma: 1 Austin Terrace. Lower Bay: Doors Open Toronto (May). PATH: Union Station onward · Hours: Casa Loma tunnels: daily with admission. Lower Bay: Doors Open Toronto only (annual, May) · Price Range: Free–$ · Editorial status: Not yet verified

Why Visit

Toronto’s historic tunnels let you walk literal underground slices of the city’s past, from a castle’s secret passage to a ghost subway platform. They offer up-close details you don’t get from above ground.

What Makes It Unique

These are some of the only legal ways to experience Toronto’s underground outside of transit and shopping – Casa Loma’s tunnel was made to shelter Toronto’s elite from the weather, while Lower Bay lets you tour a disused subway platform where movies are filmed. The PATH’s oldest fragments still show pre-war stonework if you look for it.

If you want one of those Toronto spots that quietly rewires how you see the city, go look at the buried bridge under Crawford Street by Queen West. It’s not a formal attraction, and if you didn’t know what you were looking at, you could easily walk right past it. But once someone points it out, it’s kind of astonishing: sitting beneath the street is an actual concrete bridge built to cross Garrison Creek, back when the creek still ran openly through this part of town. Then in the 1880s the waterway was buried in a culvert, the street was raised, and instead of tearing the bridge out, the city basically paved over it and moved on. From Trinity Bellwoods Park, just south of the Queen Street entrance, you can still make out the old brick abutments and bits of the bridge structure. That’s the part that gets people. This isn’t some vague plaque telling you a river once existed here. It’s physical proof. You’re standing in one of the busiest, most lived-in parts of the west end, with dog walkers, people drinking coffee, kids in the park, streetcars rattling along Queen, and right there is this stubborn leftover piece of infrastructure built for a landscape that no longer exists on the surface. What I like about this place is that it changes the neighborhood around it. Trinity Bellwoods starts to make more sense once you remember water shaped it. The dips in the land, the odd grades, the way certain streets feel slightly off — suddenly it all reads like a place that had a creek running through it, because it did. The buried bridge makes that lost geography feel real in a way maps alone can’t. It’s especially good if you’re into overlooked city details, photography, or the weird overlap between nature and infrastructure. In winter, with the leaves down, the brickwork is easiest to see, and the whole thing looks a little stark and ghostly. In summer it’s still worth visiting, but you may need to slow down and really look from the park edge and street to pick out the remains. A practical note: this is strictly a look-from-above situation. Don’t try to enter any drains, culverts, or storm sewer spaces. You don’t need to anyway — the visible remnants can be seen from public space, and that’s enough to get the point. I’d approach from Queen and Crawford, then step into the south end of Trinity Bellwoods and take a minute to scan the area instead of expecting a big obvious landmark. It’s free, always viewable from the street and park, and easy to tack onto a Queen West walk. If you’re coming by transit, go from Ossington Station, head south on Ossington, then east along Queen to Crawford. It won’t take long, but it sticks with you. After you’ve seen it, it’s hard not to imagine the old creek still moving under the neighborhood.