Toronto’s Underground City Faces Bleak Future With Bankers MIA

  • A 19-mile maze of halls and shopping plazas goes eerily silent
  • Tight spaces, high rents a ‘bad formula’ in once-thriving area
A pedestrian walks through a nearly empty Brookfield Place in the financial district of Toronto on May 22.Photographer: Cole Burston/Bloomberg
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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.