Cross-posted to Spacing Wire

There are a few stations in the subway system that have a sibling station with a connection to another subway line: St. George, Yonge/Bloor, Kennedy, Yonge/Sheppard, and Spadina. The St. George stations are right on top of one another so if there is any confusion you just have to run up or down the stairs to find yourself in the right station. Kennedy’s subway and RT stations are distinctive enough as they use different forms of transit (I hear “Kennedy RT” used by my Scarborough friends). Stations at Yonge-Bloor and Yonge-Sheppard/Sheppard-Yonge have different names to make it easy to distinguish one from the other.

But the two Spadina stations are far apart and share very little visual similarities. The distinction between the two stops personally befuddles me whenever folks order our subway buttons and ask for a Spadina button but do not specify which one they prefer.

So here is what I’m proposing: let’s call the Spadina station on the north-south University line, the one with lovely round brown circles, “Spadina North.” I understand that it was originally to be called Lowther Station, named after a nearby side-street, but Lowther doesn’t register in big-city thinking. I’m not asking the TTC to officially change the name of the station, because I think the public can produce a new moniker or nickname and have it catch popular appeal. But I think a distinction needs to be made. I can imagine all of the missed dates and late meetings people have experienced because someone said, “let’s meet on the platform of Spadina station.”

If there are other suggestions for a “new” name for the station, let’s hear it. Spadina Brown? Spadina Retro?

Leave your suggestions on the Spadina North post on the Spacing Wire.

(A reader corrects: ‘At Bloor-Yonge, the north-south platforms show the name Bloor so you can tell that the cross street is Bloor, and the east-west platforms show the name Yonge so you can tell that the cross street is Yonge. This is the usual system of naming in New York, but it was not adopted for any other stations in Toronto. As is usual in most other cities, elsewhere there is one name for each station. There is no such station name as “Yonge-Sheppard”’)