Dupont Station is accessible - Easier Access Project Update
Fall 2020
Dupont Station is the newest TTC subway station to become accessible. Three new elevators connecting the street to concourse and subway platforms levels are now open for customer use.
The new accessible TTC subway entrance/street-level elevator (E1) is located on the Southeast corner of Dupont Street and Spadina Road.
Other minor project related work will continue at the station.
Cross section image of station elevators
Public art
Art is an important component of major station upgrades. As a part of this station upgrade work, TTC contacted the original artist, James Sutherland, who was first commissioned in 1977 to complete the glass mosaic tile mural entitled “Spadina Summer Under all Seasons". His original work is installed at Dupont Station’s subway platform level. In 2020, James Sutherland was invited back to create a new public art concept, “The Force that through the Green Fuse drives the Flower”. The new mural will be installed in 2021 on the station’s
Concourse level (see image).
“In 1977, I won a competition with 7 other artists, to create public art in the newly constructed “Spadina Subway Line” now called “Yonge-University Line 1”. I was assigned to Dupont Station and designed the glass mosaic tile mural entitled, “Spadina Summer Under all Seasons" which was installed the following year. My concept was to include an organic bit of surreal magic as a foil to balance the high tech qualities of a modern subway.
In 2020, when TTC retrofitted the station with new elevators, I was invited back to create another public art installation for Dupont Station. This new mural, “The Force that through the Green Fuse drives the Flower” is meant to provide thematic context for the original mosaics and for our species in this Anthropocene era, through some of the many insights of botanical science which represent a more fundamental magic, that of the evolution of plants from the inception of photosynthesis in Precambrian oceans to that miracle’s on-going consequences as flowering plants, since 130 million years ago. Almost all life on our planet has ensued from this primary process of Nature: from the manufacture of nourishing plant sugars to the oxygenation of our atmosphere, from production of fertile soil and the fungal networks that connect plant life under the soil in a “wood wide web” of nutrient trade and communication. We are the product of this wondrous phenomenon and it is part of us. We are all, truly, in this together.”
– The artist, James Sutherland