Art & Architecture

For the network’s third-busiest station, Guy-Concordia is regrettably small, shabby, and troubled.

The only station on the downtown portion of the green line to be built in tunnel, it has two access transepts, one at each end of the station (Rue Guy to the east, Rue Saint-Mathieu to the west), with overly narrow staircases leading up to the crossovers between the platforms.

Unfortunately, this layout means that many of the large volume of passengers that disembark here have to walk the length of the narrow platforms to get to their exit. Moreover, while each transept has two staircases to each platform, the platforms are longer than usual to reach them. As a result, the farther staircase is a few metres beyond the end of the platform face, and therefore attracts much fewer passengers, leading to overcrowding on the nearer one. The stairs thus become choke points where crowds tend to form. The sections of platform beyond the length of the trains are separated from the tracks with grilles.

There also tend to be lineups at rush hour to get on the up escalator, particularly at the Rue Guy exit; each access has just one escalator in each direction and two narrow staircases, to cover the station’s 19.2-metre depth.

These situations are exacerbated by the cramped feel of the tunnelled spaces, making them seem more crowded than other downtown stations built in airier cut-and-cover volumes.

The station has gone through a number of changes of style over the years. The most recent makeover came in 2012-2015, bringing in striking random patterns of black, grey, yellow, and red, in reference to Concordia University’s colours.¹ These patterns were used on the walls and floors of the transepts, on the walls behind the seats and the floors in front of them, and in central stripes along the passengers’ path through the access areas.

The wall finishes in the upper areas of the station were also redone in grey panels (dark grey in the Rue Guy access and lighter grey in the Saint-Mathieu access) with stainless steel bands, with the same brightly coloured pattern continuing along the walls in angular stripes. The choice of colours is perhaps not universally popular, but it does tie the different parts of the station together somewhat more than before. The remainder of the floors were redone in grey tiles on the platforms, black stone in the transepts and the Rue Guy access, and grey stone in the Saint-Mathieu access. There are no works of art in the station.

The accesses are not particularly remarkable. Both are in the ground floors of buildings. The Rue Guy access sits under an office building that now belongs to Concordia University. The ticket hall is lined with shops and services, and is also a key link in the underground city connections between the university’s buildings.

Unfortunately, its fairly tight spaces (including a remarkably small fare-paid zone) and forced U-turn between the turnstiles and the escalators to the surface inevitably lead to traffic snarls between the many different users of the area: lineups of passengers waiting to buy fares, dense crowds exiting toward the university or the Côte-des-Neiges buses, university students who have to pass through the space between university buildings, and customers of the shops and services. Add to this the regrettably low ceilings, and the feeling here is more of confused hubbub than smooth passenger flow. The last remodel somewhat improved the situation by adding a new row of turnstiles on the side of the control zone.

The Rue Saint-Mathieu exit is located in the ground floor of the CLSC Metro building. The landing at the top is rather small, and access to it from the curb where buses stop is awkwardly obstructed by a column and by an irregular set of stairs down from the sloped sidewalk to the entrance.

The high-ceilinged staircase and ticket hall give it a much more spacious feel than the other exit, which is too bad as it deals both with fewer people overall and with smaller surge loads (busloads of passengers arriving from the Côte-des-Neiges bus, as opposed to trainloads of people on their way to take the same bus, as at the other end). The upper part of the walls in the stairwell and ticket hall are decorated with a high-relief pattern of random vertical rectangles.

Finally, the station has a notorious problem with water leakage, leading to hideous brown stalactites collecting on the ceiling and stains on the walls. An attractive new decor can’t do much to solve such problems, let alone the cramped layout and poor passenger flow.