Where is everybody? Inside Canada’s invisible underworlds

Toronto —

It’s lunch hour on a wintry Wednesday afternoon and the streets of Toronto’s Financial District feel eerily abandoned.

Snow flurries are blowing at an angle, the sky is a leaden grey, and visibility is poor. Only a handful of pedestrians mummified in puffer coats can be seen waddling down the snow and slush-covered sidewalks of Adelaide Street West braving the 7F (-14C) windchill under the shadow of monolithic office towers .

Otherwise, the streets are unsettlingly quiet.

First-time visitors could be forgiven for mistaking Canada’s largest and most populous city (also the fourth largest city in North America) for an abandoned, quasi-dystopian concrete jungle, rather than the humming economic engine that it is.

Until, that is, they venture underground.

Because come winter, many Torontonians who live and work in the heart of Canada’s finance industry move into the sprawling subterranean underworld known as the PATH, a 30-kilometer network of labyrinthine pedestrian walkways that connect shops, restaurants, residences, office towers and subway stations, as well as tourist attractions.

On social media forums, users jokingly refer to the thousands of downtown office workers as gnomes, gophers or “mole people” who live and work underground. Or, that the workers in the maze of passageways are people who entered the PATH, got lost and couldn’t find their way out.

In the city’s Financial District, home to Canada’s major banks, locals are easily distinguishable from tourists and visitors by the conspicuous absence of winter paraphernalia. In place of winter coats, finance bros strut the halls in their puffer and fleece vests. Sartorial sightings among the smartly dressed, badge-wearing women include bare-footed sling backs, sleeveless tops and crisply-pres