There is a man, perhaps he is your father too, born in the earliest years of this century, who no longer remembers his family, or how he earned his living, or where he lives...but still he remembers the moment he stepped from the train - via the great port cities of Gdansk, Le Havre, and Montreal - and entered the vastness of Union Station.

He was young and utterly abandoned, the kind of loneliness that is never quite erased, not even by fifty years of marriage. I don’t know how old I was when I first heard the story of his emigration and imagined his desolation and the magnitude of his responsibilities which seemed to fill the cavernous space of the station, but I was very young when his loneliness first entered me.

All great train stations are monuments to the most personal rites of passage and huge historic events – every form of leavetaking and arrival. Mass human displacements, waves of immigration, war, forced migration. Exile, dispossession, exodus, deportation. And for the fortunate, the Station was a place of extraordinary, impossible reunions.

We may be one of the last generations with memories run through by trains.

During the Second World War, Union station was the central terminal for soldiers being sent overseas. Through the 200 foot concourse, under the magnificent 88 foot vaulted ceiling of Italian - Guastavino - tile, past walls of densely fossilized Minnesota Zumbro stone, over floors and stairways of Tennessee marble, in light flooding from four-storey arched windows, past the 22 pillars, each 40 feet high, each 75 tons...thousands embraced for the last time on this earth. For so many, Union Station is the place where fathers, brothers, sons, husbands were last alive. And among all the partings, it is said, were lovers who had no place else to go, who came simply to join the anonymity of the crowd, so they could kiss with inconspicuous passion among the throngs crowding the platforms and the great hall, their public display swallowed up by the intense emotion all around them.

Two rows of splash fountains.
Ten splash fountains per row.
Twenty splash fountains in total.
Thirty nozzles (three rows of ten) per fountain.
Six hundred ground nozzles in total.

Each nozzle (jet) has an orifice that is 1/4 inch in diameter, and delivers 2.65 GPM (Gallons Per Minute) at 3 foot spray height, and 4.36 GPM at maximum (8 foot) spray height. Spacing between nozzles (jets) is 2 inches, for a total body width of 18 inches, which is ideal for spanning most human body sizes, including large adults. Thus the size of the wall of water is approximately 1.5 feet wide by 8 feet tall, which more than adequately covers the largest and tallest of bathers.

Each fountain is supplied with three pipes each of which has 2 inch inside diameter. Thus each row of 10 nozzles is supplied by a 2 inch pipe, for a total of 43.6 GPM from the 2 inch pipe. The entire waterpark is supplied by three 8 inch pipes.

From small beginnings major hazards grow. ‘Who told you you could have a pedicure…?!” bellowed the surgeon, an otherwise charming man with an international reputation to protect. “Do you realize what could happen now?” he went on. “If the new hip gets infected we have to take it out. Then we put in a temporary hip, and three months down the road insert another permanent one, all while trying to keep you alive.” I could hear him thinking, How could she have done this to me …! “The nails have to come off!” he said firmly, instructing one of his several adoring residents to prepare the anaesthetic. A table full of instruments was wheeled into place next to me.

While hiking up the Don Valley one August afternoon, I spoke to a man and his son who had cycled from their home in the Jane-Finch corridor, down the Humber Valley, along the Harbourfront, and were on their way back home via the west fork of the Don - they would have cycled for eight hours without leaving parkland.
(Wayne Grady - Introduction, "Toronto Parks")

The intersection of the "irrational" (Toronto's system of ravines and river valleys) and the "rational" (arterial road system) yields many potential connection points and sites for inhabited Living Bridges.