Subterranean ‘cities-under-cities’ are spreading around the world, but for sheer continuous commercial distance, Toronto remains king

I’ve worked in a Path-connected building for over a decade, long enough to remember a time when it had smoking rooms. A couple of years back, I began to notice a guy sitting outside my building, wearing cargo shorts and a T-shirt, huffing a brick-sized vape while gaming on his phone. Summer turned to fall turned to winter, and still the shorts remained, his aloof pose untempered by the sleet or snow. He seemed to me to embody the apotheosis of Pathitude. For him, weather seemed an obsolete curio of a less-evolved time.

Take a walk through Toronto’s financial district and you probably won’t realise that you stand atop the largest underground shopping complex in the world. You might see the occasional doorway at street level bearing the words “Retail Concourse” in a nondescript font, but for the most part the more than 100 entrances to this labyrinth, known as the Path, are accessible only from within the office towers.