Walk north on Bathurst from St. Clair now and you hit it before you expect to: a glass and steel entrance sunk into the northeast corner of Bathurst and Eglinton, orange accents catching the light, commuters filing down into a station that didn't exist six months ago. Fifty metres west, past a stretch of Eglinton Avenue that spent over a decade as a construction corridor, sits a steakhouse with a green door and a new address. House of Chan has been serving USDA steaks and Cantonese classics from a live lobster tank since 1957. It just isn't where it used to be.
Those two facts sit next to each other because they are the same story. Forest Hill North spent thirteen years absorbing the disruption required to build one underground station, and what it got in return was not a shopping destination or a tourist stop. It was, by the transit agency's own description, a station built primarily to serve the people who already live here.
The Corner That Took Thirteen Years
The City of Toronto authorized property expropriations for Forest Hill Station in 2013: a fee simple acquisition at 842 Eglinton Avenue West for the main entrance and vent shafts, and a second taking at 874 to 876 Eglinton Avenue West for a secondary entrance, additional vent shafts, and a traction power substation. That second address is where House of Chan had operated for decades. The restaurant needed to relocate before demolition could proceed.
Construction did not go smoothly. On April 18, 2016, a scaffold erected across the face of the future secondary entrance collapsed, injuring seven people, three seriously, in what investigators attributed to structural failure during high winds. The years that followed brought utility relocations, shoring work, and a roadway that spent long stretches torn up along Bathurst south of Eglinton. At one community meeting inside Beth Tzedec Congregation, residents and business owners packed the room after Metrolinx floated a plan to close a stretch of Bathurst Street for seven months to accelerate the build. The agency reversed course before the meeting even started, acknowledging it had not engaged the community well enough on a closure that would have saved three months of work.
Line 5 Eglinton finally opened to riders on February 8, 2026, running 19 kilometres from Mount Dennis to Kennedy Station across 25 stops. Thirteen years after the expropriation notices went out, the corner that took the brunt of the disruption had its station.
A Station Built to Stay Local
Here is the detail that gets lost in most coverage of the Crosstown: not every stop on this line was designed to be a destination. Forest Hill Station's own project description states plainly that it is meant to primarily serve local businesses and residents, a different mandate than stops built around retail concourses or major interchange traffic. That shows in the design. The station has two entrances: a fully accessible main entrance at the northeast corner of Eglinton and Bathurst, and a secondary entrance about 50 metres west, across from Peveril Hill, with street-level retail space and 60 outdoor bicycle parking spots. There is no shopping mall built into this stop. There is a door, a platform, and a way home.
The service itself has been changing since day one. When trains started running in February, the line operated on soft-launch hours: 5:30 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 7:30 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. on Sundays, a deliberate phase-in while the system found its footing. By April 5, 2026, the TTC had extended weekday service to 5:30 a.m. to 1:20 a.m., with trains every four minutes at peak and every six to nine minutes off-peak. Once the full timetable settles in, Metrolinx has projected weekday ridership across the line of roughly 123,000 passengers. For a resident of Forest Hill North, the practical version of that number is simpler: a four-minute wait at rush hour, at a station that sits on your own corner, connecting west to a Line 1 interchange at Cedarvale and east across Eglinton toward Yonge.
The Globe and Mail ran a piece the day the line opened asking whether the Crosstown would carry Toronto forward, a fair question for a project whose construction costs have climbed to roughly $12.8 billion since major work began in 2011. CBC's opening-day coverage was more ambivalent, calling the line both a design achievement and, in places, a black eye for Toronto transit. Those are citywide arguments. The question that actually matters if you live between Briar Hill and Eglinton is smaller and already answered: does the walk to the platform beat the walk to the bus stop. For most of Forest Hill North, it now does.
The Restaurant That Didn't Leave, Just Moved
House of Chan is the clearest evidence of what construction actually cost this corner, and also of what survived it. The restaurant is still run by Penny Lyons, and it is still the hybrid that made it a fixture: USDA prime steaks and lobster from a tank alongside Cantonese and Szechuan dishes, a combination that has confused first-time visitors for close to seventy years. The new space at 514 Eglinton Avenue West, just west of Avenue Road, is smaller than the original. Regulars who have written about the move describe the same red leather booths, the same decor, the same staff, folded into a tighter footprint. It reopened rather than closed. That distinction matters on a strip where a station build displaced a small plaza of businesses at the main entrance corner and three storefronts at the secondary entrance, and where not everything that closed came back.
It is worth being precise about geography here, because Forest Hill's two commercial identities are easy to conflate. Forest Hill Village, the retail core at Spadina Road and Lonsdale, sits south in Forest Hill South, built around a century-old streetscape of boutiques and cafes. The Eglinton corridor around the new station is a different strip entirely, further north, historically anchored by businesses like House of Chan rather than village-style storefronts. The Crosstown did not touch the Village. It rebuilt one corner of the Eglinton corridor and gave that corner, for the first time, a reason for people to arrive on foot from a platform instead of a car.
What Actually Changes on the Ground
For a household in Forest Hill North, the honest way to describe the shift is not "the neighbourhood is more connected now," which is true of every neighbourhood the Crosstown touches. It is that a specific errand run along Eglinton between Bathurst and Avenue Road now happens on a different rhythm. A trip that used to mean waiting on a bus along a torn-up roadway now means a four-minute headway during peak hours, an accessible entrance at the intersection you already cross daily, and bike racks if you'd rather ride than walk. The construction fatigue that defined this corner for over a decade, the scaffold collapse, the contested road closure, the years of utility work, is now a fact of the neighbourhood's recent history rather than a daily condition.
What replaced it is deliberately unglamorous. No retail anchor, no destination shopping, just a door in the ground built, by the transit agency's own account, to move the people who already live here. For a stretch of Eglinton that spent thirteen years absorbing disruption for the benefit of a station built specifically not to be a destination, that is close to the point.
If you're weighing a move within Forest Hill North, or trying to understand how this corner's long construction history has settled into its current shape, Taylor Townley can walk you through what's changed on the ground, street by street. Request a confidential consultation to talk through the neighbourhood in more detail.
