This station primarily serves the St. Laurent Shopping Centre as well as serves as an important hub for commuters reaching businesses on St. Laurent Boulevard and as well as the many residential areas nearby. It is interesting to note that St-Laurent station is OC Transpo's original and first underground transit station.
As mentioned above, the train is located underground, with access provided by the above-ground station building, as well as through the indoor connection to the shopping mall. Additional access is provided by a pedestrian pathway that starts just behind the eastbound track's far end and exits at Tremblay Road, granting easy access to residents of Eastway Gardens to the station.
Large expansive and immersive murals decorate and add colour and ambience to the station's platform level. In such an open and vast space, these murals definitely add much-needed colour and warmth to the station.
The station's layout is that of side platforms. Interestingly, the two platforms are not connected directly and require passing through the fare gates to switch from one platform to the other. An overhead walkway (still located in the underground station cavern, and a hold-over from its former vocation as a bus Transitway station) allows access between both platform entrances.
St-Laurent Station is overall a good station but does suffer from some design limitations as the bus loop located above needed to be maintained open and functional during construction and conversion from bus to rail transit. As a complete rethinking and redesign would have surely affected the bus operations above, engineers and designers did their best to improve the station. The biggest drawbacks are the narrow accesses to the stairs and escalators from the concourse walkway level, the 2 small elevators that reach the bus platform, and the massive ceiling that comes off a bit as unfinished. These points can be easily looked past, but it does remain unfortunate that they exist.
UNIQUE FEATURES
St-Laurent Station is unique in that it is currently the only station outside of the downtown core to be located underground, much as it was in the past as a bus Transitway station. As mentioned earlier, it is the original and first underground transit station on OC Transpo's network, originally built in 1987.
PUBLIC ARTWORK
Artist: Andrew Morrow (Chelsea, QC)
Three large, immersive murals painted by the artist depict re-imagined Canadian histories. Two of the murals are located on the westbound platform, while the third is a corner-split mural on the eastbound platform.
Andrew Morrow is a contemporary Canadian painter whose work is characterized by a restless desire to both inhabit and extend historical, narrative painting. Working from personal, actual, and invented histories, Morrow's paintings engage broad historical themes such as war, eroticism, beauty, the apocalypse, and death, complicating these through a resistance to narrative closure and spatial coherence.
In his murals for the St-Laurent Station, Morrow combines large-scale digital printing technology with physical painting to produce three site-specific and archival murals. Drawing on formal conventions from Western history painting and early Canadian photographic and narrative history, the murals reflect an uncertain, fragmented negotiation of both Canadian history and history painting itself. Populated by figures at work and at rest, these dreamlike paintings present a complex and shifting Canadian landscape, where the gravity of addressing a painted National history is balanced by individual moments of beauty and connection.
Artwork descriptions provided by the City of Ottawa
- Opening Date: September 14, 2019
- Line: Confederation Line
- Previous Station: Cyrville (850 metres)
- Following Station: Tremblay (1300 metres)
STATION RIDERSHIP (November 2019)
- Balanced Boardings: 221,000
- Weekday Average: 8,700
- Weekend Average: 4,400
Balanced boardings are the average number of entries and exits at O-Train stations.
