If you walked along Queen Street East this week between Broadview and Carlaw, you saw something new: the first support columns for the future Leslieville Station breaking ground. Metrolinx confirmed the work would begin September 7, running through late May 2027, a nine-month stretch the agency describes as the first above-ground construction on this stretch of the Ontario Line. Metrolinx's own station page also concedes something worth knowing if you've followed this project closely: the site sits on the boundary between Riverside and Leslieville, and the "Leslieville" name is the branding Metrolinx chose, not a strict boundary line.
It is easy to assume this is the disruption everyone warned you about. It isn't. The columns are loud and slow and impossible to miss, but they are also the most predictable, most scheduled, most fully-documented part of a project that has been unfolding in careful stages since January. The part of this build that will actually reroute your commute, your dog walk, and your streetcar ride has not been published yet. Nobody, not even the transit writers who track this project block by block, can tell you when it lands.
What's Actually Happening at Queen and De Grassi Right Now
The station rising here sits beside the elevated rail corridor that already carries GO and VIA trains over Queen. Site preparation and utility relocation ran from January through June. What started this month is pile construction, the deep foundation work that has to go in before anything visible can rise. Pier caps follow that through next spring, and the pile driving comes with a specific, narrow cost: continued closures on portions of De Grassi Street north of Queen, and, once pier caps begin, a closure of the east sidewalk on Strange Street south of Queen.
Here is the timeline as it actually breaks down for this specific intersection:
| Phase | Window | What changes on the street |
|---|---|---|
| Site prep and utility work | January to June 2026 | Complete, minimal street impact |
| Piling (support columns visible) | September 2026 to May 2027 | De Grassi Street closures continue |
| Pier caps added | October 2026 to April 2027 | East sidewalk on Strange Street closes |
| Station superstructure | Late 2027, five to seven months | Structure built above and flanking Queen |
| Facade, mechanical, finishing | 2028 into 2029 | Architectural elements, final restoration |
None of this touches the sidewalk on Queen itself between De Grassi and Jimmie Simpson Park, at least not yet in a lasting way. That closure already happened and already ended: a temporary sidewalk went in there for about a week in June, with pedestrians rerouted through the crosswalks at Boulton Avenue and Empire Avenue while crews worked. It was a preview, not a pattern.
Businesses Stay Open. Read That Twice.
A Metrolinx construction notice from this past June, covering the work-site expansion at Queen and De Grassi, said something worth taking at face value: all businesses in the area would remain open during the work, with signage directing customers around active zones. The same notice put weekday work hours at 7am to 7pm. That claim is easy to be skeptical of when you're staring at a fenced-off lane and a flagger waving traffic through, but it's consistent with how Metrolinx designed this station in the first place. The agency chose to build above ground here specifically because tunneling under the Don River and Gerrard Street would have required stations nearly 40 metres deep, the height of a nine-story building, with excavation and permanent closures that would have hit Jimmie Simpson Recreation Centre and Park directly. Building within the existing rail corridor instead was the option that kept the park operating and kept storefronts reachable.
That doesn't mean the sidewalk in front of your favorite coffee stop won't narrow for a stretch, or that you won't hear concrete trucks idling on Queen some mornings. It means the fundamental promise, that this remains a walkable, functioning stretch of Queen East through years of construction, has held so far and was designed to keep holding.
The Closures Nobody's Complaining About Yet
There's a detail in the local transit commentary on this project that's easy to miss if you're only watching the columns: the vehicle closures residents fear most, the kind that shut down a whole block of Queen to cars for days, aren't what's actually documented for this site. Metrolinx's own notice describes the De Grassi work-site expansion as a long-term westbound lane closure on Queen, paired with a temporary sidewalk, not a closure of the street to vehicles. Local transit commentary tracking the project has counted only a handful of full weekend closures across the entire multi-year build, not a running shutdown.
That's a meaningfully smaller disruption than the years-long full closure Queen Street West went through downtown near Bay and Victoria for the Queen subway station, where the street was closed to all vehicles between Victoria and Bay for roughly four and a half years starting in 2023. Nothing at that scale is documented for Queen and De Grassi.
The Part That Actually Matters and Isn't On Any Calendar Yet
Here's the piece worth remembering after the columns stop being novel. Building an elevated station over an active streetcar line eventually requires taking the overhead wire down entirely, because Metrolinx can't safely build directly above energized streetcar power while trains are still running underneath. When that happens, at both this station and the Gerrard-Carlaw site up the line, streetcar service will be removed at that site for roughly five months at a stretch. Streetcars will detour to the parallel street, Queen if Gerrard is the site under construction, or Gerrard if Queen is, between Coxwell and Broadview, with replacement buses bridging whatever gap the detour leaves.
That five-month window is the disruption that will actually change how you get around, not the columns going in this month. And as of the most recent public construction update this summer, the full transit change details, the exact dates, the specific detour routing, hadn't been published yet. So the honest answer to "when does the streetcar stop running through here" is: nobody outside Metrolinx has said yet, and that includes the transit writers who've been tracking this project closer than almost anyone.
Why the Timing Isn't Purely Metrolinx's Call
There's a smaller story buried in this project that says something about how much leverage this neighborhood actually has over its own construction calendar. Back in November 2024, Metrolinx told the city it planned to start piling for this station in mid-December, right into the holiday shopping season. The Riverside Business Improvement Area raised the concern directly, and the city and local councillor pushed Metrolinx to explore revising that timing. It's a small adjustment in the scope of a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar transit build, but it's evidence that the businesses along this stretch of Queen aren't just absorbing whatever schedule gets handed down.
Councillor Paula Fletcher's office keeps a running Ward 14 update on exactly this kind of detail, and Metrolinx maintains a 24/7 line at 416-202-5100 for anyone dealing with a specific access issue, a delivery truck blocked, a sidewalk closure that wasn't signed clearly, that kind of thing.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
The station itself is not expected to open on any committed date. The province has only offered a vague "2030s" window even though the current schedule has construction reaching finishing stages by 2029. So the honest way to think about the next few years is less as a countdown to a grand opening and more as a long, uneven stretch where Queen Street East slowly rebuilds itself around a piece of infrastructure Metrolinx projects will put 9,500 residents within a ten-minute walk by 2041.
For now, the practical advice is simple. Expect De Grassi Street restrictions and the Strange Street sidewalk closure to be the visible, ongoing reality through next spring. Expect weekday work hours, not round-the-clock noise, at least for this stage. Expect your favorite spots on Queen to stay reachable, because that was a design choice, not a courtesy. And keep an ear out for the transit change announcement nobody's made yet, because when the streetcar wire actually comes down for those five months, that's the disruption that will reroute your week, not the columns you're watching go up right now.
If you're weighing what a changing Queen Street means for a home you already own here, or for a move you're considering into this stretch of Leslieville, Catherine Mortimer can walk you through how infrastructure timelines like this one tend to play out for property values on the ground. Request a personalized market plan when you're ready to talk specifics.
