It helps to have an umbrella if you’re going in or out of an entrance to the Yorkdale TTC station under the Allen Expressway.

And don’t be surprised if you see a well-fed rat at the same entrance.

One of the more unusual of the TTC’s 69 stations is Yorkdale, which has a unique, glassed-in dome covering the subway platforms and runs alongside the Allen.

It’s right next to the Yorkdale Shopping Centre, which gives customers handy access to the mall via public transit, instead of searching for a spot in its perpetually jammed parking lots.

An entrance to the station is located under the Allen, a dark and cavernous area that nobody has ever thought of as particularly uplifting, especially if they were splashed with water from above.

Lolita McArthur sent us a note about the dripping water, describing it as “a long standing problem” at the entrance under the expressway.

“When I enter the subway from (under Allen Road) there is a leaky pipe right over the stairs,” said McArthur. “This has been there for a long as I can remember.

“There is almost always a puddle and in the winter it is quite dangerous when it freezes.”

We went there and spotted a plastic pipe with an elbow in it, right above the stairs to the station, on the left side. A steady sprinkle of water was running out of the pipe and splashing onto the sidewalk in front of the stairs.

While we were there, we took a look at the area above a waist-high wall next to the sidewalk, and a short embankment that runs up to the underside of the expressway.

Piles of garbage are heaped along the other side of the wall, mostly fast-food trash and coffee cups that were almost certainly deposited by TTC riders. Who else would be there to do the littering?

We climbed up to take a closer look and found three of those big black rodent boxes that lure rats and mice into it, to take the poison inside back to their nests.

If somebody cleaned it up, maybe there wouldn’t be a rodent problem.

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STATUS: We alerted the TTC and got a note back from its communications staff saying, “all is City of Toronto property,” and that the TTC salts the wet patch when it freezes. OK, but surely someone at the station knows about the leak. Shouldn’t the TTC have by now liaised with the city on fixing it? And couldn’t the TTC send someone to clean up the garbage tossed down by its customers? You gotta wonder.