Visit Toronto - Canada's Largest City

Multicultural Metropolis with Fine Architecture and Great Nightlife

Mar 26, 2007

Toronto is a great place to explore. The CN Tower was, until recently, the world's highest tower. It has world class restaurants, excellent museums, fabulous markets.

The image of being goody-goody dogged Toronto since the mid-19th century when strong religious views created its puritanical image. As late as the 1970’s it was illegal to go to a movie in Toronto on Sunday but nowadays the city is so “hip it hurts”. It says so on the front of a Queen Street store.

Canada - Toronto - A Diverse Ethnic City

Toronto is home to around 80 ethnic groups, representing 169 countries and is one of the most multicultural cities in the world. A good way to get the feel of the place and experience its diversity is to walk around the downtown area and to also explore the various neighbourhoods. There’s a Greek neighborhood that stretches for miles, Polish and Ukranian enclaves, at least three Chinatowns, two Little Italys - and more. Some areas are easily reached from the centre, for others you’ll need to use the excellent public transit system.

A good place to start is Yonge Street (pronounced Young), Toronto’s lively “main drag” which splits the city into easy and west and is home to some of the most striking skyscrapers in the city. These soaring temples of steel and glass that form the greater part of Toronto’s skyline are mostly banks. They may be temples to mammon but they have an aesthetic beauty that will have you craning your neck all the way down the street.

Beneath the skyscrapers lies a subterranean city with seven miles of brightly lit tunnels crammed with all kinds of restaurants, shops, trees, fountains, art galleries and theatres - everything you need when, above ground, a harsh Toronto winter chills the bones.

Toronto - Fine Architecture

There’s some fabulous architecture in Toronto, with the old reflected in the glass walls of the new, like the Old City Hall shining on the side of the Cadillac Fairview Tower on Bay Street. The delightful Flat Iron building on Front Street has a gleaming rearguard of soaring white skyscrapers. Walk around the back to see the amusing trompe l’oeil painted around the rear windows.

On a warm summer day there’s no better place to browse than Kensington Market. This raucous, rambunctious marketplace ranges in and around narrow streets which, at the turn of the century, were home to east European and Jewish inhabitants who set up shop in front of their houses and the market still has an old-world feeling about it . Apart from the huge food market there is a vintage and used clothing market.

The Bata Shoe Museum on Bloor Street is a rather curious place where you can see just about every kind of shoe and things related to shoes from walnut crushers and Queen Victoria’s slippers to Elton John’s sky-high platforms and Napolean’s socks. And there are nearly nine thousand more footsie items on another three floors.

One place that keeps popping up whichever way you turn is the CN Tower and why wouldn’t it? It is one of the world’s tallest free-standing structure at 1,815ft. 5in. It looks like a slim, elegant rocket ready to take off and it dominates the Harbourfront. There’s a glass floor section on the main observation deck, 1,122 feet above the city. Looking down between your feet to the world way down there is very creepy. It is said the combined weight of fourteen hippos is the maximum the floor will bear. What if another hippo sneaked in? And why hippos? How about six elephants or forty giraffes? It can make you a little crazy, standing on that glass floor.

If you’re the type that needs a regular fix of country life you can find it on the Toronto Islands - a group of tiny, tree-lined, interconnected islands only a ten-minute ferry ride from downtown. You can walk around the islands in two or three hours, or rent a bike. wander along the beaches, admire the pretty clapboard cottages - a few of them offer B&B. It would be lovely to stay in this rural retreat and gaze across at the stunning Toronto skyline; popping over on the ferry for big city life whenever the need strikes.

Niagara Falls is an easy 90 miles by road. Take a day trip to one of the natural wonders of the world.

The copyright of the article Visit Toronto - Canada's Largest City in Ontario Travel is owned by Cathy Smith. Permission to republish Visit Toronto - Canada's Largest City in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.