Toronto sits on the north shore of Lake Ontario, on flat land that rises gently northwards over an old glacial lake bed. It is Canada’s largest city — around three million in the city proper and over six and a half million in the Greater Toronto Area.
The grid, and the ravines
The street plan is a grid, laid out from the lake, with Yonge Street as the dividing line between east and west. Addresses are numbered outward from it, which is why 100 Queen Street West and 100 Queen Street East are two blocks apart.
Cutting across the grid is the thing that makes Toronto unusual: a ravine system of around 300 kilometres of wooded valleys, carved by creeks running down to the lake.
They survived because they flood. After Hurricane Hazel killed 81 people in 1954, building in the floodplains was prohibited outright, and the result is a city with genuine forest inside it — the Don Valley, the Humber, and dozens of smaller ravines threaded through residential neighbourhoods.
Toronto calls itself a city within a park, and for once the slogan is defensible.
Downtown
The Financial District around Bay and King, with the bank towers and the PATH underneath. Old Town to the east. The Entertainment District to the west. Queen and King streets running east–west through all of it.
North of Bloor, the city turns residential quickly.
The neighbourhoods
Toronto is a city of neighbourhoods rather than monuments, and the interesting ones are strung along streetcar lines: Kensington Market, Chinatown, Queen West, Little Italy, the Danforth, Leslieville and the Beaches.
The amalgamation
In 1998 the province merged the City of Toronto with five surrounding municipalities — Etobicoke, York, North York, East York and Scarborough — into one city, against a referendum in which 76 per cent voted no.
The division still shapes municipal politics, generally described as downtown against the suburbs, and it is why the city’s boundaries include a great deal of postwar suburbia.
The diversity
Around half of Toronto’s residents were born outside Canada and roughly 200 languages are spoken. It is regularly described as the most diverse city in the world.
The city’s motto, adopted in 1998, is Diversity Our Strength. See From the Carrying Place to Half the World.
The land
This is the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat, and is covered by Treaty 13.
The climate
Humid continental. Summer is 20 to 30°C and humid, sometimes hotter. Winter is around minus 1 to minus 10 with cold snaps considerably below that, and around 120 centimetres of snow across the season. Spring is short and unpleasant; autumn is the best of the year.