Where To Go in Toronto
27 places across 9 categories — the landmarks on the postcards, the observation decks, the museums, the parks, and the neighborhoods where the city actually lives.
Landmarks
TODO — what landmarks in Toronto are actually worth the time.
CN Tower
553 metres of concrete built to fix a television reception problem, with a glass floor and an option to walk around the outside.
Casa Loma
A ninety-eight-room Gothic Revival folly built by a financier who lost it to unpaid taxes within a decade.
The Toronto Islands
Fifteen islands a ferry ride offshore, with no cars, a residential community that fought eviction for forty years, and the best view of the skyline.
Fort York
The garrison the town was founded around, where the Americans blew up the magazine in 1813 and started a chain of events that burned Washington.
Nathan Phillips Square and City Hall
Two curved towers around a clam-shaped council chamber, which the city's own architects thought was a mistake.
Museums
TODO — what museums in Toronto are actually worth the time.
Royal Ontario Museum
Canada's largest museum, with a Libeskind crystal crashing through the front of it that the city has never agreed about.
Art Gallery of Ontario
Frank Gehry's only Canadian building, in the neighbourhood he grew up in, holding the largest collection of Canadian art anywhere.
Aga Khan Museum
A white granite box by Fumihiko Maki holding Islamic art, in a park in suburban Toronto, and worth the journey.
Hockey Hall of Fame
The Stanley Cup, in a former bank hall with a stained-glass dome, and you are allowed to touch it.
Gardiner Museum
Three floors of clay — Ancient American, Italian maiolica, Meissen porcelain — and a wheel you can sit down at.
History
TODO — what history in Toronto are actually worth the time.
The Distillery District
Forty-odd Victorian industrial buildings from what was once the largest distillery in the world, pedestrianised and full of galleries.
Old Town and St Lawrence Hall
The ten blocks that were the whole of York in 1793, with a Victorian assembly hall where Jenny Lind sang and abolitionists met.
Evergreen Brick Works
A brickworks that supplied half of Victorian Toronto, abandoned, flooded, and turned into a park with a farmers' market in the kilns.
Parks & Outdoors
TODO — what parks & outdoors in Toronto are actually worth the time.
High Park
Four hundred acres with a zoo, a lake, an oak savannah that burns on purpose, and a cherry blossom that shuts the roads.
Trinity Bellwoods Park
Thirty-eight acres of grass where the west end drinks in summer, with a white squirrel that has its own following.
The Scarborough Bluffs
Ninety metres of eroding cliff along fifteen kilometres of lakeshore, holding a geological record of the last ice age.
Food & Drink
TODO — what food & drink in Toronto are actually worth the time.
St Lawrence Market
A market since 1803, in a building wrapped around the old city hall, and the peameal bacon sandwich is not optional.
The Danforth and Greektown
Two kilometres of Greek restaurants along Danforth Avenue, and a food festival in August that closes the road.
Little Italy and College Street
Espresso bars from the 1950s, a street that fills when Italy plays, and some of the best restaurants in the city on the blocks around it.
Culture & Music
TODO — what culture & music in Toronto are actually worth the time.
TIFF, Caribana and the Festival Year
One of the world's major film festivals, the largest Caribbean carnival in North America, and an all-night art event in October.
Massey Hall
An 1894 concert hall with the best acoustic in the country, restored over seven years and reopened in 2021.
Shopping
TODO — what shopping in Toronto are actually worth the time.
Kensington Market
A few blocks of Victorian houses turned into shops, occupied in turn by every group that has arrived in Toronto since 1900.
Queen Street West
Six kilometres of independent shops, galleries and bars, running from the department stores out to Parkdale.
Day Trips
TODO — what day trips in Toronto are actually worth the time.
Niagara Falls
Not the tallest waterfall in the world, but by volume one of the most powerful, and the Canadian side has the view.
Prince Edward County
An island county two hours east with limestone soil, cool-climate wine, and a sand dune beach on a Great Lake.
Neighbourhoods
TODO — what each part of Toronto is like to walk around, and who lives there.
Chinatown and Spadina
Toronto's third Chinatown, on Spadina Avenue, which is wide because it was planned for a streetcar and got one.
Leslieville and the Beaches
A former industrial east end turned brunch district, and a lakeside neighbourhood with a boardwalk that argues about its own name.