Six kilometres of independent shops, galleries and bars, running from the department stores out to Parkdale.
Queen Street West runs from Yonge Street out through the west end, and it is Toronto’s principal shopping and going-out street. It changes character several times along its length.
Yonge to Spadina — Downtown
Department stores and chains at the eastern end, with the Eaton Centre and Nathan Phillips Square nearby.
Graffiti Alley — Rush Lane, running parallel behind Queen between Spadina and Portland — is a kilometre of legal, continuously repainted street art, and it is genuinely good. It appears in a great many photographs and in the opening of This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
401 Richmond, a converted 1899 tin factory a block north, holds around 140 galleries, studios and small cultural organisations, is free to wander, and is one of the better things in the city.
Spadina to Bathurst — the old strip
This was the counterculture stretch in the 1980s — MuchMusic’s studios were at 299 Queen West, the CHUM-City building, and the strip was where Canadian music television broadcast from a street-level window.
It has largely chained up. The buildings are still good.
Bathurst to Gladstone — West Queen West
The interesting part. Independent fashion, design, galleries, bars and restaurants, with Trinity Bellwoods on the north side and Ossington Avenue running north from it.
The Drake Hotel and The Gladstone House, two Victorian hotels reopened in the 2000s as art-and-hospitality projects, largely started the shift.
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) is a little north in a converted aluminium factory at Sterling Road, and is worth the detour.
Gladstone west — Parkdale
Cheaper, more mixed, and changing fast. Parkdale was a wealthy lakeside suburb, then a rooming-house district after the Gardiner Expressway cut it off from the water, and now holds a large Tibetan community alongside long-standing residents and new arrivals.
Little Tibet along Queen has a run of restaurants; momos are the thing.
The gentrification argument here is sharper than anywhere else in Toronto and is worth being aware of.
Practicalities
Streetcar 501 runs the full length, 24 hours. Osgoode station on Line 1 is the eastern access.
Most shops open late morning and close at six or seven; the bars run late.
Sundays are quieter and many independents close.
