City Guide - Toronto

30 November -0001

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The economic and cultural focus of English-speaking Canada, Toronto is the country's largest metropolis. It sprawls along the northern shore of Lake Ontario, its vibrant, appealing centre encased by a jangle of satellite townships and industrial zones that cover - as "Greater Toronto" - no less than 100 square kilometres.

For decades, Toronto was saddled with unflattering sobriquets - "Toronto the Good", "Hogtown" - that reflected a perhaps deserved reputation for complacent mediocrity and greed. Spurred into years of image-building, the city's postwar administrations have lavished millions of dollars on glitzy architecture, slick museums, an excellent public-transport system, and the reclamation and development of the lakefront. As a result, Toronto has become one of North America's most likeable cities, an eminently liveable place whose citizens keep a wary eye on both their politicians and the developers.

Huge new shopping malls and skyrise office blocks reflect the economic successes of the last two or three decades, a boom that has attracted immigrants from all over the world, transforming an overwhelmingly anglophone city into a cosmopolitan one of some sixty significant minorities. Furthermore, the city's multiculturalism goes far deeper than an extravagant diversity of restaurants and sporadic pockets of multilingual street signs. Toronto's schools, for example, have extensive "Heritage Language Programmes", which encourage the maintenance of the immigrants' first cultures.

Getting the feel of Toronto's diversity is one of the city's great pleasures, but there are attention-grabbing sights here as well. Most are conveniently clustered in the city centre, and the most celebrated of them all is the CN Tower , the world's tallest free-standing structure. Next door lies the modern hump of the SkyDome sports stadium. The city's other prestige attractions are led by the Art Gallery of Ontario , which possesses a first-rate selection of Canadian painting, and the Royal Ontario Museum , where pride of place goes to the Chinese collection. But it's the pick of Toronto's smaller, less-visited galleries and period homes that really add to the city's charm. There are superb Canadian paintings at the Thomson Gallery and a fascinating range of footwear at the Bata Shoe Museum . The Toronto Dominion Bank boasts the eclectic Gallery of Inuit Art , and the mock-Gothic extravagances of Casa Loma , the Victorian gentility of Spadina House and the replica of Fort York , the colonial settlement where Toronto began, all vie for the visitor's attention.

Toronto's sights illustrate different facets of the city, but in no way do they crystallize its identity. The city remains opaque, too big and diverse to allow for a defining personality. This, however, adds an air of excitement and unpredictability to the place. Toronto caters to everything, and the city surges with Canada's most vibrant restaurant, performing-arts and nightlife scenes

Arriving by air , you'll almost certainly land at Toronto's main airport, Lester B. Pearson International , about 25km northwest of the city centre. There are three terminals - terminals 2 and 3 are where most international flights arrive, and terminal 1 handles the majority of domestic flights. Each of the terminals has a full range of facilities, including money-exchange offices, ATMs and free hotel hotlines. The Airport Express bus service (daily: one every twenty minutes 6am-1am, every thirty minutes 1am-5.30am; tel 905/564-6333) picks up passengers outside the terminals and takes between forty and sixty minutes to reach downtown, though heavy traffic can make the journey considerably longer. The bus drops passengers at the bus station and several of Toronto's major hotels, with connecting minibuses taking passengers to most of the other downtown hotels. Tickets for the airport bus can be purchased either at the kiosks next to the bus stop outside the terminal buildings or from the driver. A one-way fare is $13.75, round-trip $23.65; the minibus service costs an extra $3 (round-trip $5). Round-trip tickets are valid for one year. Alternatively, there's an airport limo service (a shared-taxi system) next to each terminal's bus platform; limos cost about $30 per person for the journey from the airport to the city centre; they only leave when they're full. Individual taxis charge approximately $40 from the airport to downtown Toronto. Lastly, a subsidiary of Air Canada, Air Ontario (tel 1-888/247-2262, within Toronto tel 416/925-2311) operates flights from Montréal, Ottawa and London, Ontario, into the much smaller Toronto City Centre Airport , which is on Hanlan's Point in Toronto's harbour, close to downtown. From the airport, there's a free minibus service to the Royal York Hotel downtown. The minibus uses the car ferry that connects the airport to the mainland from the foot of Bathurst Street.

The city's public transport is overseen by the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC); for all TTC inquiries, call the customer information line on tel 416/393-4636, or, for the hearing impaired, tel 416/481-2523 (both phone lines operate daily 8am-5pm). The TTC's integrated network of subways, buses and streetcars is fast, safe and efficient and serves every corner of the city. With the exception of downtown, where all the major sights are within easy walking distance of each other, your best option is to use public transport to hop between attractions - especially in the cold of winter or the sultry summertime

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