Casa Loma and the Annex: The Castle Built on Light Bulbs

Best Time to Visit

Weekday mid-morning. Tuesday through Thursday, ten to noon. The Casa Loma admission queue is shortest before lunch, and the south forecourt at Stop 3 reads cleanly when the tour-bus arrivals have not yet stacked along Austin Terrace. The exterior corridor stops, Spadina House forecourt, the Hunting Lodge, the stables and tunnel entrance on Walmer Road, the Davenport escarpment, and the Annex residential blocks, are public-realm and accessible at any daylight hour. The Annex blocks at Stop 6 are residential. Read them quietly. End at Bloor and Bathurst, in earshot of the streetcar Pellatt's electricity helped power.

Pro Tips

• •The tour is designed for the free exterior corridor. The audio anchors outside Spadina House and outside Casa Loma. Listeners who choose to buy admission to either museum can do so before or after the audio. The corridor works without entry to anything.
• •Walk the corridor north to south, Spadina House to Bloor. The Davenport escarpment is a roughly 25-metre vertical drop in 200 metres between Stop 5 and Stop 6. Walking south is downhill. Walking north is the climb. Pellatt's view was north on the ridge.
• •The Hunting Lodge at Stop 2 is a private residence. The audio anchors on the Austin Terrace public sidewalk. Read the building from the street, do not approach the door.
• •Casa Loma's 800-foot tunnel and the stables at Stop 4 are visible from the Walmer Road sidewalk without paid admission. The audio reads the engineering boast from outside the gate.
• •Bill Freeman, Casa Loma (1998), is the biography the tour cites by name for the Pellatt story. If the 1924 eviction and the Home Bank failure hold your interest, that is the book.
• •Listeners with mobility constraints can reverse the corridor and take Dupont subway station, then walk west and north, skipping the escarpment descent. The audio still reads in either direction, but stop order is north to south by design.