How to See Toronto: A City That Argues With Itself in Six Corridors

Toronto is the largest city in Canada and it does not act like it. The skyline is glassy and recent and almost identical to every other postwar bank corridor in North America. The streets are flat. The hills are gentle. There is no waterfront postcard, no founding cathedral, no celebrated old square. Visitors who arrive expecting a Canadian version of Paris, or Chicago, or even Montreal, often spend the first afternoon walking around looking for the city. They are looking in the wrong register. Toronto is a city that argues with itself instead of selling itself, and the argument is best read across six corridors that each answer the same question: who got to decide what this part of the city is for?

The thesis is small. Toronto built a global city out of being deliberately unspectacular. The skill that produced this city is the skill of making trade-offs that hold for fifty years without anyone needing to feel righteous about them. The corridors below are six places where the trade-off is visible on the sidewalk. Each is a one-tour walk. Each has a counter-tour beside it. The city is the argument between the six.

The first corridor: the working past, kept as a brand

Walk the east end from the St. Lawrence Market to Corktown Common and you cross a kilometre of preserved industrial fabric that was the working spine of Toronto in 1880. The market still sells fish on Tuesday mornings the way it has since 1803. A mile east, the Gooderham and Worts Distillery, which by late-nineteenth-century output was the largest distilling operation in the British Empire, stopped producing whisky in 1990 and reopened in 2003 as a pedestrian-only arts and retail quarter with a no-chain-retail lease policy. The factory is preserved exactly the wrong way. Too valuable to demolish, too obsolete to restore, so it became a brand instead of a building. The cobblestones on Trinity Street are mostly relaid 2002 to 2003, not original. The Christmas Market is a 2010 invention. The corridor is the cleanest piece of preserved Victorian industrial architecture in North America, and it is also a curated environment with a juried tenant list. Both things are true. Hold them both.

The trade in this corridor is preservation as a verb with consequences. The condos on the perimeter paid for the brick. The brick produced the brand. The brand attracted tenants who could pay rents that justified the condos. The loop closed in May 2003 and you can walk it in ninety minutes. The historian whose work is the load-bearing source on the campus is Sally Gibson, whose Toronto's Distillery District: History by the Lake (Cormorant, 2008) is the book that should be in your bag if you want to read the buildings closely.

The second corridor: the mosaic, read closely

Two and a half kilometres west of the market, between College Street and Dundas, sits one square kilometre that has been Toronto's immigrant first-rung for almost 120 years. Kensington Market is the tourist label. Walked closely it is something more complicated. The candy-coloured houses on Kensington Avenue are 1880s Anglo-Protestant bay-and-gables that the Jewish wave converted to shops in the 1910s because the established retail streets excluded them. The Portuguese wave that arrived from the Azores starting in 1953 painted the same houses. The Caribbean and Vietnamese and contemporary waves changed the signage. The architecture is one thing; the surface is another; the conventional read (bohemian market) misses both.

The corridor's hardest claim is that the Chinatown the listener walks through on Spadina is not the original. The first Chinatown clustered along Elizabeth Street in the southern part of what was then called The Ward. Between 1955 and 1965, in two phases of expropriation, the city demolished the entire neighbourhood to build Viljo Revell's New City Hall (opened 1965) and Nathan Phillips Square. The Save Chinatown Committee, led by Jean Lumb, persuaded city council in 1969 to spare the surviving fragment on Dundas West. That fragment is the Chinatown that exists today. The honest metaphor for this corridor is not mosaic. It is palimpsest. Each immigrant wave living in the buildings the previous wave left behind, and the first Chinatown missing entirely because the city tore it down. The mosaic metaphor itself was coined by John Murray Gibbon in 1938 as an argument against the American melting pot. It was a policy choice, not a natural fact, and the corridor is where that policy choice runs into the city's actual record.

The third corridor: two downtowns stacked on each other

Walk north from Union Station up Bay Street to Queen and you walk through a financial district that looks like every other financial district in postwar North America. Glass towers, bronze mullions, dark spandrels, plazas at the base. The Toronto-Dominion Centre opened in 1967 under Mies van der Rohe as design consultant. It was his last major project; he died in 1969. Royal Bank Plaza answered him in 1979 with 14,000 panes of gold-coated glass. First Canadian Place answered him in white. Brookfield Place answered all three in 1992 with a cathedral atrium by Santiago Calatrava that wraps two surviving bank facades from the 1840s.

The corridor is also something else. Underneath the entire stretch the listener walks is the largest underground shopping complex in the world, certified by Guinness as of 2016 at 371,600 square metres of retail floor area. The PATH was not an accident of winter. It was a deliberate civic plan in the 1960s by Chief Planner Matthew Lawson, who persuaded the developers of the new generation of bank towers to build underground retail concourses and to link them. Toronto built two downtowns, stacked one on top of the other, gave the warm one to the office workers and the cold one to the city, and has been quietly arguing with itself about that trade ever since. Jane Jacobs moved to Toronto in 1968, the year after the TD Centre opened, and spent the last thirty-eight years of her life as the city's loudest defender of the sidewalk. She helped kill the Spadina Expressway in 1971. She did not kill the PATH. The PATH expanded every year of her Toronto residency and after.

The fourth corridor: the spectacle that did not survive

A kilometre north of the financial district, on the Davenport escarpment that traces the ancient Lake Iroquois shoreline, sits a 98-room castle that opened in 1914. Sir Henry Pellatt was president of the Toronto Electric Light Company, the private monopoly that lit Toronto from the 1880s, and a founding director of the Electrical Development Company at Niagara Falls. The Ontario government created the publicly owned Hydro-Electric Power Commission in 1906 under Sir Adam Beck. Public power, supplying municipalities at cost, undercut Pellatt's private business through the years Casa Loma was rising. The Pellatts moved out in 1923 to 1924 after defaulting on property taxes. The City of Toronto took the building in 1933 in lieu of $27,303 in back taxes.

The castle is the least understated artifact in Toronto, in a city that built its identity on understatement. The Annex neighbourhood below the ridge is what the city actually wanted: gabled red brick, Romanesque arches, wide porches, streetcar access, walking distance to the University of Toronto. Two estates sit on the same Davenport escarpment. Spadina House, built 1866 by James Austin, was lived in by his family for 116 years before they left it to the city as a museum in 1982. Casa Loma was lived in by the Pellatts for less than ten years before they could not pay the tax bill. The thesis of this corridor reads cleanly across two front doors. Toronto kept the castle because it had to. It built the Annex because it wanted to. Bill Freeman's Casa Loma (1998) is the biographical anchor.

The fifth corridor: the cycle that ate itself twice

Queen Street West, from University Avenue to Parkdale, is 2.5 kilometres of one street that ran the art-to-condo gentrification cycle twice in thirty years and is starting it a third time. Cycle one began in the late 1980s when John Sewell's mayoralty (1978 to 1980) had blocked the Crombie-era highrise rezonings that would have erased the Victorian commercial stock. Cheap rents and proximity to OCAD brought visual artists, galleries, and the Cameron House, the Bovine Sex Club, and the Horseshoe Tavern's punk era. Rents tripled. The artists who arrived in 1988 could not afford 1998.

Cycle two ran from 2000 to 2015. Jeff Stober bought the Drake Hotel, then a single-room-occupancy flophouse, in 2001 for under two million dollars. The 2004 reopening as a boutique hotel-gallery-music-venue is the canonical Toronto trigger event. The Gladstone Hotel followed in 2005, the West Queen West Triangle was rezoned for residential intensification in 2006, and Vogue named Queen West the second coolest neighbourhood in the world in September 2014. Cycle three is happening in Parkdale right now. What distinguishes Toronto's version of the cycle from Bushwick or Wicker Park is the regulatory context: Ontario rent control covers units first occupied before November 2018, the heritage regime has saved building stock, and the Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust acquired its first rooming house in 2019 as a structural counter-mechanism. The 2017 Parkdale rent strike, three hundred tenants in MetCap-owned buildings, was the largest in Canadian history. The cycle is mechanical, sixty years of academic urbanism literature names the mechanism (Glass 1964, Zukin 1982, Smith 1996), and Parkdale is the first place in Toronto that organized a structural answer.

The sixth corridor: the city that turned its back on the lake

Toronto sits on Lake Ontario and spent a century pretending it did not. From the 1850s onward the railways filled in the shallows along the natural shoreline to lay track and freight yards. By 1912 the shoreline had moved roughly 300 metres south of the original Front Street. The Toronto Harbour Commission was created by federal statute in 1911 and produced the 1912 Waterfront Development plan, a comprehensive lakefilling and industrialization scheme. The Gardiner Expressway, opened in stages between 1955 and 1966, walled the downtown off from the waterfront with concrete and ramps. The expressway is named for Frederick Gardiner, the first chairman of Metropolitan Toronto from 1953 to 1961. Gardiner is also the named actor for the 1956 expropriation vote that ordered the Toronto Islands residential community to be demolished. Roughly 600 cottages came down on Centre Island and Hanlan's Point between 1956 and 1969. The Ward's Island and Algonquin Island residents organized, occupied their cottages through eviction notices, survived a 1980 sheriff's confrontation, and won the Toronto Islands Residential Community Stewardship Act in 1993, giving them 99-year leases. The 252 households still on Ward's and Algonquin Islands are the survivors of the only major Canadian residential community that fought a municipal expropriation and won.

The waterfront's federal redevelopment began in 1972 when Pierre Trudeau's government announced the Harbourfront site, 92 acres of formerly industrial land that was supposed to be public. The execution was condo-heavy. The Harbourfront Corporation sold lakefront parcels to private developers to subsidize public programming, producing the present condo wall. The 1990 to 1992 Royal Commission on the Future of the Toronto Waterfront, chaired by former mayor David Crombie, criticized the privatization. The 2017 Sidewalk Labs proposal for a Quayside smart-city development, withdrawn in May 2020 after sustained criticism from Bianca Wylie and the #BlockSidewalk coalition, was the latest answer to the same question that the Harbour Commission asked in 1911: who got to decide what the waterfront was for?

What the six corridors share

The six corridors are not the same story. They are six different answers to the same kind of question. Each one names an actor, a decision, and a trade. Gooderham and Cityscape made the Distillery trade. Jean Lumb and the Save Chinatown Committee saved a block the city had voted to demolish. Mies van der Rohe set the visual grammar that produced the PATH bargain. Sir Henry Pellatt overreached and the city absorbed his castle. The Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust is the first community in Canada to build a structural answer to the gentrification cycle. The Ward's Island residents kept their houses by refusing to leave them. None of these are dramatic stories in the way Toronto's American peer cities are dramatic. None of them produced a single celebrated leader or an iconic building or a postcard image. The trades happened in committee rooms and council chambers and on cobblestone streets, and they hold.

Toronto is a city that argues with itself in the way a long-running professional partnership argues with itself: in detail, with the work continuing during the argument. The argument is the city. Once you can hear the argument across the six corridors, the flatness stops reading as polite and starts reading as deliberate. The skill is not in the spectacle. The skill is in the trade. Walk the six and the city stops being one of the world's most diverse cities and starts being one of its most carefully calibrated.

The argument is not in the brochure. It is on the sidewalk.