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.
