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