Toronto, Ontario — Where to Go
Toronto Sightseeing Overview
Like a needle jabbing into the sky, the CN Tower dominates Toronto's cityscape and is its most famous attraction. Since its completion in 1976, the tower has attracted company - at its foot stands the Rogers Center (formerly the SkyDome), a retractable dome stadium, while further east is the Air Canada Center (a state-of-the-art hockey and basketball arena).
Immediately to the north is the dense cluster of office towers that comprise the Financial District, including some architectural wonders by Mies van der Rohe (Toronto-Dominion Center) and Santiago Calatrava (the galleria at BCE Place).
Interspersed between these (and even underlying many of the buildings) are some of the city's main shopping areas, with the theaters and nightclubs of the Entertainment District to the west, and some of Toronto's chief tourist attractions just to the north.
The latter include Toronto City Hall, a gem of modern architecture, the nearby Art Gallery of Ontario, the vast collections of the Royal Ontario Museum, and the medieval-inspired 20th-century castle, Casa Loma, which stands a bit further to the north.
In the city's west end, the enormous, sweeping patch of green known as High Park unfurls, while along the waterfront Ontario Place and the Canadian National Exhibition Grounds provide fun days out for families with children. Beyond the trail-laced ravine of the Don Valley, to the east of the center, is The Beaches, with chic boutiques and a waterfront promenade.
Toronto is known as a city of neighborhoods and many of these are a short distance from the Financial District's towers. Unlike many major North American cities, Toronto has a thriving, vital, leafy downtown that keeps home owners and families from fleeing to the suburbs.
Two of the city's most affluent areas are Rosedale and Forest Hill - pleasant for walks and people-watching. Yorkville, a hippy enclave in the 1960s, predictably went chi-chi in the 1970s, today offering elegant cafes and restaurants and even a Prada store.
Toronto's Chinatown - arguably North America's best due to Toronto's enormous Chinese community - centers on Spadina Avenue and Dundas Street West. Danforth Avenue is home to Greektown. Toronto has one of the highest concentrations of Italians outside Italy and many of them originally made their homes in Little Italy, west of the city center.
Near the University of Toronto, the Annex is a trendy, popular neighborhood known for its lively nightlife and cultural scene. The area around Church and Wellesley Streets is home to the city's out and proud gay and lesbian village.
Toronto Tourist Information
Tourism Toronto
Suite 590, 207 Queen's Quay West
Tel: (416) 203 2600 or 1 800 499 2514.
Website: www.torontotourism.com
Opening hours: Mon-Fri 0830-1800.
Ontario Travel Information Center
20 Dundas Street West
Tel: (416) 314 5899 or 1 800 668 2746.
Website: www.ontariotravel.net
Opening hours: daily 0830-1700 (until 2000 from late May through August).
Toronto Sightseeing
The Toronto CityPass includes entry to the Royal Ontario Museum, CN Tower, Hockey Hall of Fame, Ontario Science Center, Toronto Zoo and Casa Loma. The pass is available from the participating attractions or from CityPass (tel: 1 888 330 5008; website: www.citypass.com).
Toronto Sightseeing
The Toronto CityPass includes entry to the Royal Ontario Museum, CN Tower, Hockey Hall of Fame, Ontario Science Center, Toronto Zoo and Casa Loma. The pass is available from the participating attractions or from CityPass (tel: 1 888 330 5008; website: www.citypass.com).
Key Attractions in Toronto, Ontario
CN Tower
At a height of 553m (1,815ft), the CN Tower was, until recently, the world's tallest tower; it is still the defining symbol of this lakefront city. On a clear day, it offers stunning views of up to 120km (75 miles) across the surrounding cityscape and Lake Ontario. Glass-fronted elevators (one with a newly installed glass floor) bring visitors to the main section (at an equivalent to 114 storys high) where a terrifying glass floor enables visitors to stare 342m (1,122ft) straight down. A more leisurely view can be had from the revolving 360 Restaurant on the floor above. Another set of elevators leads to the SkyPod, 33 storys further up. There is also a group of entertainment venues at the base of the tower, including a motion-simulator ride.
301 Front Street West
Tel: (416) 868 6937.
Website: www.cntower.ca
Opening hours: Usually from early morning until 2200 or 2300 in the evening. Opening hours are adjusted seasonally, so visitors should call the tower to check.
Admission charge.
Casa Loma
Toronto seems an unlikely location for a castle, but since 1911 the soaring battlements of Casa Loma have lent an element of magic to the city. The 98-room castle was completed in 1914 by Sir Henry Pellatt, a charismatic financier, industrialist and philanthropist, to be his home. Financial ruin forced its sale years later and the castle eventually became the popular tourist attraction it is today. The castle is a bizarre hybrid of a medieval-style stonework exterior (replete with turrets and battlements) and an early 20th-century interior. Highlights include the splendidly carved Oak Room, secret passageways and pseudo-gothic Great Hall, which has 18m- (60ft-) high ceilings. The gardens are open between May and October.
1 Austin Terrace
Tel: (416) 923 1171.
Website: www.casaloma.org
Opening hours: Daily 0930-1700 (last admission 1600).
Admission charge.
Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO)
Reopened after a C$254m expansion led by Toronto-born architect Frank Gehry, Canada's premier art gallery, the AGO, contains 110 galleries displaying temporary exhibitions and a large permanent collection of international art. Its European collection covers the Italian Renaissance, Flemish Masters, 17th-century French painting and the Impressionists, right through to 20th-century works by Chagall and Picasso and beyond. The gallery's greatest attraction, however, is the Canadian collection, featuring a cross-section of work from the Group of Seven - a group of early 20th-century painters whose work embodies the sublime beauty of Canada's boreal wilderness. The gallery is also home to one of the world's largest collections of Inuit art, as well as works by Henry Moore. It is worth allowing extra time to visit The Grange, a restored 19th-century house, adjacent to the gallery. The gallery is due to reopen in November 2008.
317 Dundas Street West
Tel: (416) 979 6648.
Website: www.ago.net
Opening hours: New hours not yet confirmed.
Admission charge.
Bata Shoe Museum
The Bata Shoe Museum is the only museum of its kind in the world. Housed in an equally unique building shaped, appropriately enough, like a shoebox, the museum owns some 12,500 items of footwear, dating as far back as 4,500 years. Pieces range from Elvis Presley's loafers and Queen Victoria's ballroom slippers to 19th-century beaded Native American shoes and leather broad-toed Tudor shoes.
327 Bloor Street West
Tel: (416) 979 7799.
Website: www.batashoemuseum.ca
Opening hours: Mon, Tues, Wed, Fri and Sat 1000-1700, Thurs 1000-2000, Sun 1200-1700.
Admission charge (pay-what-you-can Thurs 1700-2000).
Royal Ontario Museum (ROM)
The ROM is one of the most exciting museums in Canada, and it recently got even better due to a massive redevelopment project. The museum's striking facade alone will take your breath away, but deeper within, the museum houses excellent collections featuring almost 6 million artifacts. The exhibits representing East Asia include a renowned collection of Chinese art, with wall paintings, snuff bottles and ceramic head cushions, as well as the only complete example of a Ming tomb in the west. Other levels handle the life sciences, the ancient Mediterranean and a Canadian heritage collection. Ten new ROM galleries opened in late 2005, and the spectacular new Michael Lee-Chin Crystal galleries and public spaces opened in 2007, featuring a grand new entrance and six new galleries overlooking the street. Designed by Daniel Libeskind, the new crystal is covered in a luminous skin of aluminum and glass. Like I.M. Pei's pyramid at the Louvre, it has not been without controversy but is likely to become a major urban landmark.
100 Queen's Park (Bloor Street West at Avenue Road)
Tel: (416) 586 8000.
Website: www.rom.on.ca
Opening hours: Sat-Thu 1000-1730, Fri 1000-2130.
Admission charge.
Ontario Science Center
The Ontario Science Center was opened in 1969, with a mission to ‘open minds to science by creating environments that excite curiosity, inspire insights and motivate learning in science and technology'. This difficult task is successfully accomplished with over 800 fascinating exhibits. Themes explored in depth include the human body and space travel. Interactive exhibits include piloting a spacecraft or touching the hair-raising Van de Graaff generator. An Omnimax Cinema offers a 24m (79ft) domed screen. A new 2,325 sq m (25,000 sq ft) innovation center featuring over 50 unique interactive experiences geared to teenagers and young adults opened in 2006, part of a C$47m renovation. It includes garbage art, fish music, a sound panel room, vibrating chair and other challenges designed to encourage skills, attitude and behaviors that enable innovation.
770 Don Mills Road
Tel: (416) 696 1000.
Website: www.ontariosciencecenter.ca
Opening hours: Generally 1000-1700 but it varies by season; call to check.
Admission charge.
Toronto Zoo
Situated on a sprawling 287-hectare (710-acre) forested piece of land next to the Rouge Valley, in the suburb of Scarborough, the Toronto Zoo is one of the largest zoos in the world. The collection of over 5,000 animals is truly international, since the zoo features areas named African Savanna, the Americas, Indo-Malaya, Australasia, Eurasia and the Canadian Domain. Underwater exhibits showcase polar bears, South African fur seals, beavers in their dens and otters swimming at eye level.
Meadowvale Road, 2km (1 mile) north of Highway 401
Tel: (416) 392 5900.
Website: www.torontozoo.com
Opening hours: The zoo is open every day but Christmas, but hours vary throughout the year; call to check. Last admission one hour before closing.
Admission charge.
Fort York
Fort York harks back to the days when Toronto, then as British as afternoon tea, was named York. As a colony, the city occasionally had to deal with revolutionaries to the south, so Fort York was founded in 1793 to ensure British control of Lake Ontario. Most of the buildings, however, date from 1814 because, during the War of 1812, the evacuating British blew up the gunpowder magazine - an explosion so unexpectedly large that it killed 10 of their own men and 250 advancing Americans, and destroyed a good deal of the fort. Highlights of Fort York include blockhouses, barracks, officers' quarters, costumed staff and period demonstrations.
100 Garrison Road, off Fleet Street
Tel: (416) 392 6907.
Website: www.toronto.ca/culture/fort_york.htm
Opening hours: Daily 1000-1700 (late May-early Sep); Mon-Fri 1000-1600, Sat-Sun 1000-1700 (early Sep-late May). Several short closed periods throughout the year.
Admission charge.
Gardiner Museum
One of the world's premier ceramic art museums, it now boasts 2,694 sq m (29,000 sq ft) of exhibition space and features Asian ceramics, 19th-century ceramics made at Minton, and contemporary studio ceramics, in addition to collections including Ancient American, Italian Renaissance majolica, and 17th- and 18th-century English delftware. The museum also features a restaurant and an expanded shop specializing in artist-designed and handmade objects.
111 Queen's Park
Tel: (416) 586 8080.
Website: www.gardinermuseum.on.ca
Opening hours: Mon-Thurs 1000-1800, Fri 1000-2100, Sat-Sun 1000-1700.
Further Distractions
The Distillery Historic District
The collection of 44 stone and red-brick buildings that began life as the early 19th-century Gooderham and Worts Distillery (once the largest in the British Empire) has been re-cast as a new arts and cultural district to rival the likes of Boston's Faneuil Hall and Vancouver's Granville Island. What is perhaps the best preserved example of Victorian industrial architecture on the continent is now a 5.3-hectare (13-acre), brick-paved pedestrian precinct of restaurants, galleries, boutiques, cafes, artists studios and a brewery, enlivened throughout the summer by a host of cultural and arts festivals and events. Tours of the site cover themes like architecture, galleries, a cinema (which was, for many years, used as a location for shooting films) and brewery.
55 Mill Street (corner of Parliament Street)
Tel: (416) 364 1177; tours 1 866 405 8687.
Website: www.thedistillerydistrict.com
Opening hours: varies according to individual venue.
Free admission.
Toronto Islands
Located in Toronto Harbour, facing the downtown skyline, the Toronto Islands have long been regarded as a place for leisure and relaxation. They did not become islands, however, until 1858, when a storm caused a rift between the then peninsula and the mainland. Over the years, the main islands (Wards Island, Center Island and Hanlan's Point) were popular resort areas and included the baseball park where Babe Ruth hit his first professional home run. In the last 50 years, as a 230-hectare (568-acre) public park, the islands have become popular picnicking places. Facilities include designated picnic areas (with fire pits), wading pools, softball diamonds, beaches, a farm, plenty of restaurants and the Centerville Amusement Park. Today, the islands offer an ideal outdoor environment in which to take a waterside walk, relax at a cafe or enjoy an unparalleled view of the city's skyline. The islands are only accessible by ferry.
Toronto Harbour
Tel: (416) 392 8193 (ferry information).
Website: www.toronto.ca/parks/island/index.htm
Centerville Amusement Park
Center Island
Tel: (416) 203 0405.
Website: www.centerisland.ca
Opening hours: Hours vary. Call ahead for details.
Admission charge.
Canada's Wonderland
Located in the northern suburb of Maple, Canada's Wonderland is, as its name suggests, an amusement park. Although not on quite the same scale as a Disney or Universal outfit, it nevertheless features over 200 attractions on its 121 hectares (300 acres) of landscaped grounds and 8-hectare (20-acre) waterpark. There are more than 60 rides, including, 'Drop Tower', ‘Jet Scream', ‘Scooby-Doo's Haunted Mansion' and ‘Shockwave'. In 2008 ‘Behemoth', Canada's largest rollercoaster, opened. There is also a Nickleodeon Central theme area for kids.
9580 Jane Street (Highway 400, exit 33)
Tel: (905) 832 8131.
Website: www.canadas-wonderland.com
Opening hours: Daily 1000-2200 (Jun-Aug); Sat and Sun 1000-2000 (May, Sep and Oct).
Admission charge.
