So you`ve heard this is possibly the cleanest big city in North America, but you still have your doubts.
Consider this recent story about a program in which Toronto will spend $33,000 this summer to hire 10 students to clean up the city`s graffiti.
Mayor Art Eggleton reportedly hinted ”that the city`s buildings and inspections department has been keeping files on the worst examples of graffiti and debris, although he refused to say what part of Toronto is threatened with becoming an eyesore.”
Yes, you read that right. In Toronto–metropolitan area population 3.4 million, the largest city in Canada, bigger than Houston, older than Chicago
–people don`t know where the eyesores are. They need the mayor to tell them. And he won`t.
Yet that`s how clean Toronto is. And the cleanliness so apparent to an American visitor makes clear that this is a city most quickly understood by comparing it with its decaying urban counterparts to the south.
Toronto is a big city–cultured, sophisticated, ethnic, inviting–without any discernible West Side or Bronx or Liberty City. A city where the 33-year- old subway and its 33-year-old cars are nearly as clean as the day they were put into service. A city where street sweepers scrub nearly every residential block each week.
Crime is far from a preoccupying concern. Women routinely walk in most parts of the city unescorted and without fear. There were just 37 homicides last year. The police say they don`t generally take their guns home with them at night, a practice almost unheard of in major U.S. cities.
The poor and disadvantaged, of which Toronto has its share, have not been warehoused and ghettoed as they have in America. Rather, they generally live mixed into neighborhoods across the metropolitan area. Where there is public housing, it is low-rise, well-kept and decidedly unforbidding.
This is not to say that the city does not have some seedier areas, most notably along Yonge Street north of the downtown area. The area, home to the city`s five remaining adult bookstores, is also plagued with persistent prostitution problems. But it is an exception.
Perhaps the most endearing aspect of Toronto is the fact that it is a true ”city of neighborhoods” which puts to shame similar claims made by most U.S. cities. In Chicago, which boasts of its ethnic diversity, neighborhoods often seem delimited along strained fault lines. In Toronto, neighborhoods tend to flow seamlessly, cheerfully, colorfully one into another.
Fortunately for the visitor to Toronto, this harmony and diversity is easy to find. You need only locate Bloor Street, a major east-west artery, and start walking. Walking, by the way, is the best way to enjoy this city`s subtleties. But if you get tired, the subway or a streetcar, offering frequent service, is never far away.
Downtown, Bloor Street is home to some of the city`s most fashionable clothing and jewelry stores, which radiate to the north into an area known as Yorkville, which in earlier decades was Toronto`s Haight-Asbury district. Yorkville is now a warren of high-fashion boutiques, cafes and art and antique shops bursting out of renovated brick rowhouses.
The Bellair Cafe is the must-be-seen-eating-there spot for resident and visiting glitterati, but Yorkville overflows with many fine restaurants, most of which move onto the sidewalks for outdoor dining in the summer.
Two of the city`s best hotels make this area their home and both offer attractive weekend rates during the summer (especially when you consider that the U.S. dollar is running about 25 percent ahead of its Canadian counterpart.)
The Four Seasons Hotel towers over the west end of Yorkville, where rooms normally costing $205 (Canadian) a night double occupancy drop to $140 on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Nearby is the charming Windsor Arms, a small European-style hotel. Every room, appointed with overstuffed chairs and Old World furniture, is uniquely decorated. Weekend rates here for three sizes of rooms are $75, $115 and $135 a night.
Yorkville is the playground of the new Toronto, financial and commercial heart of Canada, where those who have made it big in Ontario`s currently booming economy come to spend. But you don`t have to walk too far west along Bloor Street to find a more down-to-earth world.
Within a few blocks, many buildings of the University of Toronto come into view and designer Italian suits give way to blue jeans and punk haircuts. Just beyond lies a neighborhood called the Annex.
The Annex is an old Ukrainian neighborhood, where Slavic tongues are often heard on the street and the home-style goulash restaurants generally don`t feel compelled to translate the menus posted in their windows.
Many stores in the Annex retain a distinctly European feel–flowers spill onto the sidwalks in front of florists and small groceries, riotous aromas of sausages and meats waft from delicatessans. Liberally sprinkled in between are coffeehouses and bookstores and shoe repair shops and hardware stores, neighborhood services that cater to a mix of residents of many backgrounds and financial means.
Not to be missed here is The Other Cafe, a tasteful, moderately priced nouvelle restaurant where the menu changes daily but attention to cooking details and presentation never lags.
Beyond the Annex, the neighborhood turns appreciably Indian, then Haitian, then Korean, on and on like that for several miles. Never is the tone exclusive, however. Bloor Street, like Toronto, like much of Canada, is pan-cultural.
This fact has much to do with Canada`s heritage as a multicultural society where different groups strive not merely to tolerate one another, but to respect one another as well. Canada is no melting pot; it has been likened instead to a hearty stew.
The crowds of every conceivable ethnic background converging on Toronto`s huge Chinatown every weekend illustrate the point. Here people from all parts of Asia and the Far East live together and jostle for space on the sidewalks and the streets (don`t even think of driving in this area) to sell a blinding variety of exotic fruits and vegetables, undressed meats and assorted kitsch. At the adjacent Kensington Market, a dizzying five-block outdoor bazaar, every other ethnic group seems to be represented.
There are so many Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean and Thai restaurants here that it would take the duration of a Ming Dynasty to sample them all. The Pink Pearl, with two additional locations in the city, is highly recommended, but just blundering into a storefront usually leads to a fine, and inexpensive, meal as well.
This Chinatown, which lies south of the Annex, is no mere urban tourist attraction. It is a self-contained commercial district that grew up to serve its own residents. Visitors are obviously welcome here, but there is never any guarantee that the haggling over prices will be conducted in a language you can understand.
South of Chinatown is another major east-west route, Queen Street, which has kind of a Soho feel to it and is the favored home of Toronto`s artsy, counterculture set. The area is not unlike parts of North Halsted Street in Chicago and the Queen Mother Cafe, with its pressed tin ceiling and polyglot menu, is worth a visit.
Nearby (you are now about eight blocks north of Lake Ontario and the Harbourfront area) is Toronto`s burgeoning wholesale fashion district (good place to buy Canadian furs).
If you tire of exploring neighborhoods where real people live, there are always the major tourist attractions, with which Toronto is amply appointed. The Royal Ontario Museum (art to natural history) and the Art Gallery of Ontario (modern art) are downtown.
The Eaton Centre, a monstrous three-level shopping mall, sprawls hard by the curved City Hall building, an architectural landmark that resembles two halves of an upended cylinder.
Beneath the downtown center core here runs Toronto`s famed underground city, a network of interconnected shopping concourses that offer a warm and dry way to traverse from one downtown high-rise to the next.
Towering above the city near the lakefront, and unavoidably visible for dozens of miles around, is the CN Tower, a concrete spindle erected by the Canadian National Railway that boasts it`s the ”tallest free-standing structure in the world” at 1,821 feet. There are two observation decks and a horribly overpriced bar in the tower. (It must be said, however, that you are allowed to keep the CN Tower-shaped glass that your drink comes in.)
At Harbourfront, a busy place in the summer, you will find several large shopping concourses, marinas, parks, ferry boats across the lake to the pleasant Toronto Islands and the Harbourfront Hilton, a fairly new high-rise which offers a $99 a night weekend rate, with a two-night minimum. You can rent bicycles at Harbourfront and ride along lengthy lakefront pathways and there is a large antique market here.
West along the lakefront lies Ontario Place, a summer amusement park, and the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition, where a variety of programs and trade shows are always going on. The Toronto Blue Jays play baseball down here, too.
Of all the standard tourist attractions, the Metro Toronto Zoo, east of the city in Scarborough, qualifies as a must-do. It is a very big (if you`re a serious zoo-goer, you can`t see it all in a day), modern place with animal habitats meticulously designed to mirror the real places from which the animals come. Also, there are few bars and barriers: You can watch orangutans from across a 10-foot pond, ogle elephants from across a narrow gulley or stare down a grizzly bear from a mere five feet. (The bears are behind bars, but they don`t hesitate to sit right up to them to intimidate visitors.)
Prices in Toronto can seem steep until you remember the 25 percent premium the American dollar gets. For Americans accustomed to U.S. big-city prices, restaurants and lodging are actually reasonable. Clothing, however, is generally costlier than in the U.S., especially the imported stuff. And beer, wine and liquor is downright outrageous, thanks to government controls and taxes. Most stores are closed on Sundays because of Ontario`s ”blue laws,”
except in certain designated ”tourist areas,” such as Harbourfront.
If Toronto lacks anything when measured against the biggest U.S. cities, it is a shortage of distinctive architecture. The downtown, alas, is a generally unremarkable mixture of glass-and-steel modern skyscrapers and undistinguished low-rises.
Once again, the neighborhoods are the most pleasing to the eye. There, block after block of sturdy brick rowhouses, townhouses and duplexes provide an endless and colorful stream of esthetic delights. Every third house, it seems, is undergoing renovation, its ancient and broken innards piled into dumpsters by the front walk.
But this is Toronto, so the piles are neat. And the dumpsters are hauled away promptly.
WHY CANADA IS CANADA
Just who are those neighbors to our North? Here`s what the 1987 World Almanac and Book of Facts has to say about them:
Population (1985 estimate): 25,399,000. Almost 49 percent of the population falls in the 15- to 44-year-old age category with 28.8 percent over 44 and the remaining 22.5 percent 14 or under.
Sixty-one percent are English and 25 percent are French.
There are 10 provinces in Canada and two territories (Northwest Territories and the Yukon). The capital is Ottawa, in the province of Ontario. The largest cities (according to 1984 metropolitan estimates) are Toronto, 3,140,500; Montreal, 2,865,900; Vancouver, 1,133,000; Ottawa-Hull, 756,600;
Winnipeg, 603,000; Edmonton, 697,000; Calgary, 619,700; Quebec City, 589,000. Language: English and French.
Religion: Roman Catholic, 46 percent; Protestant, 41 percent.
Geography: Second largest country in land size with 3,860,000 square miles. (The Soviet Union is the largest with 8,649,496 square miles; the U.S. is third largest with 3,623,420 square miles.) From east to west it stretches 3,223 miles and southward from the North Pole to the U.S. border.
Land frontier shared with the U.S.: 4,039 miles.
Exchange rate: As of May 5, the exchange rate was $1.28 Canadian to the U.S. dollar. A year ago the exchange rate was $1.37 Canadian to a U.S. dollar. Gasoline: 4.54 liters equals an Imperial gallon, and 3.8 liters equals an American gallon.
Number of American tourists who traveled to Canada in 1986: 14.1 million spent one or more nights.
Most popular tourist destination in Canada: Ontario with 7.4 million visitors.
Second most popular tourist destination in Canada: British Columbia with 3.6 million. (That was an 87 percent increase over `85 brought about by Expo 86.)
Number of American dollars spent in Canada in 1986: At today`s exchange rate: $3.39 billion.
Number of Canadians living within 200 miles of the U.S. border: 90 percent of the population.
Additional sources: Tourism Canada and Deak International
