It starts with that Oz-like, ”hey-look-me-over” skyline-gleaming glass towers, the needle nose of the CN Tower stabbing the sky. Right away, you know this is no ordinary city.
Toronto is New York North. Only nicer.
Canada`s largest city is vital and vibrant. It`s the ”Phantom of the Opera” and Jack Morris, ethnic restaurants and wine bars, subways and streetcars, the hipness of Yorkville and the pop-top roof of the SkyDome.
Most downtowns have a sputtering day life and a vacuous night life.
But-what a concept-Toronto teems by day and night. All kinds of people use the city. Toronto gives that energy right back.
With success has come problems, to be sure, of racial tensions and growing too much too fast. And Toronto isn`t the cheap date it used to be.
Summer visitors will find plenty that`s new: tours on foot and in the heavens, a hotel that starts on the 28th floor, museums of shoes and stage props.
Oz? Better. The Wizard himself would be jealous.
– Air tours. It is nearing rush hour, we are 1,500 feet above Toronto and I can`t help it:
”Traffic on the 401 outbound from the city moderate to heavy,” I announce into my headset microphone. ”We`ll go over and check the Don Valley.”
Pilot Anthony Johnson cocks back his head and laughs. ”I can see I`m gonna have my hands full driving home tonight.”
On new and affordable air tours of Toronto, you can play traffic reporter, Peter Pan or just awestruck tourist.
Aboard four-seater Cessna Skyhawk IIs, it`s a heart-fluttering feeling being eye-high with the CN Tower and Toronto`s sleek downtown skyscrapers.
Johnson circles over the Ontario Science Centre, the Metro Zoo, Greenwood Race Track, Casa Loma and Maple Leaf Gardens.
At 115 m.p.h., we breeze above the beaches and boaters of Centre Island, gaze at the chalky white majesty of the Scarborough Bluffs, buzz the green copper roofs of Queens` Park and skim above the boardwalk of the Beaches.
What amazes me is there are more trees to a city when you get above it. We even peer down into the SkyDome, its retractable roof open to the sun.
But dancing above downtown, riding the updrafts off Lake Ontario and drifting above the bridges and Cinesphere of Ontario Place are personal thrills of this fly-boy.
For the price of lunch with wine and a tip, you can tour Toronto from the air. But if you`re like me, you`ll have the same feeling at touchdown: That Toronto is still better from the ground.
Flights leave from Toronto Island Airport, a short ferry ride. Cost for 30- to 40-minute air tours is $100 (U.S.) for up to three people. Call Kawartha, 416-367-0144.
– Bata Shoe Museum. They get stepped on, scuffed up and dunked in rain puddles. We play sports with them, dance with them, walk down the aisle with them. Yet hardly anyone-Imelda Marcos notwithstanding-gets excited about the lowly shoe.
A just-opened museum is out to change that.
The Bata Shoe Museum Collection celebrates footwear in soleful ways. Hundreds of shoes and shoe-related artifacts of international, historical and ethnological import are featured in changing exhibits.
The new museum is a project of Bata Ltd., a worldwide producer of shoes.
”Shoes tell us about people,” says director Sonja Bata, ”their way of life, their status in society, the climate in which they lived, their activities, sometimes even their religious beliefs.”
Elton John`s platform shoes are there, as are Queen Victoria`s and the red brocaded silk numbers of Pope Pius IX (1857), status shoes (they got taller or longer the more important you were), English jackboots worn in 1700, French shoes for crushing chestnuts, fashion footwear from the 14th Century to the 1970s. Everything from boots made for walking on the moon to a pair of shoes worn in Egypt in 2500 B.C.
Visitors learn the history of shoes and how they are made, look in on a 19th Century cobbler`s shop, watch a video, design shoes and watch them step through their favorite dance routine, and learn interesting facts such as how the average person walks 9,000 steps a day.
Oh, your aching feet!
It`s at the Colonnade, 131 Bloor St. West. Hours are 11 a.m.-6 p.m.;
closed Mondays. Admission is $3 for adults, $1 for students and seniors, $6 for a family.
– Walking tours. To most people it is the lobby of Toronto Dominion Bank. To Norm Yip it is like dying and going to architecture heaven.
”Ludwig Mies van der Rohe,” Yip says in whispered reverence, ”his gem.”
Yip points out the marble teller counter, walls that are windows, flooring that extends from inside outside, and not a free-standing column in sight.
”Everything is meticulously chosen,” Yip says. ”This is architecture as art.”
Yip leads walking tours deep among the gleaming glass towers of downtown Toronto. An architect by trade, he was inspired by an architecture tour he took of Chicago (no slouch when it comes to daring design).
For $11 (Canadian) in Toronto, walkers get a street-level tour of the Financial District.
We pause at the gilded magnificence of the Royal Bank; the architect laminated gold into its windows.
Inside the atrium, metal rods enameled yellow and white hang above us like icicles.
”The Royal Bank seems to light up the skyline,” Yip says.
Yip considers the five-building Toronto Dominion Center a Mies masterpiece. But for contrast he walks visitors across Richmond Street to a grassy patch with sculptures of cows in repose. Overlooked by most people except the brown baggers who lunch there is Joe Fafard`s ”The Pasture.”
”No one will ever go here, but I think it`s grand,” Yip says. ”To remind people of the rural life amid all this modern architecture, it`s brilliant.”
Necks crane at high rises scraping the heavens. Some buildings Yip likes
(one he describes as ”very Toronto”); others are too cluttered with ornamentation (”That`s when you lose,” he says). The buff-colored Toronto Trust Tower ”doesn`t have a finesse for me,” Yip says.
Union Station, with its beaux-arts design, he calls ”one of the best spaces in all Toronto.” Architecture coexists, with the modern Ernst and Young Tower wrapping around the old Art Deco facade of the Toronto Stock Exchange.
What it all proves is that architecture, like most everything else, is something Toronto does right.
Yip`s Toronto Architecture Tour may be reached at 416-922-7606 anytime.
Toronto`s Royal Ontario Museum offers free summer walking tours, including Yorkville, historic Toronto, Cabbagetown, City Centre, the wharves and warehouses of the waterfront and the like. Call 416-586-5513.
Looking for a nice Sunday jaunt? Explore Historic Toronto (416-392-6827)
offers Sunday walking tours, including Ft. York, Queen`s Wharf Lighthouse, William Lyon Mackenzie`s Toronto, Spadina neighborhoods and more.
– Museum of the Absurd. Among Toronto traditions, the restaurants of Ed Mirvish are right up there with streetcars, Union Station and Maple Leaf Gardens.
Across years of building his empire of restaurants and the Royal Alexandra Theatre, Mirvish was an insatiable collector, of everything and anything. Above his restaurants on King Street West it`s all there for show or for sale: Ed`s Museum of the Absurd.
Open less than six months, the museum is true Mirvish mayhem: stoves, tin canisters, clocks, playbills, arcade games, jukeboxes, stained glass windows, flapper dresses, lamps, antler-horn chairs.
Most everything had another life on stage. Crowns, costumes, furnishings, tombstones and other wonderful props from the Stratford Festival are for sale, like Malvolio`s cell from ”Twelfth Night” (1988). But most of the merchandise draws from six decades of the Royal Alexandra.
There`s even stuff you can use-plates for a buck, steak knives for 5 cents, champagne glasses or beer mugs for 50 cents, carafes for a quarter.
You could spend hours here, which is okay with Ed. Lunch in one of his restaurants, have dinner in another.
– Hotel in the heavens. Twenty-eight floors up from the marble-and-glass lobby of the bustling Scotia Plaza is another world, one of relaxed comforts. The homelike, slippers-and-pipe feel of the Camberly Club Hotel reminds me of the dear, departed Windsor Arms Hotel. Only the Windsor Arms never had views of Toronto and Lake Ontario like you get from the flowered couches of the lobby lounge. Or half the services.
Up a grand oak staircase, to the 29th floor, are most of the 52 guest rooms. Arriving guests can have their clothes pressed, their baths drawn, the room temperature set to their liking. Of course, there`s a chocolate and a terry robe beside your turned-down bed.
For your in-room VCR, choose from shelves of movie titles. Handsome guest rooms are well-stocked with hardcover books.
”People tell me at checkout, `I started a book . . ,` ” says concierge Irene Babin. ”I tell them to take it. Because they all come back.”
Business travelers are the Camberly`s raison d`etre. Even the in-room desks mean business with two phone lines, a computer hookup, paper clips, a stapler and staples.
What a wonderful find in the middle of the skyscraper.
Rates from $210 a night include lavish continental breakfast, afternoon tea and hors d`oeuvres each evening. And when your business is pleasure, the Camberly obliges with half-off rates for a Friday or Saturday night stay. Call 800-866-ROOM.
