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Toronto: The Scoop
No matter how you look at it, Toronto (a.k.a. T.O., the T-Dot, the Big Smoke, and the Live Music Capital of Canada!) is one of the coolest places on the planet to live. That also makes us one of the coolest places to visit. Why would you want to go anywhere else?
Okay, let’s come clean. There are certainly prettier cities to put on a postcard.
Sure, from the right angle and in the right light at the right time of day (when the sun and the clouds and the snow and the rain and the smog co-operate) Toronto’s kind of picturesque, a slouching lakeside metropolis of neatly arranged office towers and condominiums and construction cranes. There’s a barely noticeable necklace of islands across the harbour. There’s a wind turbinee—part o T.O.’s growing green efforts—spinning lazily like the propeller on some cosmic horizontal albino beanie. And of course, there’s the CN Tower, a 553-metre-high phallus with the SkyDome (it might have suffered the indignity of corporate rebranding, but the home of the 92 and 93 World Series champs is no Rogers Centre) hanging off it like a single, lonely testicle half-buried in concrete.
But we lack the defining character possessed by other great cities, the arrogant majesty of New York or the historical grandeur of Paris or London, or even the cheesy pop-culture familiarity of Los Angeles. We may boast the world’s longest street (Yonge Street splits the city into east and west starting at the lakeshore and doesn’t end for 1,896 kilometres), but it ain’t the Champs Elysées or Broadway. Although, again, from the right angle in the right light, it could be. Which is part of the reason Hollywood shoots movies like Chicago and Cinderella Man here, cuz we can be dressed up to look like everywhere while never actually looking like anywhere.
Not that we lack significance. We’re the fifth-largest city in North America, after all. Only Mexico City, New York, L.A. and Chicago are bigger. Our more than 5.3-million residents—41 per cent of whom were born outside of Canada, doncha know?—speak close to 150 languages and dialects, which the United Nations says makes us the most multicultural metropolis in the world.
The current City of Toronto is an amalgamation of six prior municipalities, but really, we’re a city of neighbourhoods, from the lakeside Beaches to the boho Annex to ritzy Rosedale, Little India to Little Italy, Greektown to Cabbagetown to Koreatown to at least two Chinatowns. And with all this ethnic diversity, there’s no better way to explore the city than by eating your way around the globe at any of our countless great restaurants.
The Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) is North America’s third-largest exchange by value traded. In fact, Toronto is the very heart of the Canadian economy, even if the soul stretches from St. John’s, Newfoundland to the Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia to Cape Columbia, Nunavut. And we have our fingers wrapped around more than our share of the country’s political strings, although we’re not the capital of Canada (that would be Ottawa, dammit!).
When it comes to culture, Toronto is no couch potato. It’s home to the world’s third-largest English-language theatre scene, where internationally renowned productions—like The Lord Of The Rings—have received their world premieres. There’s the National Ballet Company, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Canadian Opera Company. The Toronto International Film Festival, one of about 40 film festivals the city hosts each year, is the world’s biggest, but, appropriately, not the world’s most glamorous. And while we’re talking about movies, we wouldn’t be Hollywood North if we didn’t have a few famous actors and directors of our own, including Keanu Reeves, Sandra Oh, Sarah Polley, Mike Myers, Jim Carrey, Christopher Plummer, Catherine O’Hara, David Cronenberg and Norman Jewison.
Our gay population is the biggest in Canada; and the Pride Week celebration is one of the three largest in the world (along with New York City and Sydney, Australia). Likewise, Caribana is the largest Caribbean festival north of Jamaica, attracting close to 2 million partiers each summer. A million more stop by for the International Dragon Boat Festival. And those are just a few of the hundreds of festivals held here each year.
We’ve got a vibrant music scene and Toronto is the hometown to the likes of the Barenaked Ladies, Blue Rodeo, Broken Social Scene, Neil Young, Rush, k-os and that dude with the ’tude who won the job as lead singer of INXS.
Our favourite sport is hockey, naturally, and we love our Maple Leafs as much as the rest of the country hates ’em. We also spill our beer (and the occasional tear) over the Blue Jays, Raptors, Argos and Rock (the lacrosse team—they play the original Canadian game).
We erected the world’s first permanent AIDS memorial. We invented the world’s first alternating current (AC) radio tube, which allowed radios to run on household current. We discovered insulin and created IMAX. M.A.C. Cosmetics was founded here, for chrissake!
Mick and Keef and the rest of the Stones love Toronto. They recorded a live album here, they prep for all their world tours by rehearsing in our local clubs, and when SARS delivered a stinging bitch-slap in 2003, they came to our emotional rescue with an all-day concert that drew 800,000 fans and reminded everyone that Toronto is a really great place to be.
Now, all of this might seem like bragging, and to some degree it is. It’s part of the reason why the rest of the country sees us as confident to the point of arrogance: we believe we’re the centre of the country, if not the entire universe, which is kind of funny when you consider that while one-third of Canada’s population lives within 160 km of Toronto, the actual geographic centre of the country is just south of Yathkyed Lake in Nunavut, somewhere near the Arctic Circle.
We’re a big fish in a small pond at home, but it’s perhaps not surprising that we’re a little unsure of ourselves on the international stage, striving for acceptance like someone’s kid brother. We’re still a young city in a young country, and we have a lot of growing up to do.
And we’re doing it. Sure, we have crime and pollution and social problems like any city, but we’re already far safer, cleaner and greener than most urban centres our size. Even the picture on our postcards is changing. Our buildings, long staid and rather plain, are getting a makeover thanks to some of the world’s most acclaimed architects. The Toronto-raised Frank Gehry is currently overseeing a redesign of the Art Gallery of Ontario while Daniel Libeskind has sketched out a funky crystalline addition for the Royal Ontario Museum. English architect Will Alsop’s controversial Sharp Centre for Design building has turned some heads while the understated Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, home of the Canadian Opera Company and National Ballet of Canada, is perking up more than a few ears.
But after all that, what do visitors think about Toronto? It’s clean. Yup, cleanliness is our claim to fame, along with friendliness. Sure we’re proud of our clean streets and environmental initiatives and the fact our mayor drives a hybrid and that people will smile and wave and say please and thank you and help you with directions if you ask. But these aren’t exactly things to trumpet from the rooftops—“Toronto. So clean. So friendly. So dull.”—when it’s so obvious we’re so much more than that.
We were once called Muddy York—ironic given our current reputation as one of the cleanest cities around—until we paved the hell out of everything. When we had the largest pork yards in North America, they called us Hogtown and that still stings a bit. Then, when churches stood on almost every corner and booze was banned, we were Toronto the Good. But somehow even that’s never been good enough. Because, as anyone who’s lived here awhile already knows, no matter what angle you look at us from, we’re really more like Toronto the really fuckin’ great!
Don’t believe us? Just drop by for a visit. We’ll show you around.
