Page 1 of 6
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
The security guard with the maniacal laugh said it's always the leader you lose
I organize a lot of these slideshows after the fact, I mean, it’s hard to put together a “weekend trip” slideshow until the year ends, and, as you have probably already figured out, these weekend trip slideshows usually include a combination of actual weekend trips (as in I fly out on a Friday and come back on a Sunday night) as well as some interesting local things that I may (or may not) have actually seen on an actual weekend. That said, we’re starting the 2014 Weekend Trips Slideshow strong with not just an actual weekend trip, but an actual weekend international trip.
I normally fly up to Toronto and then take that awful but not that awful) tourist bus that goes from Pearson to all of the downtown airports. This time though I tried something different, flying on Porter out of Newark right to Billy Bishop Airport in the heart of Toronto, if (of course) the heart of Toronto was on the waterfront west of the Skydome. The flight was quick and the view of Toronto from the plane was spectacular. Billy Bishop is on an island, and while they are planning to build an underwater pedestrian tunnel, the only way to get to dry land is to take a ferry. This is where the Porter experience drops off. The ferry is slow (insanely slow) and packed (insanely packed), and once everyone gets off at the exact same time, the Porter shuttle bus system is overwhelmed. I ended up walking to my hotel instead- it was only about a mile and a half or so- but that tunnel just can’t open fast enough. That ferry makes Pearson and its tourist buses look good.
As for the photo, well it’s from BCE Place, my favorite place in Toronto. It’s a Santiago Calatrava building (the first Calatrava building that I’ve ever been in) with a killer Movenpick restaurant and the Hockey Hall of fame in the basement, a rare building that just about checks off every box I can think of.
I was in Toronto to see Open Doors Toronto, a city wide festival very similar to Open House London and Open House New York. It becomes a bit like a scavenger hunt after a while as I look through the guide, find a building in some neighborhood or street that I’ve never been in or to, then head off to see somewhere new. We’re starting at Toronto City Hall, where I have been but not been inside. Doors Open Toronto allowed you to explore the building, see the Rob Ford Must Go sit in site (maybe all of the protestors were on a break on Day 102) and took you to the top level where there apparently has been an observation deck all of this time. Who new?
When you think Toronto skylines all you think of is the CN Tower, and that’s ok, it is dominant and the rest of the skyline kind of looks like a sideshow more than a feature player. But if you look a little harder, you can see that there are some pretty good buildings in that sideshow, including here on King Street where the Mies van der Rohe designed Toronto Dominion Center, um, sorry, Toronto Dominion Centre stand out among all those other background players.
There were a lot of interesting buildings open for Open Doors Toronto but these were not among them. On either side of The Grange are two of Toronto’s best buildings, the AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario) and OCAD (Ontario College of Art and Design). the AGO was designed by local boy Frank Gehry (he literally grew up adjacent to this park) while OCAD was designed by everyone’s favorite Will Alsop.
Our next Open Doors Toronto stop is the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library on the University of Toronto Campus. This is one of those treasure map type sites I never knew about nor would ever visit since, well, I never knew about it, The library was in a well designed but somewhat non descript brutalist building, but that nondescript exterior did nothing to prepare you for what was waiting inside.
I’ll keep mixing up the scavenger hunt and treasure map metaphors as we go (they’re kind of interchangeable in this case). So our scavenger map/treasure hunt led us to another place I never heard of. This is Commerce Court North, a wonderful hidden space right in downtown.
Over on Younge Street, Open Doors Toronto provided tours of the Winter Garden Theatre which, inside, kind of looks like you’re outside. In the cold harsh Toronto winter, that’s probably a pretty welcome thing to see.
That scavenger treasure hunt map took me to all sorts of buildings and into spaces like this at a Native Child and Family Services office, a totally unexpected space in an otherwise uninteresting building.
I visited 15 different sights, and a lot of them aren’t pictured here, primarily because I’m attempting to keep these Weekend Trips Slideshows kind of short, despite clear and overwhelming evidence to the contrary. So, you’re missing sites like Osgoode Hall, the Canada Life Tower, Knox College and the Canada Permanent Building, and instead we’ll finish up at the TIFF Reference Library, wondering exactly how and why what is happening here. Why are there cardboard mounties, and why are they set up like news reporters, and why is the one with the lights purposefully not paying any attention to where the light is focused and, more importantly, why were these ever even made? So many questions, but we’ll have to answer them the next time we’re in Toronto I guess.
