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The economic and cultural focus of English-speaking
Canada, Toronto is the country's largest metropolis.
It sprawls along the northern shore of Lake Ontario, its vibrant,
appealing centre encased by a jangle of satellite townships and
industrial zones that cover - as "Greater Toronto" -
no less than 100 square kilometres. For decades, Toronto was saddled
with unflattering sobriquets - "Toronto the Good", "Hogtown"
- that reflected a perhaps deserved reputation for complacent
mediocrity and greed. Spurred into years of image-building, the
city's postwar administrations have lavished millions of dollars
on glitzy architecture, slick museums, an excellent public-transport
system, and the reclamation and development of the lakefront.
As a result, Toronto has become one of North America's most likeable
cities, an eminently liveable place whose citizens keep a wary
eye on both their politicians and the developers.
Huge new shopping malls and skyrise office blocks
reflect the economic successes of the last two or three decades,
a boom that has attracted immigrants from all over the world,
transforming an overwhelmingly anglophone city into a cosmopolitan
one of some sixty significant minorities. Furthermore, the city's
multiculturalism goes far deeper than an extravagant diversity
of restaurants and sporadic pockets of multilingual street signs.
Toronto's schools, for example, have extensive "Heritage
Language Programmes", which encourage the maintenance of
the immigrants' first cultures.
Getting the feel of Toronto's diversity is one of
the city's great pleasures, but there are attention-grabbing sights
here as well. Most are conveniently clustered in the city centre,
and the most celebrated of them all is the CN Tower ,
the world's tallest free-standing structure. Next door lies the
modern hump of the SkyDome sports stadium. The
city's other prestige attractions are led by the Art Gallery
of Ontario , which possesses a first-rate selection of
Canadian painting, and the Royal Ontario Museum
, where pride of place goes to the Chinese collection. But it's
the pick of Toronto's smaller, less-visited galleries and period
homes that really add to the city's charm. There are superb Canadian
paintings at the Thomson Gallery and a fascinating
range of footwear at the Bata Shoe Museum . The
Toronto Dominion Bank boasts the eclectic Gallery of Inuit
Art , and the mock-Gothic extravagances of Casa
Loma , the Victorian gentility of Spadina House
and the replica of Fort York , the colonial settlement
where Toronto began, all vie for the visitor's attention.
Toronto's sights illustrate different facets of
the city, but in no way do they crystallize its identity. The
city remains opaque, too big and diverse to allow for a defining
personality. This, however, adds an air of excitement and unpredictability
to the place. Toronto caters to everything, and the city surges
with Canada's most vibrant restaurant, performing-arts and nightlife
scenes
