Toronto in a day

The CN Tower

Five hundred and fifty-three metres, finished in 1975 and the tallest free-standing structure in the world until 2007: thirty-two years at number one. Canadian National, a railway company, built it for a reason with nothing to do with tourism: it needed an aerial that cleared the skyscrapers blocking the signal. Like the Eiffel Tower, it exists because it was useful.

Inside is the glass floor, from 1994, the first of its kind anywhere: it takes around thirty-five tonnes, which the brochure itself translates as fourteen hippos, and even so everyone tiptoes across it.

And at the top is the EdgeWalk: you go outside, at three hundred and fifty-six metres, clipped to a rail with no railing, to walk around the rim of the crown. It isn’t for everyone and it doesn’t need to be.

The PATH

Under downtown Toronto there are thirty kilometres of pedestrian tunnels connecting seventy-odd buildings, with shops, restaurants and subway stations, and it’s the largest underground shopping complex in the world according to Guinness. You can cross the entire centre without going outside.

And the reason is meteorological and desperate: in January it’s fifteen below here with wind off the lake, and a city where nobody goes outside for five months a year doesn’t work. So the city went underneath. It’s ugly, it’s a maze and the signage is famously bad, but it’s an honest answer to a real problem.

Walk a stretch of it even in summer: understanding the PATH is understanding why Toronto is the way it is.

St Lawrence Market

It has run on the same site since 1803 and the south building was the city hall before it was a market, which you can still see in the façade. Inside there are butchers, cheese, fish and a density of stalls with queues that only happens in markets still feeding a neighbourhood rather than a brochure. It shuts on Sundays and Mondays.

What to order is the peameal bacon sandwich, which is Toronto’s dish.

And mind the name: the “Canadian bacon” sold to you outside Canada isn’t bacon. It’s pork loin brined and rolled in cornmeal, so it has neither the fat nor the texture of real bacon. It got called peameal because it was originally rolled in ground peas. You eat it in a soft roll, with mustard, standing up, mid-morning.

Kensington Market

There’s no covered market here, but a whole neighbourhood of small Victorian houses turned into shops, and its history sums up Toronto’s in four blocks: it was Jewish in the twenties, there were synagogues and an open-air market in the street, then Portuguese, then Caribbean, then Vietnamese, and each wave left its layer without erasing the last. Today they all coexist.

The result is a corner with a Portuguese bakery, a Jamaican fruit stall, a taco place and a record shop, all within fifty metres. In summer there are pedestrian Sundays when the traffic is closed off and the neighbourhood puts its tables in the street. It’s where you best see why Toronto is the most diverse city on the planet: it isn’t a statistic, it’s a neighbourhood.

The islands, by ferry

Fifteen minutes of ferry from the foot of the skyscrapers and you’re in a car-free archipelago, with beaches, channels and bicycles. The view of the city from the ferry, with the CN Tower rising out of the water, is Toronto’s postcard and you only get it from here.

And there’s something almost nobody knows: people live on the islands. Around seven hundred of them, in a community of wooden houses that has existed for over a century and that spent thirty years fighting municipal plans to demolish it for parkland. They won in 1993 and they’re still there, on protected leases.

Walk through Ward’s Island: unpaved lanes, gardens and bikes lying about, fifteen minutes from the financial district.