THIS IS MY TORONTO.
When one of my exchange partners arrives in Toronto we have a day or two of orientation before I fly off to their home in Sweden or Scotland or New Zealand. Out the front door of our apartment and east one block to the dazzling Santiago Calatrava atrium in BCE Place. From there a short walk to the little park with its gathering of noontime office workers and the whimsical sculptures and the elaborate bas relief adornments on the old Bank of Commerce Building. I love showing it off to visitors. They are startled because what they have heard is that Toronto is nice and clean and friendly, but dull.
So the news that tourists in Toronto are “less satisfied” that they had been in past years was all that the let’s-all-hate-Toronto newspaper pundits need to launch another attack on the city I live in and love. All they needed was a new statistic and their self-anointed criticism of our city begins anew.
To paraphrase some of the more Cassandra-like sky-is falling pundits, the streets are crowded with panhandlers, the new garbage containers are monsters, the food and hotels are expensive, and you simply can’t find the waterfront. (I am paraphrasing Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail.)
I am fed up with the endless comparisons to Chicago, where the Mies van der Rohe apartment buildings face but do not block the lake.
I love Chicago. Not for its waterfront, which I don’t think is as varied as ours, but for its truly American architecture, it’s used-to-be jazz clubs , and its Viagra corner where rich middle aged guys in Lamborghinis go to pick up beautiful young women.
But this is Toronto. Our cityscape is an archetypical cityscape. Drive into town from the west along the Gardiner. At night especially, you are greeted by the dazzling array of condos and office building on both sides of the expressway.
The critics obsess that it is a “wall of ugly condos.” (True enough some are ugly, but in Chicago not all apartment buildings are by Mies van der Rohe.
Toronto-phobia at its best derides our “ruining” lakefront. (In fact they are referring to the Harbourfront, the lakefront is not behind the “wall” of condos.)
Waterfront: there are several. There is the promenade that runs between the buildings and the water. Thousands of tourists can walk and admire the expanse of the bay, or take a tour of the island lagoons. There are concerts and events and a wonderful gallery and all the variety of restaurant and street foods any tourists loves.
The fact that tens of thousands of people choose to live in the Harbourfront area is a testimony to its attractiveness.
So you want a lake view - according to the critics, we come in a bad second to Chicago. Have these gloom-spreaders ever walked the eastern beaches from Ashbridges Bay to Balmy Beach? Have they walked from the western gap (for the Toronto bashers information, that’s where the hated Island airport is, you can find it if you leave your snug little condos.) along the Sunnyside walk which takes them, past the western beaches and to the exquisite suspension bridge across the Humber river, then to the walk past new condos and Ontario Place and to the shores of Humber Bay.
Chicago does not have these vistas. They do have if you the a Chicago river cruises. What you get on a lakeside walk is a view of water, unless you stop off at Lincoln Park and go to the zoo.

Back to my exchangers and their quick tour. Going east from my front door we stop at St. Lawrence Market, once named by Conde Nast as one of the twenty best markets in the world. We head south to the Esplanade and walk east along a tree-lined allee reminiscent of Paris. At the end of the Esplanade is the Distillery District, with galleries, a great coffee house, a brewery, an award-winning theatre and a number of fine restaurants. I always take them through one of the finest glass galleries anywhere – the Sandra Ainsley gallery, where the world’s finest art glass makers, including Dale Chihooly, are on display.
In no time at all my visitors learn how to use our transit system The whole city is there for them: Bloor and its fashion neighbourhoods on Yorkville and Cumberland, the Royal Ontario Museum with its new crystal cubes designed by Daniel Liebeskind, one of the best displays of pre-Columbian art at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramics. (I have to remember that meso-Amnericans do not like to have their art referred to as from the time before Columbus “discovered” America.).
The same subway and trolley system takes them to Chinatown and Kensington Market, Greek Town, or the “Strada” St. Clair west or the south Asian village around Pape and Gerrard. Funny how the naysayers forget that we are still one of the most, if not the most, multi-cultural city in the world..
The complaint that everything is expensive simply means you don’t know where to go. True -in my neighbouthood there are restaurants where for dinner, if you can get a reservation without booking weeks in advance, you will have to offer up your firstborn to pay for dinner, there are even more restaurants where you can eat well for twenty to thirty dollars.
I really am tired of the snide-self-loathing “critics” who have used the “satisfaction” figures to prove what they have always believed, that Toronto, as a destination, sucks!
Well, how many of you self-styled mavens of tourism have walked the streets and spoken to tourists and have made sure they got the help and advice they need.
I often visit the sidewalk pub on the Esplanade that sells 400 different beers. There is usually a tourist sitting close by. I engage them. I ask them what they have seen. One German couple, said they were looking for the famous Victorian buildings. In fact, after the entire downtown burned down in the early 1900s, new construction gave us rows of wonderful buildings like the south side of Front or just one block north, the Colborne street buildings, lit up at night.
Alas, living in Toronto, at least for some people, carries with it the obligation to wish you were somewhere else.
Too bad.