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Flat, originally poorly planned and with few noteworthy buildings, Toronto is beginning to raise its aspirations

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 2004 by Christine Samuelian

The sign of a great city lies in equal measures in its architectural innovation, the quality of its hotels, and in the kindness of strangers. Toronto is only partly there; a good city, but not a great one, known as Toronto the Good.

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Toronto is by no means Canada's prettiest city, or even a pretty city at all. It doesn't have the scenic views of the Rockies cradling the Pacific like Vancouver, nor does it have the beauty of Ottawa's Rideau Canal snaking through the city. And, unlike Montreal, it has no hills to call its own. It does have a lake, a Great Lake in fact, but it is obscured by large buildings from almost all angles.

After New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, Toronto is North America's fourth largest financial centre. Which says something about its industry and development, but also about the onslaught of immigration in the past 20 years that has made it one of the most multicultural cities in the world (49 per cent of Toronto's population was born outside Canada). It's similar to Los Angeles in its urban sprawl; since 1996, about 450 000 new people have joined the suburban masses. The Greater Toronto area is expected to reach a population of over 7 million by 2031.

Talk to Ganadians on the east coast or the prairies, however, and they'll tell you how much they dislike the city, even if they've never been there. In the same way as London is perceived by provincials as getting all the goodies in the UK, Toronto appears to have a lot of advantages handed to it.

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With a complex about being a 'little New York', Torontonians seem to genuinely think that it is the best--and sometimes the only--city on the planet.

'Why would you leave?', they ask, 'when we have everything anybody could want here?'

But Toronto is a hard place not to like--once you've hung around for a while, eaten at its many diverse restaurants and met the locals. Having not lived there for seven years, and only visiting for two weeks each year, I am always taken aback at how friendly everybody is. Despite having swollen to a population of 2.5 million, Toronto proper retains a small-town feel and mentality, which can be both charming and irritating. Some accuse Canadians of being puritans for their niceness, but I won't be complaining. The one thing I will moan about, however, is how very American Toronto has become: from the retail chains that have encroached on the city, to the way so many locals have become all about money, money, money like their New York counterparts.

Toronto is flat, not well planned and is architecturally ambiguous, like many North American cities. Aside from a few old buildings (old, in Canada, dating back about 150 years), and a few downtown skyscrapers, including the Toronto-Dominion Centre by Mies van der Rohe, there is little of note.

Toronto is somewhat of a wasted opportunity, separated from Lake Ontario by its lakeshore motorway. The Harbourfront area, created by lake-filling in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is underused and under-appreciated. That said, the city is gearing up to redevelop the neighbourhood in 2005 by adding parkland and a cultural focus.

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From the land, the views of the Toronto Islands are gorgeous, but a sugar refinery, several ugly condominium buildings and various other waterside factories pollute the view as much as they do the environment. Toronto looks its best when seen from a ferry in the lake from where you can admire the CN Tower and surrounding buildings, avoiding the hideousness both to the right and left.

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Despite this, aside from a rabid development of visually questionable condos, there are some exciting things happening in Toronto, arguably for the first time in years. Frank Gehry (born in Toronto) has been commissioned to build an addition to the Art Gallery of Ontario, his first project in the city. Daniel Libeskind, whose wife is Canadian, is in the process of building an addition to the Royal Ontario Museum. And, perhaps the most exciting new building, the new Terminal 1 building at the airport, designed by architects Moshe Safdie and David Childs, which opened in April.

In the past year, three new hotels have opened. The best: Le Germain, part of the Germain group, which specializes in boutique hotels, from Montreal. The quirkiest is the Drake Hotel, owned by Internet millionaire Jeff Stober, who has created Toronto's equivalent of the Chelsea Hotel in one of the most run-down parts of town. The new developments, which also include the SoHo Metropolitan Hotel (can you see the neurotic need for New York references?), have given existing hotels--such as the Park Hyatt, Four Seasons and Intercontinental impetus to refurbish, which is no bad thing. The retail scene is also catching up with the more sophisticated cities in the world. Burdifilek architects (responsible for Club Monaco outlets and the swish Holt Renfrew department store's ground-floor revamp) and II X IV, who are doing the interiors for the new members-only Spoke Club, are two companies whose vision has positive implications for Toronto as well as huge international potential. Toronto the Great? It's getting there.