Attention conservation notice: All of this is Urbanism 101. Just look at the photos, all taken by my partner Jen unless otherwise stated.
What should a 21st century city aspire to be? IMO:
It should be growing and diverse;
It shouldn’t be prohibitively expensive for those on lower-middle class incomes;
You should be able to get around without driving.
On these metrics, Toronto arguably beats every city in the U.S. It has higher public transit usage than any metro besides New York, yet its rents are comparable to cities like Chicago and Philadelphia that are still well down from their historical peak populations. It’s true that Canadian market incomes are well below those in the U.S., but to mitigate this there’s the whole universal healthcare thing. So when I recently took a trip over the border, I wanted to see for myself what a city that had gone some way towards achieving these goals looked like, as well as where they might be falling short.
SKYLINES
Toronto has either the second or third most skyscrapers of any Western city (depending on your definition), and they’re still building more. Even satellite city Mississauga has a decent skyline, including the Absolute World towers, by far the most aesthetically interesting tall buildings in the province.
High-rises are almost the entire explanation for why Toronto has avoided rents blowing up to the same extent as space-constrained coastal U.S. boom cities. (Of course New York has even more skyscrapers and sky-high rents, but it’s sui generis.) Still, “better than the U.S.” only goes so far: Toronto’s cost of living has outpaced income growth.
What surprised me about Toronto is how little there was in between skyscrapers and single-family homes. Wandering around from the Art Gallery to Chinatown, it was notable how once one got a little way from the main street, the dominant form of building was a low-rise stand-alone house. Even on many major streets, the median height is two storeys.
Urbanists talk a lot about “missing middle”, which has rarely made that much sense to me—just about every U.S. hipster neighborhood has a bunch of five-over-ones that are expensive because no one’s building skyscrapers—but it’s certainly missing in Toronto, I think because lots are typically narrow. The mini-mid-rise is an elegant solution, but it’s probably more important to relax single-family zoning restrictions anywhere near transit.
SUBWAYS
All of North America apart from New York and Mexico City should be embarrassed that Toronto has the mass transit with the third-highest ridership, because it sucks. There are only four lines, and two of them are stubs. That leaves the U-shaped Line 1 and the east-west Line 2, which averaged 800,000 and 500,000 riders per weekday pre-pandemic, either of which beats all of BART, despite the train screeching horribly near the St. George station (which apparently everyone else is so used to they don’t react.)
So what is Toronto doing right? Firstly, the two main lines are reasonably placed, with stations in locations where people actually work and live. (The original idea for this post was a comparison with Pittsburgh, where the rail lines spend as little time as possible between the two rivers, but that got too depressing. Sorry Pittsburgh. The Carnegie is awesome though.) Second, trains come every few minutes. Thirdly, streetcars and buses also run frequently, and transferring to them is easy, requiring no new ticket. The details of transit are nearly literally rocket science but the basic ideas are very simple.
The very simple idea that Toronto’s not adhering to is don’t waste money. We were staying in Vaughan at the northwest end of the 1, and the last couple of stations on the line were huge and near-empty. The Vaughan Metropolitan Center, which we forgot to take a picture of, was particularly palatial, but the Highway 407 station was also pretty excessive, especially considering that the only thing within walking distance was a deserted park-and-ride. Other stations on the extension are starchitect-designed and similarly overbuilt.
Money matters because local governments don’t have infinite resources to pour into transit. Overspending meant work on the much more important Ontario Line downtown has only just started. It’s budgeted at $16 billion for ten miles.
Oh, and regional transit is appalling (getting between two satellite cities without a car isn’t even worth joking about) but everyone in Greater Toronto knows this and doesn’t need me to belabor the point.
TOURIST TIPS
The Royal Ontario Museum has, among other things, the best collection of broadly-defined religious Chinese art I’ve seen outside of Asia, besides probably the Met (which I haven’t been to since my salad days when I knew nothing, as opposed to now when I know slightly more than nothing.) The Toronto Zoo is as good as any I’ve been to and apparently humane, if you do not reject all zoos as non-humane. Yes, you should go up the tower, but avoid the restaurant, the only bad food we had in the city.
We also went to Niagara Falls. You don’t need to see another picture of Niagara Falls here.
FOOD
Here are some things we enjoyed eating on the way and on the way back.
DETROIT: Leila prepares meat dishes from Lebanon and environs like sujuk and kibbeh niyee with care that usually isn’t economically feasible at less bougie places. (Baba ganoush was better at Al-Ameer in Dearborn, though…) Also, Coney dogs exist; maybe they’re better in Flint.
TORONTO: Americans don’t have nearly as much reason to envy Canadian Chinese food as they did twenty years ago, but the top Cantonese dishes, like the Gold Hand Lin crispy squab at Casa Victoria in Markham, is at the level of the best stuff in California… Unless you get to Jersey often, there are much stronger grounds for jealousy of Greater Toronto’s Indian scene. Baigs Grill in Brampton has as good a biryani as I’ve had, and unlike many of the best U.S. Indian places I’ve been to, seems like it might still be around at the same level of quality in a year… Bar Raval has very un-Canadian (and un-Spanish) pricing, but Iberico pork and morels aren’t acquired cheaply… Giulietta feels like it’d do well in Italy (maybe after losing the pizzas), with delicate agnolotti and more morels.
PITTSBURGH: Pusadee’s Garden serves embougified Thai classics, like gang hung lay upgraded to pork belly. Could be a notch spicier, but easy to like, a theme of the city’s scene… Shoutout to Pittsburgh Magazine’s Hal B. Klein, one of the best restaurant writers in the country.
COLUMBUS: Comune makes vegetarian cooking mouth-pleasing without postmodern technique or prices by turning up the umami on everything: potatoes with morel gravy AND cheddar AND fava beans. Addis Restaurant has the spiciest veggie combo I’ve encountered at an Ethiopian place. Belle’s Bread is a Japanese-French bakery, which sells itself. Columbus seems like a vibrant city with the best food scene in the Midwest outside of Chicago, which makes having literally no rapid transit especially regrettable.
Best Timbits flavor: Blueberry.