Toronto: The way we were: A collection of Photos & Stories About North America's Greatest City

The most disorienting thing you can do in this city is find an old photograph of the corner you're standing on. Same intersection. Same basic geography. And almost nothing else the same. The building is gone. The streetcar is gone. The signs, the storefronts, and the skyline transformed so completely that the city offers no acknowledgment that anything was ever different.

Filey built a book out of that confrontation. Old photograph on one side, the same spot as it stands today on the other. Sometimes what you see is loss. A beloved building replaced by a parking lot, a neighbourhood erased by a highway. But sometimes what you see is a city growing into itself, like the CN Tower rising behind a street that's still standing or a waterfront reinventing itself around landmarks that held their ground.

What the format does is make time visible. You can see the city thinking, changing its mind, tearing down and building up. Toronto rarely stops to look at itself in motion. This book makes it impossible not to.