Catalog

Toronto has a complicated relationship with its own past. The city builds fast, tears down fast, and moves on without looking back. Then a generation later, everyone wonders what happened to the thing that used to be there. Mike Filey sp...

Bloor and Dufferin is not a glamorous corner. It's not the places that get written about in books about Toronto's culture, like the Annex or Rosedale or Kensington. It is, and has always been, a working neighbourhood. The Denison family ...

This is the one that catches people off guard. Hemingway. Toronto. The Star. Before the novels, before Spain, before any of it, he was here filing dispatches, covering the city, learning the craft in real time on deadline. The lean prose...

Toronto doesn't know its own origin story. Most people in this city can't tell you that it was founded as a British military garrison in 1793, not as a trading post, not as a settler town, but as a strategic position. Lieutenant Governor...

Before a city exists, it's just land. Then someone draws a line, and suddenly there's a street. Someone draws another and there's a block. Someone decides where a park goes, where a road bends, where one neighbourhood ends and another be...

In 1990, the federal government slashed VIA Rail's routes by half. Whole lines disappeared overnight. Pindell, an American who had already ridden the US rail system end to end, got on the last Canadian trains still running to see what th...

Every city loses buildings. Toronto loses them recklessly. The list is long and painful: the original Union Station, Mechanics' Institute, block after block of Victorian storefronts on King and Queen and Yonge. Each one made sense to tea...

The Toronto Island is one of the strangest places in the city. Fifteen minutes from downtown by ferry and it feels like the rest of Toronto barely exists. That distance has always been the point. The Island has been a resort, a military ...

There's a version of Toronto that spent decades pretending it didn't have a culture. Too practical for that. Too busy building. The Annex is where that story breaks down. For over a century, writers, professors, politicians, and artists ...

Before Toronto was a city, it was a colony. And in a colony, land is the whole game. The people who got here first and staked their claim built estates on the high ground and those estates shaped everything that came after. The streets s...

The official story of a city is always told through its politics, its architecture, its famous people. The real story gets told through its food. Every wave of newcomers to Toronto has had to figure out how to exist here, and the first t...

Most history gets written at scale. The big arcs, the famous names, and the events that made the newspapers. Robson went the other direction. Ward 5. One corner of the city. Street by street, block by block. Who got named here and why. W...

The years between the World Wars don't get much attention in the Toronto story. There's no dramatic event, no founding moment, no singular achievement. What there is, is 20 years of the city quietly becoming itself. The twenties brought ...

A street name is a political act. Somebody chose it. Somebody else agreed. And embedded in that choice is everything: who mattered enough to be commemorated, what the city wanted to believe about itself, which histories got honored and w...

A street name is a political act. Somebody chose it. Somebody else agreed. And embedded in that choice is everything: who mattered enough to be commemorated, what the city wanted to believe about itself, which histories got honored and w...

There's the Toronto on the postcards and there's the Toronto underneath. The sealed-off spaces no one knows about. The histories that didn't make it into the official version. The buildings with pasts that don't show on their faces. The ...

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 s...