Toronto Street Name: An Illustrated Guide to Their Origins

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 which got buried.

Dundas is named for a Scottish politician who delayed the abolition of slavery in Britain. Spadina is an anglicization of an Ojibwe word for a hill that no longer exists. Roncesvalles invokes a battle in the Pyrenees that happened a thousand years before Toronto did. None of this is visible from the street. But it's all there, layered underneath the asphalt, waiting for someone to go looking.

Gould and Wise went looking. Every block you walk in this city has a story. This is the book that tells it.