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Queen's Quay Terminal
Start your morning Harbourfront constitutional with a diversion into this refurbished 1926 warehouse, now filled with skylights, arts-and-crafts shops, ritzy boutiques, cafés and galleries, revolving around an eight-storey atrium. Renovated in 1983, this was one of the first Harbourfront buildings to emerge from lakeside dereliction. The Premier Dance Theatre is also on-site; loud-mouthed ticket sellers hawk harbor cruises outside.
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Rc Harris Filtration Plant
Commanding heavenly views of the lakefront on a priceless slab of real estate, the elegantly proportioned RC Harris Filtration Plant is a modern art-deco masterpiece that has appeared in countless movies and TV shows, as well as in Michael Ondaatje's In The Skin Of A Lion . Originally residents disparagingly dubbed it the 'Palace of Purification,' due to hefty construction costs during The Depression. It's currently closed to the public, but hardcore Ondaatje fans should call to see if tours are back on the agenda.
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Redpath Sugar Museum
The working Redpath sugar refinery, a descendant of Canada's oldest refinery which opened in Montréal in 1854, wafts delicious sugary smells along Queens Quay E. Inside, a small museum tackles a variety of topics related to the social development and modern refining of sugar, with biographic information on founder John Redpath.
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Riverdale Farm
The 7.5-hectare Riverdale Farm was once the Toronto Zoo, where prairie wolves howled at night and spooked the Cabbagetown kids. It's now run as a working farm museum, with two barns, a summer wading pool and pens of sundry fowl and animals (geese, goats, pigs, rabbits, turkeys etc). Kids follow the farmer around as he does his daily chores, including milking the cows daily at .
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Rogers Centre
As technically awe-inspiring as the CN Tower, the Rogers Centre (formerly the SkyDome - people still confuse the two) sports stadium opened in 1989 with the world's first fully retractable dome roof. Made mostly of concrete, this engineering spectacular moves at a rapid 22m per minute, taking just 20 minutes to completely open. That sure beats Montréal's Olympic Stadium, which opened once but failed to ever do so again.
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Rombus
The Royal Ontario Museum puts the keys in the ignition of monthly bus tours, arranged around historical, architectural and cultural themes - perhaps surveying stained glass at the University of Toronto, art deco heritage or trawling past the architectural offerings of Cabbagetown. Advance reservations required; tours depart the ROM.
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Roy Thomson Hall
Looking like an inverted ballerina's tutu, this concert hall's controversial design has been called neo-expressionist, deconstructionist, and a whole lot of other rude words we can't repeat here. Inside it's another story, the superb acoustics more than good enough for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and touring acts like Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Ravi Shankar.
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Royal Ontario Museum
The multidisciplinary Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is Canada's biggest natural history museum. The main building involves a magnificent explosion of architectural crystals on Bloor St, housing an array of new galleries, including the new 'Renaissance ROM' building.
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Scarborough Bluffs
A few kilometers east of The Beaches, this gnarly 14km stretch of glacial cliffs jags up from the lakeshore. When Elizabeth Simcoe came here in 1793, she named the spot Scarborough after the town in Yorkshire, England, also famed for its cliffs. Several parks provide access to clifftops, from where views sweep across the Bluffs to Lake Ontario.
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Spadina Museum
More low-key than neighboring Casa Loma, this gracious mansion was built in 1866 as a country estate for financier James Austin and his family. Cream-painted brickwork is complimented by gloriously ornate wrought-iron portico and blue timber shutters. Lit by Victorian gaslights, the interior contains three generations of furnishings, art and fabrics.
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Spadina Quay Wetlands & Waterfront Children's Garden
This 0.28-hectare former parking lot is now a thriving, sustainable ecosystem full of frogs, birds and fish. When lakeside fishermen noticed that mature Northern Pike were spawning here each spring - a pattern probably (and remarkably) unchanged for centuries - the city took it upon itself to create this new habitat.
Read more about Spadina Quay Wetlands & Waterfront Children's Garden
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St Andrew's Presbyterian Church
Built in 1876, rock-solid Romanesque Revival-style St Andrew's encourages stressed-out city workers to come inside and 'find a quiet moment.' It's a peaceful place indeed, its tranquility only shattered when the multipiped Karl Wilhem Organ on the second floor starts pumping. Pick up a self-guided tour pamphlet by the entrance.
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St Andrew-By-The-Lake Church
Indeed, it is by the lake! This white weatherboard Anglican church (1884), often referred to simply as 'The Island Church,' holds heart-warming traditional Christmas celebrations each year and harbor boat blessings every June.
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St James Cathedral
Erected after the Great Fire of 1849, this venerable Gothic Revival cathedral is graced by Tiffany stained glass, a grand organ, lovely gardens and bells pealing out from the tallest spire in Canada. A small historical museum is tucked away in the parish house. Check the website for details on free Music at Midday and Twilight Recitals concerts.
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St James Cemetery
Many of Toronto's founding families are pushing up daisies at this historic cemetery, which belongs to St James Cathedral . Ancient gravestones slowly succumb to gravity and disappear beneath the lawn. Its beautifully proportioned little Gothic Revival Chapel of St James-the-Less (1860) - a national historic site - has justifiably been called one of the prettiest buildings in Canada.
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St Lawrence Market & Hall
Old York's sensational market has been a neighborhood meeting place for over two centuries. The restored, high-trussed 1845 South Market building houses more than 50 specialty food stalls: cheese vendors, fishmongers, butchers, bakers and pasta makers with lots of action and yelling of prices in silly voices.
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Steam Whistle Brewing
Bubbling away in a 1929 steam train repair depot at the foot of the CN Tower, this microbrewery specializes in a hugely popular, crisp European-style Pilsner. In fact, that's all they make! (A policy of 'Do one thing, but do it really, really well' prevails). During snappy, punny tours of the premises, guides explain the brewing process in great detail and let you blow the railway roundhouse's historic steam whistle
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Textile Museum of Canada
Obscurely located at the bottom of a condo tower in an otherwise cultureless corner of town, this small museum's exhibits draw upon a permanent collection of 10,000 items from Latin America, Africa, Europe, Southeast Asia and India, as well as contemporary Canada. Workshops teach batiking, weaving, knitting and all manner of needle-stuff.
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Todmorden Mills
Quietly set by the Don River, this unique industrial relic housed a late 18th-century gristmill turned sawmill, then brewery and distillery, then paper mill. Historical exhibits loiter inside the Brewery Gallery, where eager guides show visitors around old millers' houses and the petite Don train station, relocated here in the 1960s.
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Tommy Thompson Park
A 5km-long man-made peninsula between the Harbourfront and The Beaches, Tommy Thompson Park (named after a former Toronto Parks commissioner) juts further into Lake Ontario than the Toronto Islands. Managed by the Toronto & Region Conservation Authority (TRCA), this 'accidental wilderness' - constructed from Outer Harbour dredgings and fill from downtown building sites - has become a phenomenal wildlife success.
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Toronto Dominion Gallery Of Inuit Art
A fourth Toronto-Dominion Centre tower stands on the other side of Wellington St from the original trio of skyscrapers. In a corner of the lobby is an exceptional gallery of post WWII Aboriginal carvings and sculptures in stone and bone, worthy of display in any museum, and free for public viewing. A succession of glass cases displays otters, bears, eagles and carved Inuit figures in day-to-day scenes.
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Toronto Heliconian Club
Nudged between art galleries and salons on Hazelton Ave, the former Olivet Congregational Church (1875) is constructed in 'Carpenter Gothic' style - boards, battens and intricate trim with a carved rose window and wooden spire. The hall was taken over by the Heliconian Club in 1923, an association for women in the arts and letters that hosts exhibitions, book launches and arts functions.
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Toronto Hippo Tours
How can you spot the Hippo bus? It's the big yellow thing with seaweed dipping off its axles (well, lake weed perhaps). These amphibious buses take families on goofily-narrated tours of downtown before plunging into the harbor; your driver is also a marine captain.
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Toronto Music Garden
Delicately strung along the western Harbourfront, this sculpted garden was designed by Julie Moir in collaboration with famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma. It aims to express Bach's Suite No 1 for Unaccompanied Cello through landscape. An arc-shaped grove of conifers introduces a treble-clef-shaped path through a meadow and a grass-stepped amphitheatre where free concerts are held from June to September (usually Thursday and Sunday).
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Toronto Necropolis
The remains of 984 of Toronto's colonists, including the city's first mayor William Lyon Mackenzie, were transferred to this wickedly named cemetery in the 1850s when the old Potter's Field burial ground near Todmorden Mills started to contaminate the town. A road leads off Winchester St through the gates of the Necropolis, passing a Victorian Gothic chapel with a multicolored slate roof.
