Toronto - I love you

I used to share the prejudice against Toronto

but I'm gradually getting over it,

thank God.

Toronto can actually be one of the nicest cities in

the world.

As many as a dozen subway stops Out from the downtown core, the tower can still be glimpsed day or night — more easily, of course, in winter when the leaves are gone. It provides a centrepiece that gives Toronto a coherence it used to lack.

Here, we can always take a bearing on a mountain if we want to know where we are. It's one of the more comforting things about living in or around Van- couver. In Toronto, there used:to be a feeling of being adrift in a_ directionless urban Jabyrinth.

But the CN Tower has

" changed all that, giving the

city a more village-like feeling, It's great. You don't get lost so easily.

If you're heading downtown on the Gardiner Expressway, the tower looks

, like an intergalactic starship

poised to take off. It is so beautiful that it reaffirms your faith that humanity can't be an utter failure. It's more a sculpture than a building.

Another delightful feature of Toronto is the fact that it is basically a collection of ethnic communities, very few of which actually mix. It is polyglot in the extreme, with each neighbourhood dominated by one branch of the human family or another. Much more so than the newer and less diverse cities in Western Canada.

You'd have to be slightly insane, as, indeed, they all are, to live there full time in the winter. But it can be an exciting place (o visit even in

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novelty of snow and ice begins to pale.

The cliche that the city is unfriendly and ugly is un- true. The rumor that it is grey and stodgy is equally untrue.

The legends about its infatuation with itself, on the other hand, are accurate.

And why not?

The new Royal Bank building, created out of an

. array Of golden glass, looks

like a castle made of jewelry. It is probably the most dazzling piece of ar- chitecture to be found anywhere.

I spent over an hour last month just around outside the struc- ture, admiring the play of early morning light on the reflections of the surrounding buildings in the

Fantastic! It really has to be seen to be believed.

The famous CN Tower may seem, in a photograph or postcard, to be nothing much more than a stretched version of the ho-hum Seattle World's Fair Tower or even that other Frisbee- Oon-a-pole m Calgary.

But it ain't the same thing atall.

Vanety? Name at.

Entertainment? Pick your kick.

There are scores of parks — High Park in particular comes to mind — whch are a joy year round. In winter, people skate on the ponds in pastel hght. In summer, they paddle Ducks and = geese

Ambient will

your

wandering

flock amok.

The rows of brownstone townhouses are charming. Frequent ravines with little streams surprise you. Walking down most sidewalks you ean hardly see the sky for thé overhanging foliage. Grey squirrels grow as large as cat.

The new T. Eaton's Centre, I have to admit, is an architectural marvel. Generally speaking, mez- zanines don’t excite me, but this one did. It is a glimpse of the best possibilities of the underground worlds of the future.

The subway system, by the way, is one of the best in the known universe — clean, swift, silent. The difference it makes to life in the city is impossible to calculate.

Imagine being whisked from North Van to Rich- mond, passing through downtown Vancouver en route, within about half an hour, while you sit and calmly read your newspaper. Well, in Toronto, the system is that good.

What a waste to put a city like that in Ontario.

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