ART & CULTURE

Consulate General of Germany

2 Bloor Street East

From here south, the Yonge Street Strip, as it was known at times, had some of Toronto’s earliest taverns hosting live music and supporting various subcultures and scenes, like the Silver Rail, the Friars Club (now the Hard Rock Cafe) and the Colonial, just a few sites that played host to the city’s evolving culture scene, along with some the city’s first truly public LGBTQ venues.

A city like Berlin seems to pour out arts and culture from every block while Toronto less so, but we hope on this walk through a relatively small geographic area looking at just some of the landmarks will demonstrate how rich and varied the arts and culture is and was here.

Justus Becker Mural

20 Charles Street East

Look up at the colourful mural by German artist Justus Becker on the side of this city-owned parking garage. It celebrates the relationship between Toronto and its sister city Frankfurt -- note the two skylines reflected in the sunglasses. The mural was painted in 2019 and instigated by StreetARToronto, a city program that has been installing artworks big and small across Toronto. As part of this particular piece, a Toronto artist will paint a mural in Frankfurt.

The parking garage was built atop the Yonge Street subway as north of Wellesley station it runs next to, rather than under, Yonge itself. Walk south to find the chain of parks also built overtop the subway. The first is named after the late George Hislop, an LGBTQ activist in Toronto, followed by Norman Jewison park, named after the famed Canadian film director who has an office in a building alongside it.

Oscar Peterson Plaque

21-23 Park Road

This house at 21 and 23 Park Road was the site of the Advanced School of Contemporary Music set up by legendary Canadian jazz musician Oscar Peterson along with fellow jazz stars Ray Brown and Phil Nimmons. Formerly a boarding house, the school opened here in the 1960s after starting out in Peterson’s Scarborough basement. Though Toronto did not have a reputation as being a hot spot at the time, it was home to quite a few jazz players, some surely helped by their work at the school, and many of the big jazz acts would stop in the city when touring.

Next door to the Peterson house is Asquith Green, a small park that includes a narrative sculpture by artist John McEwan called Patterns for the Tree of Life. Installed in 1989, it has three parts. Atop a terrace there is a postmodern frame of an old one-storey Ontario house, an homage to the kind typically found all over the province and relics of pioneer days. Two howling wolf silhouettes are below on the green, as well as a small deer. Take a close look at the black iron fencing atop a small mound as it includes two inscriptions that read, “In the faces of our Children / In the sounds of our voices”.

Toronto Reference Library

789 Yonge Street

The Toronto Public Library’s flagship reference branch is the brain of Toronto. Take a walk inside but don’t look around too much. Instead head directly for the two central glass elevators, get in and press five for a great reveal. As you rise though the atrium floor by floor, rows of books, computers and most importantly, people, are revealed like an ant farm for nerds. This most public of places is free for anyone to use and is always busy, often with a lineup before opening. The Toronto library system is one of the busiest in the world and the reference library is a physical testament to the continued value of libraries.

Designed by Toronto architect Raymond Moriyama in 1977, the structure is actually two separate buildings connected by the atrium. The collections and stacks are vast, research-grade, but for the general public, not just a university crowd. The newly renovated Baldwin Room has a collection of Toronto history and ephemera. The Arthur Conan Doyle collection is housed in a recreation of a Victorian study and is one of the world’s largest collections of his material. There are dozens of drawers full of photos and clippings in the image collection. There’s something for everyone. It’s a remarkable place.

Masonic Temple

888 Yonge Street

The Masonic Temple here at 888 Yonge Street opened in 1918 and has had a long and versatile life. It was used by a variety of Masonic lodges for meetings and rented out to help defray costs. By the 1960s it was known as the Rock Pile, a music venue right on the edge of the famous Yorkville scene. Led Zeppelin played their first Toronto show here in 1969 and the list of performers is a roll call of local and international acts of the day. By 1980 it had rebranded as The Concert Hall and continued its role as an important medium-sized venue in Toronto. Occasionally the Rolling Stones would use it as a rehearsal space before touring. In the late 1990s the building became a studio for the CTV network and was home to the Open Mike with Mike Bullard show and in the early 2000s it became the MTV Canada studios. At various times in its history rumours of the building’s end have surfaced but it has remained intact despite the intense development in the area. Today the Masonic Temple has been rechristened as The Concert Hall again and is open for special events and concerts.

Town Hall Square / Mist Garden

48 Yorkville Avenue & 25 Yorkville Avenue

Town Hall Square park is a nod to the former village of Yorkville and its original Town Hall, once located a few dozen meters away on Yonge Street. Designed by Janet Rosenberg Studio, a Toronto landscape architecture firm, the park was built over a parking garage belonging to the adjacent condominium and is meant to evoke a formal French parterre garden with its rows of trees and geometric patterns.

Walk east past the Yorkville library branch to the firehall and look up at the façade to see the original coat of arms that was found on the old Town Hall. The symbols on it – a beer barrel, brick mold, jack plane, anvil and sheep’s head – represent the professions of the councillors at the time.

Next door to the fire hall is Mist Garden, a park designed by Nak Design and Claude Cormier. Small shrubs create a rose shape and make for a contemplative short walk. The rose theme continues on the adjacent wall with an artwork by Montreal sculptor Linda Covit that produces mist every 10 minutes during the summertime.

Hazelton Hotel

118 Yorkville Avenue

The 1960s Yorkville scene is one of Toronto’s most storied periods. Before the posh boutiques and hotels opened, Yorkville was a bohemian neighbourhood with a series of coffee houses and clubs that were the hubs of the community with names like The Purple Onion and The Riverboat. Where the Hazelton Hotel is today the Penny Farthing coffee house operated, opening in 1963 in a Victorian house, hosting folk, blues and jazz performers. There was even a backyard pool. 

By the early 1970s the Four Seasons hotel opened and the hippie scene started to dissipate as the area gentrified. Cultural scenes come and go but critical to cities like Toronto and Berlin are affordable venues. Nightlife is so integral to the culture of Berlin that they have created a position called a Night Mayor to oversee and advocate for the night time economy. Other cities have created similar positions. Today it would be difficult for a coffee house to inhabit a big rambling Victorian house in Toronto due to economics, so the Yorkville scene might be impossible now.

Yorkville Park - “The Big Rock”

115 Cumberland Street

This 700-ton granite outcrop in the Village of Yorkville Park has become a landmark, a place to meet up with a friend, but it’s part of a series of 11 distinct environments that are part of the award-winning landscape design by Oleson Worland Architects in association with Schwartz Smith Meyer Landscape Architects and PWP Landscape Architecture.

Completed in 1994, the park was created on a strip of land that had been cleared of its Victorian houses for the Bloor subway which runs underneath. It languished as a parking lot for decades, though a well-known one, as the University Theatre on Bloor Street, an early Toronto International Film Festival venue, backed onto it.

The park's different segments mimic the lot lines of the buildings on the other side of the street, an homage to the houses that were here before, and each is a different Ontario landscape said to have been inspired by the Victorian style of collecting. The rock may be the most prominent, but there’s a waterfall, pine forest, marsh and so on. While Ontario-inspired, it’s one Toronto’s most European public parks, with formal elements and movable chairs.

The Colonnade

131 Bloor Street

Imagine it’s 1963 in Toronto. The city is still largely a Victorian landscape, New City Hall is not yet complete, but some modernist apartment towers and office buildings have begun dotting the skyline. Here on Bloor, adjacent to bohemian Yorkville, the sleek Colonnade building opens -- unique because it was one of the first mixed-use developments in Toronto that blended retail, office space and residential units in one building. The idea was to create a situation where there was 24 hours of life, unlike some office tower districts that emptied out after 5 pm.

The Colonnade included this forecourt where a restaurant patio has been installed at times, as well as this unique zig-zag staircase, exceptional because it doesn’t include a central support. It’s a testament to modern building techniques, but also the notion that neighbourhoods don’t have to be for just one kind of use. The Colonnade was also one of the early transitions from Yorkville as hippie enclave to the “Mink Mile” chic strip it’s been since the art and bohemian scene moved elsewhere in the city.

The ROM

111 Queen’s Park

Yonge and Queen’s Park is a cultural nexus. The Royal Ontario Museum and its rather prominent “crystal” addition by architect Daniel Libeskind gets all the attention, but there’s more to this corner. Understated in comparison, the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art was designed by KPMB Architects and has fabulously framed views of the museum across the way. Next door the classical-looking building on the Bloor corner is known as the Lillian Massey Building, originally built for the Faculty of Household Sciences at University of Toronto. Converted to retail and housing some offices, including the university’s Medieval Studies department currently, inside it has stained glass windows by British designer Henry Holiday.

Finally, look over to the northwest corner of Bloor and Avenue Road. The Park Hyatt has been recently refurbished and the rooftop bar has long been a favorite haunt of writers, politicians and celebrities during the Toronto International Film Festival.