The day started when I met Andrew, my guide from Sights on Bikes, who gave me a bike, lowered the seat for me and led me to the ferry dock right below my hotel-room window.
(I'm staying at the Westin, in a room that looks out across the lake at the Toronto Islands and the city airport, which I had the pleasure of flying in and out of in a single-engine plane in a previous life. Coming to Toronto, for me, is like going to a party and seeing old friends, some of whom are the kind you sort of cough and force a smile for.)
The day was turning into a splendid and sunny one as we got on a ferry to make the short trip across to the islands. The islands are a tight cluster in Lake Ontario just across from downtown Toronto, so close they were once a peninsula until the thin tether uniting them washed away in a particularly violent storm. They're a delicious place to bike, because the only cars allowed on the islands are service vehicles -- delivery, lawn care, home maintenance, etc. And there are homes. But more aboot that in a minute. (I'm going native.)
We had just barely coasted off the ferry when we came to a surprising historical marker: The site of Babe Ruth's first professional (and only minor-league) home run, hit in 1914. The islands were settled in the 19th century by people escaping the city's summer heat and mugginess, and by 1914 they were pretty well built up, with the Toronto Maple Leafs playing in a park where the airport is now.
By the '40s, Andrew told me, the islands were a populous city neighborhood. But in the '50s, the city decided to clear out all the housing and turn the islands into public parkland. This did not go particularly well, as you might expect. Whole communities were evicted, resettled and their neighborhoods burned to the ground. By the '70s, the last holdouts refused to go, had a faceoff with the sheriff and drove him out. So a compromise was reached, whereby an enclave of homes were allowed to remain, but the property cannot be owned outright. Homeowners sign a 99-year lease. (This happened in 1980, and no one is sure what will happen when the 99 years is up.) The homes are not owned and therefore cannot be sold to a third party, though they can be willed to immediate family. The homes can only be modified in certain ways. Prospective homeowners enter a complex lottery system, and Andrew told me he knew of a woman who has been on a waiting list for 15 years and has not yet had the option to buy an island home. The upsides of all this draconian control, though, are that (a) the house prices are kept at fair market value, not driven up to absurd heights by the desirability of the location and the limited number of homes; (b) if you buy a house, you have to live in it, so there's no buying it as an investment and then selling it to Japanese developers who want to put luxury lofts in its spot -- also, you know your neighbors and there's a real sense of community; so (c) the island remains charming and rustic instead of turning into a vile forest of multimillion-dollar ugly condos populated by vulgar snots, belching filth into the lake.
Having been to a lot of resorts spoiled by development, I think this is absolute genius.
Look at this castoffs drop-cart they have. You can put stuff you don't want but someone else might on this cart, and things are surprisingly neatly hung up or otherwise displayed.
Even if it's incredibly hard to live on the islands, despite the health of your bank account, anybody with ferry fare can whip over there and enjoy the old-fashioned amusement park for the kids, the fountains, the scenery, the beaches. There's even a clothing-optional beach! No, we didn't go, but Andrew told me about a woman from San Diego on one of his tours who absolutely insisted on going to the nude beach because she wanted to see it. So he indulged her, and when they got close, a naked man emerged from the trees and the curious woman was so startled she drove her bike straight into a fence, temporarily losing her purse containing her passport, etc.
We saw the Gibraltar Point Lighthouse, which used to be on a point but is now, thanks to the lake's reshaping of the island over time, far inland. That sculpting process has been halted by a seawall that should retain the islands' current shape. There's a boardwalk along the wall, from which you can see that the lake is unbelievably clear for a Great Lake with a lot of shipping traffic and urban areas on it.
Andrew and I stopped for lunch at the Rectory Cafe, where I had an amazing mushroom and feta wrap in a setting so enchanting that I wasn't a bit surprised to see the staff setting up tables for a wedding reception. The restaurant looks down across a lawn, through a gate and out at the sparkling water of the lake. The breezes were gentle and the food was delicious.
Then we were off back to the ferry, so I could move on to the Distillery, one of Toronto's newer happening places to hang out. In 1877, the Gooderham and Worts distillery was the largest in the world; now its 40+ buildings are the biggest collection of Victorian industrial architecture in North America. The carefully renovated buildings are now home to art galleries, high-end home furnishings stores, specialty shops and funky places to eat and drink.
While the interiors at the Distillery are very modern and funky, the exteriors have been kept so true to their original industrial form that it's a popular place to shoot films, including "Chicago" and "Cinderella Man." Of course, the original dirt streets and floors had to be covered during the renovations, and I was amused to hear that the bricks to pave the streets came from Cleveland, when that city ripped up its old brick streets to replace them with asphalt.
Matthew Rosenblatt, one of the developers, explained the idea behind the overhaul: to create a place for locals, not tourists, with no chains, no overt historic emphasis (no costumed re-enactors, no docents), and find vendor/tenants who are passionate about what they do, not necessarily passionate about being canny businesspeople. At right is a coffee shop that is high-end, purveying reportedly some of the best coffee in Canada, but it's funky rather than pretentious. And then there's the former dessert chef who opened Soma without ever having owned a business before. Soma has fantastic gelato -- I tried both the Ontario blueberry sorbet and the Sicilian pistachio gelato, and they were both glorious, especially the richly nutty gelato -- and also handmakes chocolate truffles. You can watch them make chocolate through a glass wall. I also tried a drink there that was unlike anything I'd ever had before. The chocolate shot is pretty much hot melted chocolate, dark and rich and darn near pure, but when you drink it, after a moment you realize the heat in your mouth and down your throat is not just temperature. The chocolate has chili in it, and the heat and mild burn sliding over your tongue and down your throat, along with all the sweet richness of the chocolate, is overwhelmingly sensual. Then the other hints of flavor develop, the whiff of ginger, the whisper of orange peel ... they serve it in a very small cup, like an espresso cup, and it's still an outrageous sensory overload. I don't know if I can ever go back to Hershey's.
I had the privilege of meeting and chatting with former Bostonian Jane Corkin, who showed me her photography gallery. I can't say much about the art, because I don't know anything about art, but I found it interesting to look at, and Jane supplied colorful details about the artists. The gallery, like most spaces at the Distillery, is all original brickwork, adapted structure and reclaimed wood. The wood everywhere is worth noticing, because it tends to be very thick, having come from former shop floors and barrel racks. Jane is wry and passionate and smart, justly proud of her realm but friendly and down-to-earth. Meeting her is the kind of experience the Distillery was conceived to provide to people like me who don't generally hang around art galleries because we find them a bit intimidating.
Art appreciation being thirsty work, I sampled some of the wares at the Mill Street Brewery. A helpful beer geek who manned the taps ("Don't just try one or two -- try all of them") rattled off a long, long list of awards Mill Street concoctions have won, but I must endorse the very light and drinkable Organic Lager and, at the other end of the spectrum, the Coffee Porter. Wouldn't want a lot of it, but it's good stuff in a short glass.
I had dinner at Pure Spirits. I had to try the cold watermelon soup made with gin, and then I had some black cod that was melt-in-your-mouth sweet and tender. Van Morrison tunes competed with the live music ramping up outside as the shadows got longer.
Not bad for Friday the 13th.
(I'm staying at the Westin, in a room that looks out across the lake at the Toronto Islands and the city airport, which I had the pleasure of flying in and out of in a single-engine plane in a previous life. Coming to Toronto, for me, is like going to a party and seeing old friends, some of whom are the kind you sort of cough and force a smile for.)
The day was turning into a splendid and sunny one as we got on a ferry to make the short trip across to the islands. The islands are a tight cluster in Lake Ontario just across from downtown Toronto, so close they were once a peninsula until the thin tether uniting them washed away in a particularly violent storm. They're a delicious place to bike, because the only cars allowed on the islands are service vehicles -- delivery, lawn care, home maintenance, etc. And there are homes. But more aboot that in a minute. (I'm going native.)
We had just barely coasted off the ferry when we came to a surprising historical marker: The site of Babe Ruth's first professional (and only minor-league) home run, hit in 1914. The islands were settled in the 19th century by people escaping the city's summer heat and mugginess, and by 1914 they were pretty well built up, with the Toronto Maple Leafs playing in a park where the airport is now.
By the '40s, Andrew told me, the islands were a populous city neighborhood. But in the '50s, the city decided to clear out all the housing and turn the islands into public parkland. This did not go particularly well, as you might expect. Whole communities were evicted, resettled and their neighborhoods burned to the ground. By the '70s, the last holdouts refused to go, had a faceoff with the sheriff and drove him out. So a compromise was reached, whereby an enclave of homes were allowed to remain, but the property cannot be owned outright. Homeowners sign a 99-year lease. (This happened in 1980, and no one is sure what will happen when the 99 years is up.) The homes are not owned and therefore cannot be sold to a third party, though they can be willed to immediate family. The homes can only be modified in certain ways. Prospective homeowners enter a complex lottery system, and Andrew told me he knew of a woman who has been on a waiting list for 15 years and has not yet had the option to buy an island home. The upsides of all this draconian control, though, are that (a) the house prices are kept at fair market value, not driven up to absurd heights by the desirability of the location and the limited number of homes; (b) if you buy a house, you have to live in it, so there's no buying it as an investment and then selling it to Japanese developers who want to put luxury lofts in its spot -- also, you know your neighbors and there's a real sense of community; so (c) the island remains charming and rustic instead of turning into a vile forest of multimillion-dollar ugly condos populated by vulgar snots, belching filth into the lake.
Having been to a lot of resorts spoiled by development, I think this is absolute genius.
Look at this castoffs drop-cart they have. You can put stuff you don't want but someone else might on this cart, and things are surprisingly neatly hung up or otherwise displayed.
Even if it's incredibly hard to live on the islands, despite the health of your bank account, anybody with ferry fare can whip over there and enjoy the old-fashioned amusement park for the kids, the fountains, the scenery, the beaches. There's even a clothing-optional beach! No, we didn't go, but Andrew told me about a woman from San Diego on one of his tours who absolutely insisted on going to the nude beach because she wanted to see it. So he indulged her, and when they got close, a naked man emerged from the trees and the curious woman was so startled she drove her bike straight into a fence, temporarily losing her purse containing her passport, etc.
We saw the Gibraltar Point Lighthouse, which used to be on a point but is now, thanks to the lake's reshaping of the island over time, far inland. That sculpting process has been halted by a seawall that should retain the islands' current shape. There's a boardwalk along the wall, from which you can see that the lake is unbelievably clear for a Great Lake with a lot of shipping traffic and urban areas on it.
Andrew and I stopped for lunch at the Rectory Cafe, where I had an amazing mushroom and feta wrap in a setting so enchanting that I wasn't a bit surprised to see the staff setting up tables for a wedding reception. The restaurant looks down across a lawn, through a gate and out at the sparkling water of the lake. The breezes were gentle and the food was delicious.
Then we were off back to the ferry, so I could move on to the Distillery, one of Toronto's newer happening places to hang out. In 1877, the Gooderham and Worts distillery was the largest in the world; now its 40+ buildings are the biggest collection of Victorian industrial architecture in North America. The carefully renovated buildings are now home to art galleries, high-end home furnishings stores, specialty shops and funky places to eat and drink.
While the interiors at the Distillery are very modern and funky, the exteriors have been kept so true to their original industrial form that it's a popular place to shoot films, including "Chicago" and "Cinderella Man." Of course, the original dirt streets and floors had to be covered during the renovations, and I was amused to hear that the bricks to pave the streets came from Cleveland, when that city ripped up its old brick streets to replace them with asphalt.
Matthew Rosenblatt, one of the developers, explained the idea behind the overhaul: to create a place for locals, not tourists, with no chains, no overt historic emphasis (no costumed re-enactors, no docents), and find vendor/tenants who are passionate about what they do, not necessarily passionate about being canny businesspeople. At right is a coffee shop that is high-end, purveying reportedly some of the best coffee in Canada, but it's funky rather than pretentious. And then there's the former dessert chef who opened Soma without ever having owned a business before. Soma has fantastic gelato -- I tried both the Ontario blueberry sorbet and the Sicilian pistachio gelato, and they were both glorious, especially the richly nutty gelato -- and also handmakes chocolate truffles. You can watch them make chocolate through a glass wall. I also tried a drink there that was unlike anything I'd ever had before. The chocolate shot is pretty much hot melted chocolate, dark and rich and darn near pure, but when you drink it, after a moment you realize the heat in your mouth and down your throat is not just temperature. The chocolate has chili in it, and the heat and mild burn sliding over your tongue and down your throat, along with all the sweet richness of the chocolate, is overwhelmingly sensual. Then the other hints of flavor develop, the whiff of ginger, the whisper of orange peel ... they serve it in a very small cup, like an espresso cup, and it's still an outrageous sensory overload. I don't know if I can ever go back to Hershey's.
I had the privilege of meeting and chatting with former Bostonian Jane Corkin, who showed me her photography gallery. I can't say much about the art, because I don't know anything about art, but I found it interesting to look at, and Jane supplied colorful details about the artists. The gallery, like most spaces at the Distillery, is all original brickwork, adapted structure and reclaimed wood. The wood everywhere is worth noticing, because it tends to be very thick, having come from former shop floors and barrel racks. Jane is wry and passionate and smart, justly proud of her realm but friendly and down-to-earth. Meeting her is the kind of experience the Distillery was conceived to provide to people like me who don't generally hang around art galleries because we find them a bit intimidating.
Art appreciation being thirsty work, I sampled some of the wares at the Mill Street Brewery. A helpful beer geek who manned the taps ("Don't just try one or two -- try all of them") rattled off a long, long list of awards Mill Street concoctions have won, but I must endorse the very light and drinkable Organic Lager and, at the other end of the spectrum, the Coffee Porter. Wouldn't want a lot of it, but it's good stuff in a short glass.
I had dinner at Pure Spirits. I had to try the cold watermelon soup made with gin, and then I had some black cod that was melt-in-your-mouth sweet and tender. Van Morrison tunes competed with the live music ramping up outside as the shadows got longer.
Not bad for Friday the 13th.
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