I love Toronto, and I love the thought of visitors returning to their homes with a better impression of the city than they arrived here with.
I have a friend named Michelle Donovan who is coming to Toronto from Grand Falls-Windsor, Newfoundland, in September, so I thought I'd put together this A-to-Z guide of things she might want to do when she's here.
Grand-Falls Windsor is also the birthplace of one of this country's most famous actors, the late Gordon Pinsent.
And here's 26 reasons why we kept asking that question.
A is for Albino Carreira. In 1994, Albino, a Portuguese immigrant, got hurt on a construction site in downtown Toronto and to see himself through recovery, devoted his time to what some call his Wood Cake House, in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood. I've driven by the place dozens of times but only recently stopped to get a close look. The house, garage, yard and Albino's still-operational Plymouth minivan are covered with shells, glass marbles, tiny toys, and thousands of little wooden discs that are in fact slices of old pool cues that he gets from a pool cue manufacturer in Northwest Toronto. (Maybe the pool cue factory belongs on this list but I haven't been there so I can't include it.) Albino imports the shells from China. And they're not plastic! They were once live creatures. Albino's property's crawling with them. The best part of the visit, if you're lucky, you'll meet the man himself who talks so proudly about this work in progress that it almost sounds sensible. A lovely fellow. Not sure what the neighbours think.
“What kind of tree is that?" I asked.
E: Ed's and Paul's memorial benches in High Park. My brother Ed died too young in January, 2022. We're still not sure what of. In August, 2023, my sister Norma's oldest son Paul passed away of cancer at 46. He was Ed's Godson and both men loved Toronto and both spent a heck of a lot of time around my house. (Okay. This part of my story is sad. But bear with me. It gets less sad.) The City of Toronto has a park bench program through which, for a donation, you can have a plaque affixed to a bench somewhere in the city, commemorating whatever or whoever you like. In separate applications, Norma applied for a bench for Ed, my sister Charlene did the same for Paul. Applicants can request a specific park but there's no guarantees.
I is the Inter Steer: If somebody were to ask me if I had a "a local," I'd have to say it's a joint around the corner from my house weirdly named The Inter Steer. It'd be embarrassing for me to tell you how much money I've spent there over the years, but we did hold Ed's wake at the Steer. It's also the home of what I call Billy's Show every Saturday afternoon: the closest thing to a kitchen ceiledh that you'll find in this city. I also just realized I've never written the word ceilidh before. If you're lucky, the Saturday you drop by will include the fiddling of my friend Shelley Coopersmith who warrants her own place on this list but "S" and "C" are both already used up. Sing along with Billy the Kidder.
J is for John O'Callaghan. John and I have been friends since the early '70s. He, too, was a page boy in the Ontario Legislature and he, like Michelle, couldn't tell a boring story if you held a Glock to his head. I hope he and Michelle meet and if I'm there, I'll ask if he recalls the time he, Ed and I were in a pub on Yonge Street and somebody suggested we try something called John Courage Brown Ale. The beer arrived, Ed took a small sip, looked disgusted, held the bottle to his lips, chugged the contents, wiped his mouth with his sleeve and announced, "Waiter! This horse needs his kidneys checked!"
P is for Prehistoria Museum. My daughter Ria's text: "Dad. You have to see this place!" She was right. A pay-what-you-can freakshow museum with the oddest assortment of antiques and memorabilia that you likely won't find anywhere else and as you exit through the gift shop (called the Skull store), you can actually purchase real dinosaur bones and fossils. Acting on Ria's advice, we visited and saw, for the first time in my life, a real stuffed two-headed calf, a mummy, an honest-to-goodness shrunken head (it's yours for a measly $25k); and a whole bunch of stone age artifacts that the museum operators somehow got their hands on legally and oddly.
S is for Squeezeboxes. Michelle's from Newfoundland. If she doesn't visit Accordions Canada on Eglinton Avenue in the heart of Little Jamaica. I'm telling on her.
T is for the Tranzac. More accordions. More cowbell. You name it. The Tranzac's on Brunswick Avenue. Not far from Albino's house, come to think of it. Something musically interesting is going on at the Tranzac, almost every day of the year. Somebody should write a book or make a documentary about the Tranzac. An undersung musical treasure. Musically undersung? See what I did there?
U is for us. Me and Helena. We love visitors. Plus, because we have been to every place on this list, we'll be happy to get you there. Including the entry for "V," because for "V," you will need a car. Oh wait. We haven't been to Fatima. Yet. If Helena's sore muscles don't soon get better I'm going to insist. Meantime, come visit our little library. Sit on the adjacent bench. Read a spell.
V is for the flea market downstairs the Dixie Value Mall, a few clicks west of downtown Toronto. When my sister Mary gave me a ticket to join her at a Shania Twain concert at the Scotia Centre last year, she needed some sparkly jeans, and come concert day we found a pair at the Value Mall. The flea market downstairs is not for the squeamish but for the curious? If Albino Carreira of the Wood Cake House ever went into sales, this is the kind of joint he'd run.
W is for--and it's about time you asked--"Who is Michelle Donovan. And why are you writing this for her?" When I was the still editor of Today's Trucking magazine (before I wrote about the all-dark restaurant) I penned an editorial about trucking
companies hiring foreign workers. When my dad and uncle Ed ran the bus company in Sudbury they had guys from all sorts of places on staff, but to me, the most foreign was a guy named Mike Donovan, from a place called St. Brendan's Island, Newfoundland. Mike (or Moik as he pronounced it) appeared out of nowhere looking for a job, got hired on and then, for the next few years, hung around and endeared his charming Newfoundland self to our family. When I did the story about 40 years later, I phoned the post office in St. Brendan's Island looking for him. Whoever answered said there were no Mike Donovans but he'd heard of one in Grand-Falls Windsor. I called and got him. How'd I know I had the right guy? One of the first things he asked was, "Did your sister Norma ever get married?" A few years later, I got an email from somebody named Michelle who had been at her ailing father's bedside in Newfoundland, and in a drawer beside his bed, found my magazine column. Moik'd never told her about the story, but she contacted me to say we Carters might be interested in knowing that her much-loved dad was facing his last days, and that he had lots of fond memories of Sudbury. After exchanging a few emails, I commented that Michelle seemed to have a facility with language. I encouraged her to join a writing group that I participate in and turns out she's just as charming as her dad, she's a former elementary school teacher, and she has taken a real fancy to Toronto and writing but she's been to all the touristy tourist places and should now focus on the good ones. Everybody in the writing group loves when Michelle tells her stories. What is it about Newfoundlanders anyway?
X might as well be for "The Expositor," the beloved weekly newspaper that I still subscribe to and sometimes write for and two summers ago, I covered the opening, downtown Toronto, of the Lillian McGregor park, named for a former resident of the Whitefish River First Nation and if you're going to be downtown Toronto, you really might like to pay attention. Especially to the huge metal sculpted eagle feathers. The older I get, the more I understand that, if you just stop and look around you will never be bored in downtown Toronto. Or anywhere, for that matter.
Y as in YYZ; Toronto's airport code. I highly recommend hopping a ride on the Union Pearson Express (UPS) train that goes from downtown out to the airport and back. It's a quick fun trip that lets you see the backyards and unpublicized sides of the city. When the UPS first opened, Ed and I rode it out to the Airport, had a beer there and then returned downtown, and even though we'd lived here about 20 years already, we saw parts of our beloved city that we would have never otherwise passed through. Not coincidentally, one of the places the train goes alongside of is the Henderson Craft Brewery which brews a very tasty IPA named after the train: Pearson Express. And Henderson's a 15-minute walk from my house, is open every day of the year, including holidays like today. I'm probably headed there after this one last entry.
Z. The Toronto Zine library (obviously). Upstairs at the Tranzac Club. Did you even know there was such a thing as a zine library? Literary enterprises like the Toronto Zine library, showcasing younger writers' and creators' enthusiasm for the importance of reading and writing, fill me with optimism. Traditional media might be on the way out, but ingenuity and creativity are burning hotter than ever. Exhibit Z: The Toronto Zine library. As far as tourist spots go, it's the last word.
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| NEVER HEARD of Bonds of Love? Neither has anybody else |
Pinsent starred in countless productions, including the 1993 wholly forgettable TV movie called Bonds of Love, along with Kelly McGillis and Treat Williams. More importantly, Bonds of Love was both the screen debut and final Hollywood appearance of none other than Ewa Frances and Ria Bridget Carter, aged one and a few months.
Our daughters were cast as "Nena," the tiny niece of McGillis's character, who falls in love with Bobby, a mentally challenged dude played by Williams. The movie was filmed in Toronto's Mimico neighbourhood, which actually shows up later in this list of places Toronto visitors should go, and in the story I wrote about the Bonds of Love misadventure for the Toronto Parents of Multiple Births Association newsletter, there's a quote from my brother Ed who helped us onset, saying, "I bet you'll think twice before having twins again."
Spoiler alert: That's not the last you'll be hearing from Ed in this guide. My Toronto wouldn't have be the same if Ed had not lived here most of his short life. One of Ed's and my favourite Toronto activities was asking each other, "Why would anybody want to live anywhere else?"
And here's 26 reasons why we kept asking that question.
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| HE'S SO FRIENDLY, his project almost makes sense! |
B? Why Bibliomat of course. The Monkey's Paw bookshop on Bloor Street is within walking distance of Albino's. You give $5 to Stephen the very friendly owner, he gives you a token that you drop into the
Bibliomat machine at the back of the store, and out pops a book! Any book. You have no idea what you'll get but Stephen says his store carries nothing published after 1980. I now own a hard-cover Complete Guide to Skin and Scuba Diving, copyrighted 1975. Toronto's home to dozens of quirky new and used bookstores. I'll try to keep them to a minimum on this list but I'm not making any promises. Monkey's Paw might well be the best.
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| BOOK'EM STEPHEN: No book under 35. |
C is for my big sister Charlene. I know she's not a tourist site, but still. Somehow, from her spectacularly scenic home on the north shore of Manitoulin Island in Lake Huron, my sister Charlene manages to keep on top of very important social, cultural, political and fun development in Ontario's capital city. To whit: a few summers back, Toronto Harbour was suddenly home to a giant rubber duck but I hadn't heard. I got the news from Charlene. So down we went, singing "Rubber Ducky I'm awfully fond of, Rubber Ducky I'd like a whole pond of you" there and back. She'll kill me for this but all visitors should be in touch with Charlene. She can tell you the coolest restaurants. Like Caren's Rosedale. Where they serve--I hope you're sitting down--fondue! I also had the extreme privilege of living with the 18- or 19-year-old version of Charlene when she was a nursing student at Humber College and I was an 11-year-old page boy. Every day for a few months in 1969, I commuted from the apartment she shared with her two beautiful roommates Barb and Cathy in Mimico (very close to where Gordon Pinsent held Ewa and/or Ria all those years later) to Queen's Park. Charlene is absolutely vital to my loving this city, and I know I'll consult Charlene some more before Michelle arrives.
D: Dave. My neighbour: A few week’s back, my wife Helena and I were walking eastward on our street when we stopped in front of Dave’s place. He was standing on the third or fourth rung of a stepladder, doing something to a tree with odd-looking branches. The following exchange ensued.
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| I WARNED DAVE I'D DO THIS |
“This is an Alpine something,” he said though he didn’t say “something” he used another word but I forget what. Doesn’t matter. The way the tree’s shaped is way more interesting than what the tree’s called. Fact is, Dave’s garden is one of the most intriguing little plots of land I’ve ever seen. He’s got tiny flowers and mossy stuff; a few plastic dinosaurs and hiding halfway behind a bush is smiling Buddha. The front of the garden is home to a huge rock that looks like he found it at the bottom of the ocean.
“Your garden,” I told him, “should be in one of those guides showing all the best places to visit in Toronto!"
Dave agreed.
Tu-Duh!
Everybody should have at least one neighbour named Dave.
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| PAUL |
Get this: Toronto has more than 1,500 parks, ranging from small waterparks to big ones like High Park, which is really close to my house. The fact that both Paul's and Ed's benches wound up within hollering
distance of one another, right at the north entrance to High Park, and both within a 30 minute walk of my front door, borders on the unbelievable. The City Parks people had no way of knowing these two men were related. Or that I--who had nothing to do with the applications--loved both men dearly and live so close to High Park. They had different surnames. So do my sisters. I don't know why or how it
happened. Paul could have wound up in Northern Scarborough and Eddie near Jane and Finch. Plus if you visit the benches, you can read about these two extraordinary men and take a shot of the QR code that my other brother, Alex, had installed on Ed's bench. That code will take you to an audio/video Ed history, including a clip of him telling me a joke about a sailor coming across a man stranded on a desert island. He goes to recue the guy and he sees three buildings. He asks what they're for. The guy points to the first and says 'that's my house.' He points to the second and says 'that's my church,' Then he points to the third and says 'that's the church I used to got to.'"
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| ME, ALEX, ED, when we were younger. Mitch Hedberg: "Every photo is of you when you were younger. I'd like to see the camera that takes a picture of you when you were older." |
happened. Paul could have wound up in Northern Scarborough and Eddie near Jane and Finch. Plus if you visit the benches, you can read about these two extraordinary men and take a shot of the QR code that my other brother, Alex, had installed on Ed's bench. That code will take you to an audio/video Ed history, including a clip of him telling me a joke about a sailor coming across a man stranded on a desert island. He goes to recue the guy and he sees three buildings. He asks what they're for. The guy points to the first and says 'that's my house.' He points to the second and says 'that's my church,' Then he points to the third and says 'that's the church I used to got to.'"
F is for Fatima. Remember Albino back there with the pool cues and shells? He told me that his father had been a stonemason in a little town in Portugal that until 1917, hardly anybody knew about. It was called Fatima. Given the marvelous circumstances surrounding the placement of my brother's and nephew's benches, keep eye on the north end of High Park is all I'm saying.
H, as in Hippy. When I was six or seven, I remember my parents in Sudbury talking about some place in Toronto called Yorkville, which is where something called "hippies" hung out. Then one day after we visited some of mom's relatives in Niagara Falls we were returning to Sudbury and my folks decided to take a detour through Yorkville, to get a look at the hippies. I've always loved them for things like that. That also might have been the first time I slept overnight in this city. My dad rented a hotel room; a suite, actually, in the King Edward Hotel and I went for my very first subway ride. The subway trains roared in and out of the station with such ferocity I found it a bit scary. And they also arrived every few minutes. Back home in Sudbury, the local buses rolled around on the half hour! I should know. Our family owned the bus company. But here in Toronto? The transit system was breathtaking. Believe it or not that first thrilling ride comes back to me almost every single time I walk down the stairs to the subway platform. As for the hippies, about 100 metres east of Paul's bench in High Park, stands a statue of some anonymous dude wearing a sports coat, sunglasses and a badge that says "LOVE." According to every source I checked, the statue's called The Hippy, and if you're visiting the miracle benches you might as well drop over and say peace.
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| SATURDAYS AT THE STEER: Shelley on left. |
J is for John O'Callaghan. John and I have been friends since the early '70s. He, too, was a page boy in the Ontario Legislature and he, like Michelle, couldn't tell a boring story if you held a Glock to his head. I hope he and Michelle meet and if I'm there, I'll ask if he recalls the time he, Ed and I were in a pub on Yonge Street and somebody suggested we try something called John Courage Brown Ale. The beer arrived, Ed took a small sip, looked disgusted, held the bottle to his lips, chugged the contents, wiped his mouth with his sleeve and announced, "Waiter! This horse needs his kidneys checked!"
K. As in OK. You probably guessed that I didn't just scribble this list down in alphabetical order all in one fell swoop. Some of the locations came more easily than others. And "K" had me snookered. Until. Just now. This Toronto location is what you would get if you took all these other places, stuck them in a blender until they were all mixed up together: Kensington Market. It never disappoints. Unless you don't like bargains, great food, beautiful people, reggae, the smell of pot and spending a restful colourful afternoon in a place that never loses its charm. I can't believe Kensington didn't occur to me first.
Little Canada. I challenge visitors from other parts of Canada--Michelle included-- to find their own homes on this ridiculously interesting miniature 3-d version of our country.
M is the Mandarin. I'm writing this on Canada Day. And as I write, thousands of people in various parts
of Ontario are lining up at their nearest Mandarin Restaurants because on Canada's birthday, every year, the Mandarin lets people eat for free! True fact. But any day of the year, the Mandarin buffet is a tribute to human achievement. You like fresh hot pizza? Oysters? Salads? Roast beef with Yorkshire pudding just the way my mom tried to make it? Good old fashioned North American style Chinese foot? The Mandarin selection takes your breath away and you of course can eat as much as you want and the atmosphere is downright playful. And this part's not as important but for a number of years, my wife Helena and I have been on--get this--the Mandarin Restaurant's Menu testing panel. Every few months, the management invites 60 to 100 people to an evening of food (and drink!) testing where they try out new restaurant items and ask us to rate them. Like last time we went we had to determine whether one sort of shrimp sauce was better than a slightly different sort. Plus we a-b tested Bloody Caesars. But I'm not shilling for the Mandarin because they give me free food. I call BS on anybody who says Disneyland's the happiest place on earth. It's the Mandarin, hands down.
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| MILES OF MEALS AT THE MANDARIN |
N brings us back to Nena from Bonds of Love. Toronto has stood in for many many foreign cities over the years but my favourite was when our neighbourhood became Brooklyn for the John Travolta version of Hairspray. In the summer of 2010, I was at Ceasar's Palace in Vegas, shortly after the first Hangover movie came out, and the front desk clerk told me tourists love taking photos of themselves in the lobby. If you're in Toronto and want a photo of something you might have seen in a movie head to The Lakeview Diner on Dundas near Trinity Bellwoods Park. It, too, was in Hairspray and, more familiarly, Cocktail with Tom Cruise. I know. Cheap use of an N but there you go.
O is for O Noir, the downtown restaurant where guests dine in total darkness. Helena took me there on my birthday a number of years ago and I wrote about it for Today's Trucking magazine, which might be one of the reasons I don't work there anymore. Read "Where Beer is the new Black."
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| MOMMY MEETS THE TWO-HEADED CALF |
Q. The Queen Streetcar. Wanna see Toronto? Take a ride on the what might be the longest most interesting streetcar line on the planet. The 501 Queen car starts at something called Long Branch (which is where I lived as a page with the three older women) and it travels along the Lakeshore (past Bonds of Love territory) then through various neighbourhoods sometimes so slowly it seems like it's going backwards but eventually clear across the city until it winds up at Neville Park. For the $3 and change it cost to ride, the Queen car provides the most comprehensive (and lazy) trip across one of the world's great cities. Plus you can hop on and off for brief breaks without having to pay extra.
R is for the Rebellion of 1837. You're like, whaaaa?? But wait. It started at the Montgomery Tavern which is now, simply a historical plaque near Yonge and Eglinton. But never mind that. Throughout the years, I have been accused by several freelance writers of coming up with utterly absurd story ideas that I made them do all the work on. Among them? Track down the surviving members of something called The Family Compact. Quick history lesson: In the early 1800s, this part of the world was known as Upper Canada and the most influential people around were devoted to the Crown and British traditions and they kept themselves and their friends in charge of the place. Rather haughty bunch, we all thought. In 1837, a Scottish born journalist named Willian Lyon Mackenzie led a small armed rebellion and some Family Compact types shut him down pretty quick and threw his printing presses into Lake Ontario. If I really wanted to do research I could probably find out where at the bottom of the lake that stuff lays but really, I just wanted to say that when I was a teenager and young journalist, I idolized the rebellious Mackenzie; then years later, when I assigned a freelance writer to track down the surviving members of the Family Compact, I was the editor of a magazine called Metropolitan Toronto Business Journal, which was owned by the Board of Trade of Metro Toronto, which was, in fact, the 1992 version of the Family Compact.
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| YOUR TOUR GUIDE AT Accordions Canada |
S is for Squeezeboxes. Michelle's from Newfoundland. If she doesn't visit Accordions Canada on Eglinton Avenue in the heart of Little Jamaica. I'm telling on her.
T is for the Tranzac. More accordions. More cowbell. You name it. The Tranzac's on Brunswick Avenue. Not far from Albino's house, come to think of it. Something musically interesting is going on at the Tranzac, almost every day of the year. Somebody should write a book or make a documentary about the Tranzac. An undersung musical treasure. Musically undersung? See what I did there?
U is for us. Me and Helena. We love visitors. Plus, because we have been to every place on this list, we'll be happy to get you there. Including the entry for "V," because for "V," you will need a car. Oh wait. We haven't been to Fatima. Yet. If Helena's sore muscles don't soon get better I'm going to insist. Meantime, come visit our little library. Sit on the adjacent bench. Read a spell.
V is for the flea market downstairs the Dixie Value Mall, a few clicks west of downtown Toronto. When my sister Mary gave me a ticket to join her at a Shania Twain concert at the Scotia Centre last year, she needed some sparkly jeans, and come concert day we found a pair at the Value Mall. The flea market downstairs is not for the squeamish but for the curious? If Albino Carreira of the Wood Cake House ever went into sales, this is the kind of joint he'd run.
W is for--and it's about time you asked--"Who is Michelle Donovan. And why are you writing this for her?" When I was the still editor of Today's Trucking magazine (before I wrote about the all-dark restaurant) I penned an editorial about trucking
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| MICHELLE IN GUIDE TO TORONTO: Get it? |
X might as well be for "The Expositor," the beloved weekly newspaper that I still subscribe to and sometimes write for and two summers ago, I covered the opening, downtown Toronto, of the Lillian McGregor park, named for a former resident of the Whitefish River First Nation and if you're going to be downtown Toronto, you really might like to pay attention. Especially to the huge metal sculpted eagle feathers. The older I get, the more I understand that, if you just stop and look around you will never be bored in downtown Toronto. Or anywhere, for that matter.
Y as in YYZ; Toronto's airport code. I highly recommend hopping a ride on the Union Pearson Express (UPS) train that goes from downtown out to the airport and back. It's a quick fun trip that lets you see the backyards and unpublicized sides of the city. When the UPS first opened, Ed and I rode it out to the Airport, had a beer there and then returned downtown, and even though we'd lived here about 20 years already, we saw parts of our beloved city that we would have never otherwise passed through. Not coincidentally, one of the places the train goes alongside of is the Henderson Craft Brewery which brews a very tasty IPA named after the train: Pearson Express. And Henderson's a 15-minute walk from my house, is open every day of the year, including holidays like today. I'm probably headed there after this one last entry.
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| Where zines can be seen |
