Introduction

A joke popular in the neighboring province of Quebec between the wars went "First prize, one week in Toronto. Second prize, two weeks in Toronto. Third prize, three weeks
in Toronto." And who could blame them for laughing? Toronto was a deadly city right into the 1950s, at which time its half-million citizens used to rush off to Detroit (a four-hour drive to the southwest) and Buffalo (90 minutes to the south, around Lake Ontario) for a good time. Today, of course, the rush is in the opposite direction, for hundreds of reasons that are sprinkled through this volume.

Yet, is not Toronto the city that American novelist John Dos Passos called "a beastly place" in his letter to a friend in 1907? And the city that the great British poet Rupert Brooke, during a visit in 1918, gave half-hearted, one-handed applause to, by writing that "the only depressing thing is that it will always be what it is, only larger"? The city that Ernest Hemingway, while honing his writing craft at The Toronto Star in the 1920s, could not wait to escape from, for fear of going mad with boredom?

Even as late as 1960, the witty Irish dramatist Brendan Behan was letting the city have it: "Toronto will be a fine town when it is finished." And in the words of Leopold Infeld, the Polish-born mathematical physicist who worked with Einstein: "It must be good to die in Toronto. The transition between life and death would be continuous, painless and scarcely noticeable in this silent town. I dreaded the Sundays and prayed to God that if he chose for me to die in Toronto he would let it be on a Saturday afternoon to save me from one more Toronto Sunday."

What on earth could have happened in so short a period? And why was no one surprised (in Toronto, at least) when various participants at the 1982 International Conference on Urban Design, in Toronto, ran around spouting such superlatives as "This is the most
livable city in North America" and "It is an example of how a city could grow"?

Much of Toronto's excitement is explained by its ethnic diversity. Nearly two-thirds of the 8.8 million people who now live in the metropolitan Toronto area were born and raised somewhere else. And that somewhere else was often very far away.

Nearly 500,000 Italians make metropolitan Toronto one of the largest Italian communities outside of Italy. It is also the home of the largest Chinese community in Canada and the largest Portuguese community in North America. Close to 150,000 Jews. Nearly as many Muslims. Tens of thousands of Germans. Greeks. Hungarians. East Indians. West Indians. Vietnamese. Maltese. South Americans. Ukrainians. More than 70 ethnic groups in all, speaking over 100 different languages. Certainly, a city worthy of inviting the United Nations to consider moving here from Manhattan.

What this has meant to Toronto is the rather rapid creation of a vibrant mix of cultures that has echoes of turn-of-the-century New York City -- but without the slums, crowding, disease, and tensions. Toronto undoubtedly would have had this, too, had Canada been decent and wise enough to open its gates wide back then, as the Yanks had. (This fact the city continues to bemoan and tried to atone for by accepting more "boat people" in the 1970s than any other country in the world. Yet, there are still tensions over large immigration to this very day.)

Still, to give to its burgeoning ethnic population all, or even most, of the credit for Toronto's becoming a cosmopolitan, world-class city in just a few decades would be a kind of reverse racism, and not totally correct, either. Much of the thanks must be given to the so-called dour Scots who set up the banks, built the churches, and created the kind of solid base for commerce, culture, and community that would come to such a healthy fruition in the three decades following World War II. Now a minority in the city they helped make, the much-maligned white Anglo-Saxon Protestants had their noses tweaked mercilessly in an issue of Toronto, a now-folded monthly magazine which used to come with the Globe and Mail. In the March 1988 edition, a writer noted that the city was about to hold its first St. Patrick's Day parade ever: "But Toronto -- Toronto was for generations known as the Belfast of the North, a city so firmly in the grip of Protestants, Loyalists, and Royalists that a Roman Catholic celebration would have been unthinkable. Well, it's not anymore." In a subsequent issue of Toronto, historian William Kilbourn added, "Once, Toronto the Good was embodied by the defenders of abstinence, Protestantism, and the British race." His closing words are striking: "My own childhood was pure British colonial
... But I know I couldn't stand living in that kind of Toronto now. Instead, I think of my
two Italian grandsons and my Chilean granddaughter, and of this city as a welcoming and exciting place for them, and I celebrate my non-WASP home."

The letters to the editor in the next issue of the magazine were scathing, with many of the WASPs who had built the city screaming (perhaps justifiably), "Racist!" And one might fairly ask, would Toronto be the decent place it is today had it not been for those harshly criticized white Protestants? Who opened the gates to foreigners, if not those same, now-outnumbered, supposedly boring sons and daughters of what was once the British Empire?

The city that once united Canadians from the Atlantic to the Pacific in a shared hatred of Toronto's sanctimoniousness and industriousness now tends to draw their collective envy
at how well the place works. Other critics insist that Toronto remains too smug (well, yes); too regulated (would they prefer chaos?); too provincial (actually, it's municipal; Ontario is provincial); too prim and proper (would they rather be mugged?); too young (as a major city, perhaps, but it was hardly born yesterday).

The city officially became Toronto on March 6, 1834, more than 150 years ago, but its roots go back to 1615. A Frenchman named Etienne Brulé was sent into the not-yet-Canadian wilderness in 1610 by explorer Samuel de Champlain to see what he could
discover. And he discovered plenty: the river and portage routes from the St. Lawrence
to Lake Huron, possibly Lakes Superior and Michigan, and,eventually, Lake Ontario.

His discoveries surprised the local Indians, who had known aboutall these places for centuries and had long since named the area between the Humber and Don rivers Toronto, which is believed to mean "a place of meetings." (How prescient!) It was later a busy Indian village named Teiaiagon, a French trading post, a British town named York (if the British hadn't won the Seven Years' War in the late 1700s, you would be reading this in translation from the French), and finally the city we know today, once again bearing the original Indian name of Toronto.

The city had the usual history of colonial towns of the last century: It was invaded by the Americans in 1812; there were many Great Fires; there was a rebellion in 1887; and there was a slow but steady growth of (you guessed it) white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, from about 9,000 in the 1880s to nearly 500,000 before World War II, at which time they outnumbered the non-WASPs by five to two.

And now, as we've noted, it has somehow metamorphosed into a great world city. There are countless reasons why this has happened, and we have touched on but a few. Toronto is clearly this country's center of culture, commerce, and communications -- "New York run by the Swiss," according to Peter Ustinov's marvelously witty description of the place
-- and this is partly by chance. For example, Mikhail Baryshnikov chose to defect from the Bolshoi in Toronto in 1974 and has returned frequently to work withits ballet corps.

There are a growing number of problems, to be sure. In late 1988, there were 803 vacant apartments available to rent in Toronto, out of a total of 234,568 -- in other words, a vacancy rate of .1. And in a single month in late 1988, the average house price shot up $80,000, making the average resale cost of a home in the metropolitan Toronto area a towering $250,000 and more. In other words, one has to be upper class anywhere else
to live even lower middle class in Toronto. As of late 1993, the vacancy rate was up to around 2% in the metropolitan Toronto area, and house prices had fallen by up to a third, even more, since the late '80s, but there's still no question that the city remains a very
expensive place to live.

Toronto has gained the nickname "Hollywood North" because literally dozens of major films have been made in this city, from The Black Stallion to Three Men and a Baby; from Naked Lunch to Searching for Bobby Fisher; from Moonstruck to Cocktail; and don't forget such popular television series as The Kids in the Hall and Road to Avonlea. Over $600 million was spent by film and television companies in metropolitan Toronto in 1992 and 1993 alone, with a total of 67 movies and television shows using the city as its location in the latter year. Indeed, it is hard to walk about the city nowadays without tripping over a movie crew and a number of famous people. A story is still told about one particular film made in the downtown area in 1987. Since it was a crime movie set in New York City, street signs had to be put up and several tons of garbage trucked in and spread around the city street. After filming all morning, the cast took a lunch break. When they returned barely an hour later, all the garbage had been cleaned up!

That's Toronto, in a nutshell: Clean. Safe. Orderly. Yet somehow dynamic and exciting. Groucho Marx sang an old vaudeville tune back in 1967 that went "It's better to run to Toronta / Than to stay in a place you don't wanta." And he was right. But nearly three decades later, we can honestly change the words to "It's best that you run to Toronta / There's no better place that you'd wanta."