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Toronto is built on top of its own rivers. A dense creek system once cut down to the lake through steep ravines, and from the late nineteenth century the city buried most of it, culverting Garrison Creek and Taddle Creek into storm sewers and paving over the valleys. The water is still down there and still visible in the surface: streets that bend for no apparent reason, parks that dip, a crescent that curves around a watercourse nobody has seen in a century.
A park with a pronounced dip running through the middle of it, which is not landscaping. Garrison Creek ran here in a steep-sided ravine before it was buried, and the depression you walk down into is the old valley with a sewer beneath it. The park's shape is a river's shape with the river removed.
A car-free archipelago twenty minutes by ferry from downtown, and until 1858 not islands at all but a peninsula. A storm cut the channel that separated them from the mainland. There is a residential community out here in an ongoing and complicated relationship with the city that has periodically tried to remove it.
The 1793 garrison the town of York was founded to protect, now marooned inland behind expressway ramps and condominium towers. It sat on the shoreline when it was built. Everything between the fort and the current waterfront is landfill, which means the fort has not moved and the lake has.
A preserved Victorian industrial complex of red brick, once the largest distillery in the British Empire, now pedestrianised. It survives intact because the site was abandoned rather than redeveloped, and it filled the gap by becoming one of the most filmed streetscapes in North America.
A food market operating on the same site since the early nineteenth century, with the south building wrapped around the shell of Toronto's second city hall. The old council chamber is inside the market building. A working produce hall grew over the top of the municipal government and kept going.
A Gothic revival mansion on the escarpment, built for a financier who lost the fortune that paid for it and was forced out within a decade. The city eventually took it for unpaid taxes. It is a folly in the strict sense: too large to live in, too expensive to keep, and now supported by film shoots.
A dense low-rise neighbourhood of narrow houses converted into shops, layered through waves of Jewish, Portuguese, Caribbean and East Asian settlement, each visible in the storefronts. It is a market in the sense that the whole street is one, not a building. It has resisted redevelopment for decades and the resistance is organised.
A river valley cutting through the east of the city, wide and deep enough that it was never buildable and so was never buried. It carries a parkway, a rail line and a long trail. It shows you what the buried creeks looked like before the city decided ravines were an obstacle rather than an asset.
A Beaux-Arts railway station of 1927 with a vaulted stone hall, and the busiest transport hub in the country. Its Great Hall ceiling is faced in Guastavino tile, a structural vaulting system rather than decoration. The station took over a decade to open after completion because of disputes over the tracks approaching it.
Toronto has rivers running under its streets, and you can read them in the road layout.
Garrison Creek and Taddle Creek were culverted into storm sewers from the late nineteenth century. Their courses still show: streets that curve inexplicably, the dip through Trinity Bellwoods, and the odd kink in Queen's Park Crescent all trace water that is no longer visible.
The Toronto Islands were made by a storm.
They were a peninsula attached to the mainland until 1858, when a storm cut through the neck and left the sandbar as an archipelago. A ferry service exists because of one night's weather.
Fort York was built on the waterfront and is now nowhere near it.
The 1793 garrison stood on the lake shore. The land between it and the present water is fill, added as the city extended its harbour. The fort stayed put; Toronto moved the shoreline out around it.
There is a nineteenth-century city hall inside a food market.
The south building at St Lawrence Market was built around the shell of Toronto's second city hall, and the former council chamber survives within it. The municipal government moved out and the greengrocers moved in over the top.
Toronto's fake castle bankrupted its owner and the city seized it for tax arrears.
Casa Loma was built for a financier whose fortune collapsed. He lost the house within about a decade of moving in, and the city took the property over unpaid taxes. It has been paying for itself with film shoots ever since.
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