Toronto Walking Tour: Downtown from Yonge-Dundas to the Lake

Downtown Toronto is a city of big gestures: one of the busiest crossroads in the country, a city hall that looks like it landed from the future, a forest of bank towers and the tallest tower anyone in the city has ever built. This walk strings them together in one line from north to south, starting under the giant screens at Yonge and Dundas and ending on the boardwalk by Lake Ontario, with the island ferries coming and going in front of you. On the way you pass both city halls, a lawyers' palace behind an iron fence, the corner of King and Bay where Canada keeps its money, a grand railway station and the foot of the CN Tower. It is a little under five kilometers, flat the whole way, and among the most useful self-guided walking tours in Canada for a first day in the city, because it gives you the shape of downtown and finishes at the water.

Before you set off

The walk takes a little over an hour at a stroll, but plan for two and a half to three hours if you want to look inside Union Station, sit by the skating rink or reflecting pool at City Hall, or linger at the lake. If you want to go up the CN Tower or visit the Hockey Hall of Fame, add more time and book or check tickets and hours before you go. The route is flat and paved, so any comfortable shoes will do. Toronto summers are hot and humid and its winters are cold, with a biting wind between the towers, so dress for the season. In bad weather you can do much of the middle section indoors, through the PATH, the underground network of passages and food courts that links the towers of the Financial District, Union Station and the stations around them. The streets are busy with streetcars and traffic, so cross at the lights. Weekday lunchtime shows the Financial District at full speed, while a weekend morning gives you the towers almost to yourself.

Yonge-Dundas Square

Stand in the open plaza on the corner and turn a slow circle. Giant screens and billboards light up the buildings around you, buskers and street preachers compete for the crowd, and two of the city's main streets cross right beside you. This is the closest thing Toronto has to Times Square, and it is busiest and brightest after dark. Yonge Street, running north and south, was laid out in the 1790s and named for Sir George Yonge, a British politician of the time, and for years it was billed as the longest street in the world, when its route was counted together with the highway that carries on north for hundreds of kilometers. The plaza itself is young; it opened in the early 2000s. The city has since renamed it Sankofa Square, after a word from Ghana's Akan languages about going back to fetch what was left behind, in other words learning from the past. The renaming followed a long public debate about Henry Dundas, the eighteenth-century British politician whose name the street still carries and who helped delay the abolition of the slave trade. Across Yonge, the glass and steel front belongs to the Eaton Centre, where a flock of sculpted Canada geese flies under the glass roof. From here, walk south on Yonge Street, past the Eaton Centre and the old Elgin and Winter Garden Theatre, a rare pair of theaters stacked one on top of the other. At Queen Street turn right and walk west past Bay Street. The square opens on your right in about seven minutes.

Nathan Phillips Square and the two City Halls

Stand on the square facing north, with Queen Street behind you, and take in two very different ideas of what a city hall should look like. In front of you, two curved towers of different heights wrap around a low, saucer-shaped council chamber. This is City Hall, opened in 1965, designed by the Finnish architect Viljo Revell, who won an international competition for it but died the year before it was finished. From the air, the towers and the dome look like an eye, and Torontonians still call it that. In front of it, a reflecting pool under three concrete arches turns into a skating rink in winter, and the big, colorful TORONTO sign is one of the most photographed spots in the city. The square is named for Nathan Phillips, the mayor who pushed for the project and the city's first Jewish mayor. Look for the large bronze sculpture by Henry Moore, The Archer, bought after a fierce public argument about modern art. Now turn to your right. The heavy sandstone pile with the clock tower is Old City Hall, opened in 1899 and designed by E. J. Lennox in a bold Romanesque style. The story goes that when the council refused him a plaque, he carved his own name into the stonework under the eaves, so look for it. For more than a century it also housed courts. From here, walk west along Queen Street for about three minutes, to the long iron fence and stone building on the corner of University Avenue.

Osgoode Hall

Stand outside the iron fence and look through it at the pale classical building set back behind a lawn. This is Osgoode Hall, named after William Osgoode, the first chief justice of Upper Canada, and it has been the home of the province's lawyers since the 1830s. It houses the Law Society of Ontario and some of the province's highest courts, and it grew wing by wing through the nineteenth century into the stately building you see now, with columns, a balustrade along the roofline and a garden behind. Now look down at the fence itself. Set into it are the famous cow gates, narrow, angled openings shaped so that a person could slip through but a wandering cow or horse could not. In the 1860s, when the fence went up, animals still roamed the city's streets, and the lawyers wanted their lawn to stay a lawn. If the building is open, the interior is grand, with a magnificent library under a high vaulted ceiling, and the garden behind is sometimes open to the public in summer. Check before you go. To move on, cross Queen Street and walk south down York Street to King Street, then turn left and walk east along King, with the bank towers rising on both sides, to the corner of Bay Street. It takes about eight minutes.