Reading Buildings, Part One

Cities are defined by the experiences they offer, the people they contain, but just as much are they defined by their skylines and architecture. For me, Chicago is the cavernous hall at Union Station, the skyscrapers and towers forming canyon walls on the walk from the station to Michigan Avenue and the Art Institute. San Francisco is defined by the two bridges, the Transamerica Pyramid, the pastel colors of the buildings across the city from North Beach to the Mission to the Sunset by day, the cyber-noir feel of the Financial District at night in the fog.

What better way is there to describe our trip to Toronto than by posting photographs? The buildings were old, brick, lots of porches. The buildings along Queen Street and in the various neighborhoods/villages we passed through looked lived in, and Marina told me that they have a very East Coast feel.

QUEEN STREET:

Supposedly a "hipster" district, Queen Street West was full of small, dark, interesting looking bars in interesting brick buildings. Some had heirlooms and antiques in the window; there were curiosity shops and an ice cream parlor, and various restaurants. Notably, there was a bar called Brooklynn, named not after the borough in New York but after one of the owner's cats, and among the many rules posted on a sign outside the bar, one stated that comments of a sexist or racist nature were grounds for ejection. One hears that Canada is nice, but this seems too good to be true.





Pictures of the Drake Hotel, where we ate in the Sky Yard Patio. You can see where the Patio is in the picture with Marina, just to the right of the main building, above the cherry-red street car.









Here are some varied pictures from Queen Street: a mail truck in front of the post office; the Gladstone Hotel; some other random building that caught my eye on first getting out of the car; and a restaurant that shares the name of a beer I used to drink a lot during college.

And to wrap up the first collection of pictures, here are two I took through a fence surrounding a construction zone, catching a glimpse of a car on a backstreet. There seemed to be something about the image that promised a story, something behind the hip lights of Queen Street, whatever it might be.





More pictures from the trip to follow . . .