Accidental City: The Transformation of Toronto

The old city of Toronto in the 1950s was a gray lady - "a good place to mind your own business," as Northrop Frye said. Built on the shore of Lake Ontario by generations of architects in a strange and challenging ravine-threaded landscape, the city is now the home of the Canadian National Tower, of an extraordinary subway system, of the Blue Jays and their SkyDome, of the Royal Ontario Museum, of Roy Thomson Music Hall. Today Toronto bristles with vitality, glitters with everything that architecture, planning, and cultural and intellectual life can give to a city. It has saved itself from the worst mistakes of urban planning, for its development over the past thirty years has been a tale of chance and fortuitous accident. Robert Fulford's graceful narrative, moving from one region of Toronto to another, paints a portrait of the city, its recent history, its urban planning, and its economic development. The chosen home of the great architectural and social critic Jane Jacobs (who has ha