Humber Bay Shores
The arched bridge, the butterfly habitat and the best skyline photograph in the city. The Martin Goodman Trail runs from here all the way downtown.
Etobicoke
The west end: lakefront towers along the bottom, wide lots and old trees through the middle, the airport and the racetrack at the top. It is where a lot of people end up when they want a Toronto postcode and a driveway.
Stock photograph. Not Etobicoke.
Room to breathe
Feels like
25–35 min
To Union Station
Space, and the shortest airport run
Go for
How to say it
Eh-TOE-bi-coe. The final K is silent, and pronouncing it is the single fastest way to announce you arrived last month. Locals shorten it to Eto, or just say “the west end”.
Heads up
It is very big and very varied. Lakeshore and the Kingsway feel like the city; north of Eglinton feels like a suburb that happens to be inside Toronto. Drive both at rush hour before you commit to either.
Who to go and watch
The clubs, and which ones you can actually get in to see.
Thoroughbred & standardbred racing
Woodbine Racetrack
Home of the King's Plate, the oldest continuously run horse race in North America: first run in 1860. Grandstand admission is free on most race days.
Where to actually go
5 things worth knowing about Etobicoke.
Public places, parks, markets and the streets the independents are actually on. Nothing here is invented, and nothing here is a photograph of somewhere else.
Colonel Samuel Smith Park
A figure-of-eight skating trail through the trees in winter (not a rink, a trail) and a headland full of birds the rest of the year. Free.
The Kingsway
Mock-Tudor shopfronts along Bloor West, an old cinema, and the tidiest high street in the west end.
Lakeshore Village
New Toronto and Long Branch: independent coffee, cheap and good Eastern European food, and the lake two streets south of all of it.
Cloverdale & the Queensway
Ukrainian, Polish, Portuguese and Filipino along the Queensway, mostly in plazas, mostly family-run, almost none of it on a best-of list.
The year
What comes round every year.
Keyed to a month, never to a date. Dates move, and a page that prints last year's is worse than one that says “September”.
February
Lakeshore Mardi Gras
The Lakeshore Village strip throws a winter street party. Small, free, and the antidote to a Toronto February.
June
Toronto Ribfest
Run by Rotary Etobicoke over the Canada Day stretch since the early nineties. Free entry, live bands, an enormous amount of smoke.
Late summer
The King's Plate
Woodbine's big day, and the oldest continuously run horse race on the continent. Hats are worn unironically.
HelloGTA.com
The GTA is enormous and most of it is unknown to everybody.
Including the people who have lived here twenty-five years. That is the whole brief: twenty-nine guides, and a question a week put to the region.