Scarborough Bluffs
Sixty-five metres of white cliff straight down into the lake, and Bluffer's Park with a beach at the bottom. It does not look like Ontario and that is the point.
Scarborough
The east end of the city, and the best place to eat in it. A huge share of everybody who arrives in this country lands in Scarborough first, which is why its strip malls are the ones people drive across the whole region for.
Stock photograph. Not Scarborough.
Big, green and hungry
Feels like
About 40 min
To Union Station
Food, space and the Bluffs
Go for
How to say it
Scarbrough: three syllables at the outside, and most people just say Scarb. Sounding out all four vowels is the tell. Locals identify by intersection, not by neighbourhood: “Markham and Lawrence”, “Kennedy and Sheppard”.
Heads up
It is enormous and the transit between the main corridors is thin. Where in Scarborough matters more than almost anywhere else in the city: twenty minutes apart on the map can be an hour apart on a bus.
Who to go and watch
The clubs, and which ones you can actually get in to see.
CEBL basketball
Scarborough Shooting Stars
Professional summer basketball in a two-thousand-seat room, which means every seat is a good one. Season runs May to August, when nothing else is on.
Where to actually go
5 things worth knowing about Scarborough.
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.
Guild Park & Gardens
Eighty-eight acres on the clifftop, scattered with the salvaged façades of demolished Toronto buildings and a marble Greek theatre. Free, open, and quietly strange.
Rouge National Urban Park
Canada's first national urban park: farmland, forest, a beach and a river, inside city limits and on a bus route.
Lawrence Avenue East
Wexford and the stretch east of it: Sri Lankan, Filipino, Caribbean, Hakka Chinese, most of it in plazas. This is the food people mean when they talk about Scarborough.
Kingston Road & the Golden Mile
The independents cluster along Kingston Road and around the new Golden Mile builds. The Crosstown LRT is slowly stitching the two together.
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”.
July
Taste of Lawrence
Wexford closes Lawrence Avenue East for a weekend and cooks. Free, enormous, and the most Scarborough thing on the calendar.
Summer
Scarborough Ribfest
Thomson Memorial Park, a long weekend, and a lot of smoke. Family-shaped and free to get into.
October
Boo at the Zoo
The Toronto Zoo (which is in Scarborough, whatever the name says) goes full Halloween for most of the month.
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.