Toronto Architecture: A City Guide

Dean Tudor is a journalism professor at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute and founding editor of the CBRA.

This is probably the best architectural guide to the City of Toronto. Other books have concentrated on walking tours, pointing out celebrated landmarks, and still other books have commented on buildings that are no longer with us. McHugh, an architectural journalist who has lived in Toronto for the past twelve years, here presents a living field guide to twenty walking tours that exhaustively cover the architectural details of virtually every building on the route, even the minor and undistinguished ones. Included are the Old Town of York, Yonge Street, the financial district, Don Vale, the Annex, and others. In all, 750 buildings arc catalogued here: houses, churches, apartment buildings, offices, factories, warehouses, and commercial blocks. And they are all fully described in historical, social, and stylistic contexts. Over 300 buildings have their own black-and-white photographs here.

Other useful data include a pretty good description of 22 styles of architecture (Georgian, neoclassicism, Gothic revival, Toronto Bay-n-Gables) with local definitions and dates, a glossary, extensive sources of data and bibliography, and two indexes (one to architects and one to the buildings). First rate, and highly recommended by a perennial Toronto walker.