Toronto Streets Book!

De Grassi Street. Avenue Road. Oriole Parkway. Bloor Street. Kipling Road. Brown's Line. Yonge Street.

These streets and roads may not have the same ring as perhaps Rodeo Drive, 5th Avenue, Pennsylvania Avenue, Michigan Avenue, or Broadway, but they are important byways within the fabulous City of Toronto, home to (among other great things) the famous TIFF (the annual Toronto International Film Festival).

Toronto is also home to North America's ONLY REAL castle: Casa Loma, found on Austin Terrace. And there's more, much more.

Take the “Toronto Streets Book!” on an informative, fun, and joyful ride along the roadways & byways of North America's best-kept secret: Toronto, Ontario, Canada!

Toronto is the FIFTH largest North American city, with a population of more than 2.7 million people, following only Mexico City, New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Houston follows Toronto in size.

Toronto is larger than DC, Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, Seattle, Vancouver, Phoenix, Dallas, Montreal, Miami, and San Francisco. In fact, Toronto is larger than the entire “Bay Area” of San Francisco, Oakland, AND San Jose, combined.

One of the many things that make this city a wonderful, beautiful, organized place is the way the streets of Toronto were designed, in a mostly horizontal and vertical grid, beginning at the shores of Lake Ontario. This simple design makes getting around so easy, for residents and visitors, alike.

Toronto's Yonge street is 1,896.0 km (~ 1,178.1 miles) long and runs north from Lake Ontario, dividing the city into east & west sections (The Yonge Street/Highway 11 continuous combination road results in the longest street in the world.).

Yonge Street is, by default, the "Main Street" of Toronto.

Many of Toronto street names have a colourful naming history.

I lived in Toronto for 16 years, and one day I was thinking about one of my favourite street names: Avenue Road. We've always joked about that name, and why it sounded so “weird”. Then there are the veddy British sounding Bloor Street, King, Queen, Kingsway, Queensway, along with Bay, Oriole, Kennedy, Islington, Eglinton (no “g”), and Yonge, itself. However, it all started with "Avenue Road".

So I thought about other streets and their naming history, and this fun project was born. I didn’t know where it would go, but friends in my little circle seem to have had fun reading through it.

I hope you will, too.

Please come and join me on a fun ride. Take a few minutes away from the mundane, boring world around us, and travel north to one of the greatest & most exciting cities in the world: a “World Mega-City”; one of the Top Ten Cities in which to live, in the world; a clean & safe “Mecca”, that is also the most diverse place on The Planet Earth.

Let's meet at the “Taste of The Danforth” food festival, in GreekTown, on The Danforth Road (Bloor Street becomes The Danforth Road east of the Don Valley Parkway (or The DVP, to the locals) . . . .

On the other hand, maybe we can meet at the fabulous St. Lawrence Market (At the corner of Front Street East and Jarvis), honoured as the “World’s Best Market” by the National Geographic magazine (In April 2012).

Is it just me, or is Toronto fundamentally all about the FOOD, and the streets we use to get to those tasty little goodies???

Bonus: I've sprinkled in a few of my poems, here & there. Hope you like them too.

Come & Read. Enjoy. Have fun . . . .

If you like what you see here, please tell everyone you know, so that they can acquire their very own, personal copy.

. . . And you DON'T have to LIVE in Toronto to enjoy the "Toronto Streets Book!"

You just have to "live".