The Grid’s resident Brit discovers Toronto, one lunch hour at a time.
Take a European lunch hour (i.e., a long one) and ride the Bloor-Danforth line all the way to Kennedy Station. Then jump on the 116 bus for 20 minutes and you’ll come to Guildwood Park, where Toronto’s beautiful buildings go to die.
Seventy fragments from demolished buildings have been assembled into a sculpture park here, within the formal gardens surrounding the now-closed Guild Inn atop the Scarborough Bluffs. You can find everything from the remains of the Temple Building, once the tallest in the British Empire, to the fireplace salvaged from the Annex home of Sir Frederick Banting, co-discoverer of insulin. Many of the building bits come from fancy old banks, and a casual observer could easily conclude that Toronto once looked like ancient Rome: It’s all Greco-Roman pillars and frescos.
I’d heard that the park is popular with wedding photographers, but on the chilly fall afternoon I visited, a very different sort of photography was going on. As I rounded a corner near the imposing façade of the old Bank of Toronto, I came across a curvy brunette—wearing only a lime-green bikini and some silver stilettos. She’d draped herself artistically around a Corinthian column while her male companion took photos.
Suddenly, standing near a bush, clad in a bob hat* with a camera and notebook, I began to feel like a perv and beat a hasty retreat.
* Toque
Time: 30 minutes.
Best building bit: Frescos taken from a Bank of Montreal building, which personify each province. Very campy.
Rating (out of 5): 3
Free. 191 Guildwood Parkway, Scarborough.
