Quote:
Originally Posted by softee
People compare Toronto to New York and Chicago because it's a big, urban city with a dense core of late 19th, early 20th century walkable neighbourhoods, high transit usage and an enormous skyline and downtown core that looks and like feels a hell of a lot more like New York and Chicago than it does like LA or god forsaken Las Vegas. Its pre-war core is completely intact, contains over a million people, and bears next to no resemblance to almost every sunbelt city maybe the oldest, most urban parts of downtown LA or New Orleans. Oy vey, man.
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I'd say it's a bigger and more booming upscale version of Cleveland surrounded by LA and with lots of splatters of Brickell Miami.
The character of the suburbs is more like LA especially with the sheer amount of new detached tract housing and massive 8 to 20 lane freeways and interchanges.
It also dosent have the beaux arts and art deco skyscrapers of Chicago, and instead of a centralized core it has a multi-nodular series of 'downtowns' that run from the lake along yonge street all the way to the 407. Most of these impressive suburban highrise clusters are exclamations on vast stretches of older fine grained 2 to 3 story commercial strips.
The distance from Bloor to the lake isnt that much bigger than the distance of Denman Street in Vancouver's west end to the Stadium skytrain station. Apart from Bay Street or Yonge and King, there isnt much that can be used for filming movies set in the financial core of downtown New York. We just lack the dramatic pre-war 12 to 20 story brick , stone, and terracotta tile clad canyons that make NY and Chicago so intensely urban.
I hope this changes as window wall falls out of favor and brick becomes a more popular material with developer and downtown continues to densify.