Doors Open Toronto: Illuminating the City's Great Spaces Book

With a Foreword by Anne Michaels

This spring, 80,000 people will take to the streets to explore exciting city spaces that are too often closed to them. They will be taking part in the Doors Open festival, a weekend-long celebration of Toronto's civic culture and history through 100 of its finest and most important buildings.

Generously illustrated with some 200 photographs and sidebars, and accompanied by seven hand-drawn maps, Doors Open Toronto is the essential book for anyone who cares about the city they live in, for lovers of secret places, for adventurers at heart.

2.5 million people live in Toronto, but how many know the stories of their city? In this accessible, lively literary companion to the Doors Open Toronto festival — now in its third year — irrepressible city advocate and former mayor John Sewell takes us on a tour of the places in Toronto every citizen or visitor should explore. Step inside the old Don Jail, with its rotunda ringed with serpents and gargoyles, once home to the infamous bank-robbing Boyd Gang, until they escaped — twice. Go to the original Don Mills to see where the lumber was sawn for the Simcoe's 1795 country home, Castle Frank, and the paper produced for William Lyon Mackenzie's newspaper, The Colonial Advocate. Or explore the Chapel of St. James-the-Less, with its cemetery established in response to the cholera epidemic of 1834 that killed 10% of the city's population. Doors Open Toronto illuminates these wondrous places and nearly one hundred more, bringing life and meaning to the streets we walk down every day.

The Flatiron (Gooderham) Building,the old Don Jail, Osgoode Hall, Enoch Turner School House, One King West, Hart House, University College, St. James' Cathedral, Gooderham & Worts Complex, George Brown House, R. C. Harris Water Filtration Plant, The Elgin and Winter Garden theatres, the Canadian Opera Company, Union Station, The Arts & Letters Club, Commerce Court North, the Design Exchange, St. Paul's Basilica, Canada Life building, and many more…