Famous Landmarks in Toronto
A lakeside city whose landmarks span a 1914 private castle to 1960s-70s modern towers.
Toronto's landmarks cluster close to the harbour and the downtown core, and they are almost all young: nothing here predates the twentieth century. A Gothic Revival mansion built on a midtown hilltop for a financier sits apart in stone and turrets from the concrete and steel that followed it. Civic ambition after the Second World War produced a curved modern city hall chosen by international competition and built alongside its own public square, and the railway industry then raised a concrete communications tower over the old rail lands that outgrew every earlier structure on the skyline. The mix reads less as continuous growth than as three distinct moments, each stamped in a different material and a different idea of what a landmark should be.
CN Tower
1976 · John Andrews
A grey concrete shaft that swells into a wide, saucer-like pod of observation decks partway up before narrowing to a thin antenna mast, still the tallest free-standing structure on land in the Western Hemisphere.
Canadian National, the railway company, built the tower as a communications and observation structure on former rail lands; it opened in 1976. When the railway divested its non-core assets ahead of privatisation in 1995, ownership passed to the Canada Lands Company, a federal Crown corporation. The tower held the record for the world's tallest free-standing structure from 1975 until the Burj Khalifa surpassed it in 2007, and remained the tallest tower on Earth until 2009. It contains several observation decks, a revolving restaurant roughly 350 metres up, and an entertainment complex.
- It held the record for the world's tallest free-standing structure for 32 years, from 1975 to 2007.
- The American Society of Civil Engineers named it one of the modern Seven Wonders of the World in 1995.
- Its revolving restaurant sits roughly 350 metres above the ground.
Photo: Erik Drost (CC BY 4.0)
Casa Loma
1911–1914 · E. J. Lennox
A turreted grey-stone castle with battlements, towers and a walled garden, standing on a wooded hilltop markedly higher than the streets around it — a castellated silhouette unlike anything nearby.
Built from 1911 to 1914 as a private residence for a financier, this Gothic Revival mansion stands at an elevation of 140 metres, some 66 metres above the lake below it. Its architect, E. J. Lennox, also designed several other landmarks in the city. Long since given up as a home, it now operates as a historic house museum, and its unusual architectural character, rare among its neighbours, has made it a frequent film and television location and a venue rented out for weddings after the museum closes each evening.
- It sits 140 metres above sea level, 66 metres above the level of the lake below it.
- Its architect, E. J. Lennox, designed several other landmarks in the same city.
Photo: Kanuk82 (CC0)
Toronto City Hall
1965 · Viljo Revell
Two unequal curved concrete towers cradle a low, saucer-shaped council chamber, fronted by a public square with a shallow pool — a silhouette often compared to a spacecraft that has set down among older stone buildings nearby.
This Neo-Expressionist Modern building replaced an 1899 predecessor that had grown too small for the municipal government it housed. Designed by Viljo Revell and engineered by Hannskarl Bandel, it opened in 1965 alongside the public square built together with it, later named for the mayor who championed the project. Its design came from a 1958 international competition, the first in the province open to architects from outside the country, which provoked wide debate over what a monumental public building should be and what role open competitions should play in choosing one.
- Its 1958 design competition was the first in the province open to architects from outside the country.
- The adjoining public square was designed and completed together with the hall itself.
Photo: Benson Kua from Toronto, Canada (CC BY-SA 2.0)
History
Indigenous peoples lived around the harbour for thousands of years before the British founded the town of York in 1793 as capital of Upper Canada; American troops occupied it briefly after the Battle of York in 1812. Renamed and incorporated as the City of Toronto in 1834, it grew into a business and financial centre whose surviving landmarks trace that later prosperity rather than the colonial founding: a financier's private castle raised on a midtown hilltop from 1911 to 1914, a curved city hall that replaced an 1899 predecessor and rose after a 1958 international design competition, and a railway-built communications tower finished in 1976 that briefly outranked every free-standing structure on Earth before passing to a federal Crown corporation once its builder was privatised.