2013/09/09: Subwayday & Sunday

Saturday: rain; Sunday: sun. That was the weather forecast (and the reality) for this weekend. So the decision was easy to spend the Saturday mostly in subways and streetcars with a roof on it, while the sunny Sunday was a perfect possibility to explore Toronto (Islands) by foot. My first destination on Saturday was Don Mills. Developed as a new town outside of Toronto in the 1950s and 1960s, today it is just a part of the city, not even at the edge of it. According to Wikipedia, Don Mills became the blueprint for post-war suburban development in Toronto and contemporary residential neighbourhoods (Prof. Gunter Gad explained something similar on the excursion five years ago, but I’m too lazy now to search for academic sources).
I also visited Scarborough’s Town Centre, which is a shopping mall. Scarborough used to be a municipality, but since the amalgamation of 1998 it is a part of the now much bigger city of Toronto. The district is mentioned very often in Toronto’s newspapers and radio stations at the moment, as the city plans to build a new light rail or subway or other subway or whatever to replace today’s “Scarborough RT", a somehow funny elevated light-rail, which has been opened in 1985 but is already “nearing the end of its life” (which you can actually hear sitting in the trains…).
The other subway lines in Toronto are not as interesting as Scarborough RT, but now I travelled all of them. I’ll know a lot more about the history of Toronto’s subway and its influence on the city’s development, when I’ve read the dissertation of Jay Young, “Searching for a Better Way: Subway Life and Metropolitan Growth in Toronto, 1942-1978.” The historian Jay Young was the guide of our interesting tour on Sunday forenoon, exploring the history of Toronto’s downtown.
After lunch break in Kensington Market (Kensington Market is famous, crowded and touristy, but it is just great!) and a walk through the area were the Toronto Film Festival takes place at the moment, we proceeded to the ferry terminal, where we – now a larger group of exchange students from Germany, Austria, France and Switzerland – started our Toronto Islands tour. Walking from Ward’s Island to Centre Island, we enjoyed the views to Toronto’s Skyline and to Lake Ontario (with 19,000 km² the smallest of the Great Lakes), the beautiful village next to Ward’s Island Ferry Dock and of course Ward’s Island Beach.
As the weather on Saturday was terrible (and as I forgot my memory card at home…), I’ll only show you sunny Sunday pictures: