Royal Ontario Museum Layover in Toronto

The Royal Ontario Museum stands at the top of Toronto’s Queen’s Park with a jagged aluminium crystal cut into its 1914 stone facade, and the blocks around it hold a museum of 12,500 pairs of shoes, a ravine footpath and a billion-year-old rock hauled down from cottage country.

Daniel Libeskind’s crystal cuts into the Royal Ontario Museum

Canada’s largest museum opened at 100 Queen’s Park in March 1914, in a building by the Toronto architects Frank Darling and John A. Pearson that mixed Italianate and Romanesque in heavy stone. What everybody photographs now is what was bolted onto the front of it in June 2007: Daniel Libeskind’s Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, a set of interlocking prisms a quarter glass and three quarters aluminium, sitting on a steel frame and leaning out over the pavement.

The collection behind both facades runs to more than 18 million objects across forty galleries, from dinosaur skeletons to Chinese temple art to a bat cave you walk through. Two hours is the minimum that does it justice and four would not be wasted. A timed entry ticket booked through a tours and activities platform saves standing in the queue at the Bloor Street doors, which is where the line forms on a wet afternoon. The third Tuesday night of every month is free for everyone between 4pm and 8:30pm, pre-booked online, and it is the only regular evening the galleries stay open late.

A shoebox-shaped museum of 12,500 pairs on Bloor Street

The corner of Bloor Street West and St George Street carries a pale limestone block whose roof overhangs the walls at an angle, because Raymond Moriyama designed the Bata Shoe Museum in 1995 as an open shoe box with the lid left ajar. The joke is only visible from across the street, which is the right distance to look at it from anyway.

Inside are more than 12,500 pairs covering 4,500 years, from Egyptian sandals to Elton John’s platform boots, which sounds like a novelty and turns out to be a serious social history told through what people put on their feet. Adult admission is CA$14, it is free to everyone on Sundays from noon to 5pm, and Thursday evenings between 5pm and 8pm you pay what you want. An hour covers it.

Philosopher’s Walk follows a buried creek behind the museum

A shallow wooded ravine runs south from Bloor Street between the museum grounds and the University of Toronto’s music and law faculties, and the footpath along the bottom of it is Philosopher’s Walk. The dip in the ground is not landscaping: a creek ran down this line until the 19th century, when the city buried it, and the path took over the channel it left behind.

It is about ten minutes end to end, paved, and quiet in a way nowhere else in this part of the city manages, with the backs of Victorian university buildings on one side and a glass conservatory wall on the other. On a warm day you can hear people practising through the music faculty’s windows.

A 650-tonne slab of the Canadian Shield sits in Yorkville

Cumberland Street, two blocks north of the museum, runs along a strip park made of pieces of Ontario laid end to end: a pine grove, a prairie planting, a marsh, an orchard, an alder wood. The one everybody stops at is the rock. It is granite from the Canadian Shield, roughly a billion years old, cut out of a farm in Muskoka in sections, brought south on twenty flatbed trailers and fitted back together here so the joints almost disappear.

People sit on it, which is the point, and the seam lines make it obvious the thing was reassembled rather than always here. The Victorian shopfronts across the road are what is left of Yorkville’s village high street, now occupied mostly by galleries and expensive shops. The stops worth making up here are strung out along more than a kilometre of Bloor Street and the blocks off it, with no cloakroom between any of them that will take a suitcase.

The airport train stops on Bloor Street, not only at Union

Bloor station is the UP Express stop west along Bloor Street, next to Dundas West subway station, and it turns the run out to Toronto Pearson International Airport (YYZ) into roughly twenty minutes rather than the 25 to 28 it takes from downtown. The fare is lower from here as well, since UP charges by distance rather than a flat airport rate, and trains call every fifteen minutes from about 5am to 1am.

The catch is the transfer: the subway station and the airport-train platform are a five-minute walk apart, outdoors, along Bloor and Dundas Streets, though a tunnel between the two has been under construction, so follow the signage when you arrive. Budget an hour from the museum door to the terminal. If your flight leaves from the other side of the day and you would rather be down by the water, the central Toronto itinerary covers the harbour and the old town instead.