Toronto - Parks and Museums


Toronto has no shortage of green spaces – or more like gold and red spaces this time of year. Museums are plentiful as well, and we visited a good number of them during our month in the city. Here are a few highlights.

Trinity Bellwoods Park


Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). Dramatic 2207 expansion to the 1914 building is appropriately known as The Crystal.


ROM's Gem and Minerals exhibit was probably the best such display we've seen. Lots of weird and wonderful stuff like this sandstone concretion from France.
(photo by Deborah)


Casa Loma - this 1914 mansion is now a museum and frequent setting for movies.


View from Casa Loma toward downtown Toronto.


Our friends Jan and Jeremy in front of the conservatory at Allan Gardens, a warm refuge on chilly days. (photo by Deborah)


Autumn blooms inside the Allan Gardens Conservatory



Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO)



Paining by Franklin Carmichael, member of the Canadian Group of Seven and probably my favorite Canadian artist.


High Park



Black Squirrels! They're everywhere.



From an amazing exhibit at AGO called "Anthropocene: The Human Epoch" about the profound effects humans are having on the earth and its processes - effects which now threaten to overshadow all natural forces. Above, a marble quarry in Italy. This photograph by Edward Burtynsky took up most of a rather large wall.


More from "Anthropocene" at AGO: Concrete tetrapods being manufactured in China. Photo of a photo by Edward Burtynsky.



Exhibit inside the surprisingly interesting Bata Shoe Museum
(photo by Deborah)



More impractical footwear.







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