Summer is a good time to explore the back-roads, but you don’t have to leave the city to find them. The alleys, or laneways, are the back routes of the city. Some lanes are like lush outdoor art galleries, with weed trees poking up through the concrete and graffiti murals on garage doors, while others are decidedly big-city, with broken glass and smelly garbage.

They’re found mostly in the older parts of the city, though not exclusively. If you’re walking or cycling to your destination, and not in a rush, trying getting around using laneways as much as possible; the city seems different when viewed from its backside.

Here are a few places to check out this summer (a smartphone with a maps app can be helpful).

Toronto’s haphazard urban design produced some laneway oddities that are a hybrid of alley and proper street. One such place is Jersey Ave., running south from Harbord St. between Grace and Clinton Sts., it’s an odd mix of little homes and garages that runs almost as far as College St.

Once on College, walk east to Croft St., two blocks past Bathurst St., for another hybrid with some interesting laneway housing. When there check out the mural depicting the great Toronto fire of 1904 and its only casualty, explosives expert John Croft, who died clearing debris a few days later.

In the Summerhill neighbourhood walk east along Shaftesbury Ave. from the Summerhill subway exit to the first alley called Shaftesbury Pl., and find the wonderful laneway house designed by Toronto architecture firm superkül. Covered in rusting steel, it references the blacksmith shop and horse shed that were once in its place, rough, workaday operations we don’t see much of in the city today. However a few doors down find the United Marble Co., an unlikely light-industrial concern, established long before Toronto’s residents associations opposed everything and anything. When open, dust-covered workers cutting stone are visible inside, making this lane feel like a portal to an earlier time.

All around the city there are interesting lanes behind retail strips, extending far beyond downtown, alleys like the one parallel to Bloor St. W. near Royal York Rd. in Etobicoke, or along the north side of Dundas St. W. in The Junction, or even behind many of the strip malls in North York or Scarborough. Sometimes, especially on summer evenings, back doors to restaurants will be open, affording sneak peaks of the action in the kitchen. There are also the great ramshackle decks and gardens created by people who live on top of the shops, a do-it-yourself urbanism that is radically different than what’s out front.

For a long trek through this kind of landscape follow the laneways along the north side of St. Clair Ave. W., heading west, beginning around Vaughan Rd. They aren’t continuous, and some detours are necessary — keep that smartphone handy — but they’re busy, as many cyclists use them as an alternative to the narrow lanes of St. Clair. Until Dufferin St. these lanes follow the approximate preamalgamation border of the old City of York and City of Toronto; Toronto got the riches of St. Clair’s retail tax base in this deal. At Winona Dr. and Barrie Ave. the slope of buried Garrison Creek is quite visible where the tiny Russian Orthodox Church of the Holy Resurrection sits on its former banks.

Beyond Dufferin, the lanes continue to Prospect Cemetery and Masoleum, where an alley runs along its brick wall up to Rogers Rd. There, head west to the lane that begins on the left side of St. Nicholas of Bari Catholic school called Bronoco Ave. This is hill country and Bronoco rises above and past the school with panoramic views of Etobicoke and beyond.

Toronto: a humble kind of city that hides its greatest views in its back alleys.

Shawn Micallef writes every Friday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef

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