Where do you take visitors to in Toronto?

When I’m taking somebody new to the city on a tour, one thing I do is bring them to the Toronto Reference Library on Yonge St. I make sure they walk in looking only at the ground as I lead them directly to the glass elevators. Once inside I hit five, the top floor, and only then let them look up.

The “reveal” is the dramatic five-storey atrium the elevator rises through, like a real life cross section of an ant farm but filled with people, books, computers and all manner of life. It’s the brain of Toronto, exposed and public. It’s never disappointed the visitors I take there, but it’s not exactly a traditional postcard kind of tourist attraction.

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A few weeks ago I heard the sentiment “there’s nowhere to take visitors here” in a conversation. It was a reference to out of town family members coming to visit. How to entertain them while out and about?

Even though there are hundreds of good answers to that question, I understood the sentiment. Toronto has always been a difficult city to market as a destination. It’s got all the elements that great destinations have and more — museums, galleries, a once-tallest freestanding structure, a castle and a giant aquarium — but it isn’t the biggest, oldest or first of very much. It’s been said that Toronto’s top tourist attraction is the Eaton Centre in terms of numbers of visitors. It’s a mall though. A rather unique mall, but still a mall.

Toronto’s charms are subtler. Tasked with selling this city is Tourism Toronto, the not-for-profit agency made of more than 1,100 members in both public and private sectors, that has had the hard job of selling Toronto not just to potential visitors but to Torontonians themselves. Over a decade ago they launched a campaign called Toronto Unlimited, a response to the SARS crisis that hurt our tourism industry. It was perhaps too-harshly scorned at the time as being vague. In retrospect it was an early attempt to capture a city that resists easy quantification, one that tried to avoid settling just for the Toronto clichés of Casa Loma or the CN Tower.

And there’s nothing wrong with those places, they are fun to go to. I can still remember my first trips to both of them on early visits to Toronto from Windsor: the city seemed both fantastically futuristic and fairy tale at once. However if you look at some of Tourism Toronto’s campaigns today, they’ve continued to pick up on the more ephemeral elements of the city beyond those places.

A current campaign of theirs is a video series called Stories from the 6ix and lets Torontonians themselves tell people what is special about this place. Thinking about all this is interesting in the wake of the international frenzy over Amazon looking for a city to host their massive HQ2 project. My colleague Edward Keenan pointed out here last week that what was remarkable about the Greater Toronto Area bid was that it didn’t beg Amazon to come; it simply laid out why this is a good place to live and work.

And despite the myriad problems we’ve got, this is the kind of place where it’s easier to say why we like living here rather than why you should visit here. Perhaps that’s the trick though, one Tourism Toronto has latched on to: the everyday life here that is interesting and good for each of us should, in theory, be interesting to other people.

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So where do you take Toronto visitors, other than the superstar sights on the postcards? Apart from the reference library, I like to show people ravines, buried reservoirs, the Queen St. graffiti alley or the backyard of Regal Road Junior Public School atop the escarpment at Davenport Rd. and Dufferin St. with has a panoramic view over the city. If it’s summer and they’re up for it, Hanlan’s Point beach on a hot day is about as unique an urban experience as there is.

Other times we’ll take a combination driving and walking tour of strip malls in Scarborough, North York, Mississauga or Scarborough. Those are boring? Ugly? Nope. They are the city’s magic: from one strip mall to another you don’t know what you’re going to get because they’re mostly populated with mom and pop shops of all sorts and are as multicultural as the city boasts itself to be. Think of them as the Eaton Centre’s little rambunctious and independent-minded cousins and the tourism potential is easier to imagine.

If my visitor is up for a walk I take them for a kilometres-long wander along Eglinton, St. Clair, Bloor, College, Dundas, Yonge or Queen, nearly continuous retail strips and interconnected neighbourhoods, sometimes fancy, sometimes not entirely scrubbed up. So many cities wish they had this kind of constant activity, with people out on the sidewalks lined with galleries, shops and cafes. Are they the greatest streets in the world? I don’t know, but I don’t care either.

By all means take people to the CN Tower. It remains the coolest thing, but don’t be afraid to show off the things great or small you like about this place. Some of these might seem a bit niche or possibly even nerdy, like taking them to the library, and they won’t challenge the Eaton Centre for sure. Maybe your grumpy uncle from Moncton won’t like it, and he’ll want to stick to the aquarium. But if you drop a morsel or two of your personal Toronto into each visit, your visitors might develop a taste for this kind of thing and this city too.

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

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