The Insider's Guide to Canada's Most Iconic City — Written by People Who Live Here

Updated March 2026 • 10-minute read • Guestic

There are travel guides. And then there is this. What follows isn't a list assembled from a quick internet search — it is a collection of genuine revelations about Toronto's most iconic attractions, shaped by the experience of hosting thousands of guests in waterfront apartments just steps from these very landmarks.

Toronto has a way of surprising even the most well-travelled visitor. The city that locals affectionately call the '6ix' is home to a skyline anchored by a world-record tower, a market that has fed the city since the age of Napoleon, and a castle that once sheltered a WWII military secret. Yet what makes these places truly extraordinary is not just their size or their age — it is the layer upon layer of hidden stories that most visitors never discover.

Our properties sit between the shimmering edge of Lake Ontario and the vibrant pulse of the city core, which means our guests don't just visit these attractions — they wake up to them. Over years of welcoming travellers from every corner of the globe, we have collected the ten facts, stories, and insights that consistently produce the most wide eyes and dropped jaws. This is that list.

1. The CN Tower — It Was Built to Fix a Radio Problem

Photo by Patrick Tomasso

At 553.3 metres tall, the CN Tower is the kind of structure that changes the shape of the sky. Completed in 1976 after 40 months of construction, it held the title of the world's tallest free-standing structure for an extraordinary 34 years — a record not broken until the Burj Khalifa rose over Dubai's desert in 2010. It weighs 118,000 metric tonnes, roughly equivalent to 16,847 elephants.

But here is the fact that surprises almost everyone: the CN Tower was not built as a tourist attraction. Toronto's rapidly growing skyline in the 1960s was causing catastrophic radio signal interference, with broadcast towers unable to transmit effectively above the canopy of rising skyscrapers. The Tower was an engineering solution to a very practical urban communications problem — the observation decks and restaurant were almost an afterthought.

📍 Location: 290 Bremner Blvd — a 4-minute walk from our waterfront properties.

2. St. Lawrence Market — It Was Once a Jail

National Geographic has ranked the St. Lawrence Market as the world's best food market — a title that, once you've navigated its two floors of artisan cheese, smoked meats, fresh fish, and freshly baked bread, seems entirely reasonable. The market has occupied this site since 1803, making it one of the oldest continuously operating markets in North America.

What most visitors don't know is that the South Market building incorporates the original 1845 City Hall — and that the basement once served as a jail. The original chains are still visible on the walls. The building has therefore functioned, at various points in Toronto's history, as a seat of municipal government, a detention facility, and a temple to gastronomy. Few structures on the continent carry such a layered biography.

The culinary icon of the market is the peameal bacon sandwich — lean back bacon rolled in golden cornmeal, served on a soft kaiser roll. It is a creation entirely unique to Toronto, and if you visit without eating one, you have genuinely not been to the market.

📍 Location: 93 Front St E, Old Town Toronto — accessible by TTC or a scenic walk from the waterfront.

3. The Toronto Waterfront — The Shoreline Was Once at Front Street

Photo by Alex Shutin

The strip of parks, boardwalks, and cycling trails that lines Lake Ontario today did not exist 150 years ago. Toronto's original shoreline sat at what is now Front Street — several blocks north of the water's current edge. Everything south of that line, including the land beneath our properties, was reclaimed from the lake through decades of deliberate land-filling, a process that began in earnest in the 1850s and continued well into the 20th century.

One of the most extraordinary hidden gems on the entire waterfront is the Toronto Music Garden, located at 475 Queens Quay West. The garden is a collaboration between world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma and landscape architect Julie Moir Messervy, and it is a physical translation of Johann Sebastian Bach's First Suite for Unaccompanied Cello. Each of the garden's six sections corresponds to a movement of the suite: the Gigue section features giant grass-tiered steps that serve as a natural amphitheatre; the Sarabande is a sheltered conifer grove designed for quiet contemplation; the Courante is a swirling wildflower path that mirrors the movement's momentum.

Guests staying in our waterfront properties can walk through this living musical score every morning — an experience that begins to feel less like tourism and more like a daily ritual.

📍 Location: 475 Queens Quay W, directly accessible from our waterfront properties.

4. The Royal Ontario Museum — It Contains Fragments of Mars

Canada's largest museum of world cultures and natural history is housed in one of North America's most architecturally daring buildings. The original 1914 structure — a grand Neo-Romanesque building of stone and tile — now collides with the 2007 Lee-Chin Crystal addition, a five-interlocking-prism structure of glass and sharp-edged aluminium designed by architect Daniel Libeskind. The result is a building that appears to be exploding in slow motion from the inside out.

The ROM holds over 18 million artifacts. Among its most remarkable possessions are Martian meteorites — actual fragments of the planet Mars that have landed on Earth — alongside one of the world's most complete dinosaur collections, Egyptian mummies, and the reconstructed tomb artwork of a Ming Dynasty official. The Bat Cave is a meticulous full-scale recreation of Jamaica's St. Clair Cave, complete with 4,000 preserved specimens of 11 bat species suspended from its ceiling.

📍 Location: 100 Queen's Park — 15 minutes by TTC from our waterfront properties.

5. The Distillery District — It Was Once the Largest Distillery on Earth

Walk through the Distillery Historic District's cobblestone lanes today, past wine bars and art galleries and the warm smell of espresso drifting from Victorian brick doorways, and it is easy to forget what this place once was. By the 1860s, the Gooderham & Worts operation on this site was the single largest distillery in the entire world — an industrial titan that produced over two million gallons of whisky annually and employed much of the city's working population.

The district's 47 heritage buildings were painstakingly restored beginning in 2003 and are now the most extensive collection of Victorian industrial architecture in North America. The developers chose to preserve everything — the weathered brick, the timber beams, the cobblestones — while installing modern environmental systems underneath. The result is a neighbourhood that simultaneously exists in two centuries. It has since become one of North America's most sought-after film locations, standing in for Victorian London, Depression-era Chicago, and a dystopian New England in productions including X-Men and The Handmaid's Tale.

📍 Location: 55 Mill St, Eastern Downtown — 20 minutes by bike along the waterfront trail.

6. The Toronto Islands — Babe Ruth Hit His First Professional Home Run Here

Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel

A ten-minute ferry ride from the foot of Bay Street delivers you into a world that feels entirely removed from the city that sent you there. The Toronto Islands are a 600-acre archipelago of parkland, lagoons, and quiet cycling paths, home to North America's largest urban car-free residential community — 262 quirky cottages spread across Ward's and Algonquin Islands, where residents travel by bicycle and pull their groceries home in wagons.

The islands are not an entirely natural phenomenon. They were a single peninsula until two violent storms in 1852 and 1858 carved out the Eastern Channel, transforming the landmass into the archipelago that exists today. The Gibraltar Point Lighthouse, standing since 1808, is the city's oldest surviving structure and comes with its own mystery: the lighthouse keeper who vanished without explanation in 1815, with the only evidence of his fate being fragments discovered near the building.

Sports history was made at Hanlan's Point Stadium in 1914, when a 19-year-old pitcher named George Herman Ruth stepped to the plate and drove the first professional home run of what would become the most celebrated career in the history of baseball. That name would soon be shortened to a nickname the world knows well: Babe.

📍 Ferry Terminal: 9 Queens Quay W (Jack Layton Ferry Terminal) — steps from our waterfront properties.

7. The Art Gallery of Ontario — Frank Gehry Grew Up Across the Street

The Art Gallery of Ontario holds more than 120,000 works, from the world's largest public collection of Henry Moore sculptures to the sweeping, windswept canvases of the Group of Seven — the painters who defined how Canadians see their own wilderness. It attracts close to one million visitors each year and is among the most visited art museums in North America.

What makes the 2008 renovation by Frank Gehry so remarkable is not just the architecture — though the Galleria Italia, a 137-metre-long Douglas fir and glass walkway that overhangs Dundas Street like an overturned canoe, is extraordinary — but the personal dimension behind it. Gehry, one of the most celebrated architects of the 20th century, grew up in the neighbourhood surrounding the gallery. This was the first major project he undertook in his hometown. He described it as the most emotional commission of his career.

A less-publicised fact that guests consistently appreciate: admission to the AGO is entirely free for anyone under the age of 25. The gallery's commitment to ensuring that young Torontonians have unrestricted access to world-class art is one of the city's most generous and least-advertised cultural policies.

📍 Location: 317 Dundas St W — accessible by TTC subway (St. Patrick station).

8. Casa Loma — Its Stables Helped Win the Battle of the Atlantic

Photo by Nour Abiad

Casa Loma is frequently described as North America's only authentic castle, and that description holds up to scrutiny. Built between 1911 and 1914 for financier Sir Henry Pellatt, the 98-room Gothic Revival mansion was the largest private residence in Canada and came equipped with luxuries that would have seemed futuristic to most Torontonians of the era: a central vacuum system, an elevator, a telephone on every floor, and two organ pipes that ran vertically through the building's interior.

Pellatt's fortune collapsed after the First World War, and he was forced to abandon his creation in 1923, auctioning its contents to pay debts. The city eventually took ownership, and for years Casa Loma struggled to find its purpose. The Second World War resolved that uncertainty in an unexpected way: the castle's stables were converted into a clandestine laboratory for the development of ASDIC sonar technology — the Allied device used to detect German U-boats in the North Atlantic. The work conducted there is credited with contributing meaningfully to Allied naval superiority. The research was classified for decades.

Today, the 800-foot underground tunnel connecting the castle to those stables houses the 'Dark Side of Toronto' photography exhibit. It remains one of the most atmospherically unusual gallery spaces in the country.

📍 Location: 1 Austin Terrace, Midtown — reachable by TTC (Dupont station) in 25 minutes from the waterfront.

9. Kensington Market — Every Building Tells a Different Immigration Story

Photo by SilBaBum

Kensington Market is a National Historic Site of Canada, but it is unlike any other historic site you are likely to visit. It has no single grand structure to anchor it, no admission fee, and no opening hours. It is simply a collection of Victorian homes in which successive waves of immigrants transformed the front yards into storefronts and the surrounding streets into a global village.

The market's history reads like a compressed immigration record of the 20th century. Eastern European Jewish immigrants arrived in the early 1900s and established the delicatessens, fish stores, and poultry markets that gave the neighbourhood its original character — the Kiever Synagogue on Denison Square, built in 1922, still serves the community today. Portuguese and Italian families arrived in the post-war period, followed by Caribbean and Latin American communities from the 1970s onward, each layering their own food traditions, languages, and architecture onto the streets. The result is a neighbourhood that smells of a dozen different cuisines simultaneously and speaks in more voices than any single visitor can fully absorb.

📍 Location: Bounded by College, Spadina, Dundas & Bathurst — 20 minutes by transit from the waterfront.

10. Ripley's Aquarium — Its Shark Tunnel Is the Longest in North America

At the base of the CN Tower, in a building that appears to have been dropped from the sky in the best possible way, Ripley's Aquarium of Canada holds more than 20,000 marine animals in 5.7 million litres of water. It is the largest indoor aquarium in Canada, and it is extraordinary.

Photo by Magda Ehlers: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-grey-shark-2832641/

The centrepiece is the Dangerous Lagoon — a 315-foot underwater acrylic tunnel equipped with a slow-moving conveyor belt, the longest of its kind on the continent. Guests glide through the middle of a habitat containing sand tiger sharks, green sea turtles, sawfish, and several species of ray while the creatures circle overhead and alongside them. It is the closest that most people will ever come to standing on the bottom of the ocean.

The Planet Jellies exhibit — one of the world's most extensive displays of living jellyfish — transforms the creatures into something approaching abstract art through colour-changing LED illumination. Open 365 days a year, the aquarium is one of the rare Toronto attractions that is as rewarding in the depths of January as it is in the height of summer.

📍 Location: 288 Bremner Blvd — adjacent to the CN Tower, 5 minutes from our waterfront properties. Open 365 days a year.

Stay Where the City's Heart Beats Loudest

The ten facts above were not discovered in a guidebook. They were accumulated over years of conversations with historians, tour guides, museum curators, and — most valuably — with the guests who stayed in our waterfront apartments and came back to the lobby with their eyes wide open, saying: 'We had no idea.'

Our properties sit in one of the most fortunate positions in the city — between the CN Tower and the lake, within walking distance of the ferry terminal, the Music Garden, the Aquarium, and the Martin Goodman Trail. From a private balcony, you can watch the sun descend behind the tower and paint Lake Ontario in colours that feel implausible. From street level, you can be inside the Distillery District in twenty minutes by bicycle, at Kensington Market in twenty-five, and at Casa Loma's secret tunnel in thirty.

Toronto is a city best understood not from a tour bus window, but from the inside — from a kitchen table with a lake view, from a bicycle on a waterfront trail at sunrise, from a balcony where the city's skyline feels close enough to touch. That is the experience our properties are designed to give you.

Ready to explore the 6ix like an insider? Browse our waterfront apartments and book your stay in the neighbourhood where Toronto's most extraordinary stories began.

© 2026 Guestic • All information accurate as of March 2026 • Experience • Expertise • Authoritativeness • Trustworthiness

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