Toronto [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION"Toronto will be a fine town when it's finished." Irish playwright Brendan Behan's comment is still relevant today. Toronto, Canada's largest city, continues to grow, and to flourish."Hog Town," as Ontario's capital city has been known, has a reputation for order, good government, and painstaking planning. The weeds are pulled, the shrubs are clipped, and the streets are clean. Students of city planning and residents alike have called Toronto "the city that works," "Toronto the Good" and "one of the most civilized places on earth." Visitors to Toronto remark on its well-ordered streets, its clean and efficient transit system, and the municipal pride of its residents. These factors are not the result of serendipity, but of the British colonial passion for order and organization.A pausing place on a land route between Lake Huron and Lake Ontario, the Mississauga Indians called it Toronto, or "place of meeting." French fur traders used it as a storehouse as early as 1720. Following the American Revolution, British loyalists poured northward into the province of Upper Canada, and looked for a central place from which to govern the economy and political scene of the emerging colony. John Graves Simcoe, the first governor of Upper Canada, saw the "meeting place" as a logical point from which to monitor possible incursions from south of the border, and founded the town of York in 1793, named for Frederick, Duke of York. Simcoe was a tidy sort of man, and as early as the late 1700s had established a grid plan for the future town. Simcoe's desire was to bring to Upper Canada "a superior, more happy, and more polished form of government" in order to attract the Americans back into the British fold. The adjacent inland settlements made York a natural place from which to govern the fledging jurisdiction of Upper Canada.The area surrounding the present city of Toronto is often referred to as the "golden horseshoe," because of economic overflow from the highly productive city. This was also true in the early days of the town of York. Fertile land and a fairly moderate climate gave settlers reasonable returns