The Lunchtime Tourist: Guildwood Park

Rating (out of 5): 3

The Grid’s resident Brit discovers Toronto, one lunch hour at a time.

BY: David Paterson

Take a European lunch hour (i.e., a long one) and ride the Bloor-Danforth line all the way to Kennedy Station. Then jump on the 116 bus for 20 minutes and you’ll come to Guildwood Park, where Toronto’s beautiful buildings go to die.

Seventy fragments from demolished buildings have been assembled into a sculpture park here, within the formal gardens surrounding the now-closed Guild Inn atop the Scarborough Bluffs. You can find everything from the remains of the Temple Building, once the tallest in the British Empire, to the fireplace salvaged from the Annex home of Sir Frederick Banting, co-discoverer of insulin. Many of the building bits come from fancy old banks, and a casual observer could easily conclude that Toronto once looked like ancient Rome: It’s all Greco-Roman pillars and frescos.