German Walk T.O. - BIKE TOUR

St. Clair West Station is the northwestern entrance to Nordheimer Ravine, part of a sometimes obvious, sometimes hidden, ravine system. The path here follows buried Castle Frank Brook, one of many buried watercourses in Toronto, though it’s often marshy along here, with some running water, a reminder of what’s below. The ravine heads southeast to below the St. Clair Reservoir, a hidden, human-made lake that takes advantage of the high ground here to create water pressure. Under the Spadina Road Bridge, it passes the Russell Hill emergency subway exit as the is deep below. The ravine continues north of St. Clair where it’s called Cedarvale, and souteast of Boulton Drive it meanders much more subtly through residential neighbourhoods until it becomes Rosedale Valley and the creek empties into the Don River.

This stretch is named after Samuel Nordheimer, a Toronto businessman and music promoter born in Memmelsdorf, Bavaria, in 1824. He emigrated to North America with his brother in 1839, arriving in New York, before moving on to Kingston in 1840 and eventually settling in Toronto in 1844. The two brothers started a piano importing business that expanded into a successful sheet music publication that included the rights to “The Maple Leaf Forever”. Like the Heintzman piano company in the Toronto Junction, founded by German immigrants, the Nordheimers began manufacturing their own pianos. He married Edith Boulton in 1871 and built a house high atop the ravine on the south side of the path called Glen Edyth. Though demolished, Glen Edyth Drive still leads up the steep hill to the former mansion site.

This house at 21 and 23 Park Road was the site of the Advanced School of Contemporary Music set up by legendary Canadian jazz musician Oscar Peterson along with fellow jazz stars Ray Brown and Phil Nimmons. Formerly a boarding house, the school opened here in the 1960s after starting out in Peterson’s Scarborough basement. Though Toronto did not have a reputation as being a hot spot at the time, it was home to quite a few jazz players, some surely helped by their work at the school, and many of the big jazz acts would stop in the city when touring.

Next door to the Peterson house is Asquith Green, a small park that includes a narrative sculpture by artist John McEwan called Patterns for the Tree of Life. Installed in 1989, it has three parts. Atop a terrace there is a postmodern frame of an old one-storey Ontario house, an homage to the kind typically found all over the province and relics of pioneer days. Two howling wolf silhouettes are below on the green, as well as a small deer. Take a close look at the black iron fencing atop a small mound as it includes two inscriptions that read, “In the faces of our Children / In the sounds of our voices”.

Look up at the colourful mural by German artist Justus Becker on the side of this city-owned parking garage. It celebrates the relationship between Toronto and its sister city Frankfurt -- note the two skylines reflected in the sunglasses. The mural was painted in 2019 and instigated by StreetARToronto, a city program that has been installing artworks big and small across Toronto. As part of this particular piece, a Toronto artist will paint a mural in Frankfurt.

The parking garage was built atop the Yonge Street subway as north of Wellesley station it runs next to, rather than under, Yonge itself. Walk south to find the chain of parks also built overtop the subway. The first is named after the late George Hislop, an LGBTQ activist in Toronto, followed by Norman Jewison park, named after the famed Canadian film director who has an office in a building alongside it.

Barbara Hall Park and the 519 Community Centre are arguably the town square of the Church-Wellesley Village. Named after former Mayor Barbara Hall, a supporter of the LGBTQ community throughout her public life, the park as well as the 519 building were once home to the Granite Club. One of the club buildings was destroyed by fire in 1913 and its foundation can still be found at the back of the park by the AIDS Memorial, itself begun as a temporary installation in the late 1980s but made permanent in 1993.

After the Granite Club moved, the building you see today, with its second-floor ballroom, housed the German Harmony Club until 1939 when it moved to Sherbourne Street. Later the building became the Ulster Athletic Club, then the headquarters for the 48th Highlanders. At risk of demolition in the mid-1970s, the building was turned into a City of Toronto community centre that ultimately, and not without some controversy, offered some of the first gay programming in the city.

During Pride, the park becomes an outdoor discotheque, and Church Street closed to cars, one of the biggest queer pride celebrations and on the scale of the annual Christopher Street Day Pride events in Berlin.

Yonge Dundas Square is the commercial heart of Toronto, sometimes unfairly called “Toronto trying to be Times Square,” Many big cities have a square or intersection where the neon and giant video billboards seem to be feral, as they do here. In the 1990s there was a desire to create a new, large public space in downtown Toronto as Nathan Phillips Square at City Hall was the only real open space. The design competition was won by Brown + Story Architects, the commercial buildings here previously were razed and the square officially opened in 2002.

Look up on the east side of the square to see the Sam the Record Man neon sign atop the Toronto Public Health building, moved here after the famous record store closed on Yonge Street a few blocks north.

The square’s creation opened up a new, expansive view of the Eaton Centre, Toronto’s downtown mall and office complex that opened in 1977. Created on land owned by the now-defunct Eaton’s department store chain, the complex was designed by German-Canadian architect Eberhard Zeidler and modelled after the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, Italy. The design was ultimately required to respect the Church of the Holy Trinity on the west side of the building as well as Old City Hall. Today it’s one of the, if not the, most visited attractions in Toronto.

Here in Nathan Phillips Square at the base of the middle Freedom Arch closest to Queen Street is Toronto’s very own chunk of the Berlin Wall. This piece of the wall was purchased by Marcus Hess, an engineer from Kitchener, and flown over by the German Consulate in 1991, one of many pieces of the wall that made their way around the world.

City Hall itself was opened in 1965 and designed by Finnish architect Viljo Revell. It carried on Bauhaus traditions as craftwork is quite evident in its construction. Get up close to it and look at the details, especially the fine stone grain of the towers, the tile work and door handles. It’s an expressionistic building, with modern construction techniques that demanded new forms, like the weightless-seeming concrete in these arches and the council chamber “clamshell”. Like the Bauhaus school’s design ethos itself with three distinct wings, City Hall has a separation of uses connected by bridges, stairwells and in between places where people can meet.

Abstraction was also important to the Bauhaus, as it existed in a tense political environment and indirect ways were needed to make a statement. The Archer sculpture by Henry Moore in the square closer to City Hall continues the tradition of abstraction, and existed in its own tense political climate as its cost became an issue when City Hall opened, and it was paid for by private donation.

The southwest corner of Richmond and John Street is currently the Scotiabank theatre complex. Built in the late 1990s, it's a landmark destination, especially during the Toronto International Film Festival. The view from the lobby up the long escalator is a panorama of ever-changing downtown Toronto.

The buildings and uses of this site have changed many times. About halfway between John and Widmer Street was the Liederkranz Society Hall. Sometimes called the Toronto Liederkranz German Benevolent Society, it was a German social club that was closed due to anti-German public pressure in 1915. Afterwards the hall was taken over by the Sportsmens’ Patriotic Association Soldiers' Club. The hall itself opened in 1894 and was designed by architect Charles Wagner.

Wagner was the son of Jacob P. Wagner, a Toronto builder of German descent who was elected alderman in 1876. Active in the mid to late nineteen century, the Central Prison Chapel in Liberty Village is one of his surviving projects. Son Charles was a prolific architect from the 1880s onwards, designing residential, ecclesiastical, institutional and commercial works in Toronto and beyond. Apart from the Liederkranz hall, some of his Toronto work includes: St. Paul’s Lutheran church on College Street at Markham; the demolished Hanlan’s Point baseball stadium; the Heintzman Piano company showroom and offices that were on King Street near York; the La Plaza theatre on Queen east, now the Opera House; and the First Lutheran Church on Bond Street.

Ontario Place opened in 1971 and was this province's answer to Expo ’67 in Montreal. Designed by prolific Toronto architect Eberhard Zeidler and landscape architect Michael Hough, it's an important public space on Toronto's waterfront. Zeidler was born in Braunsdorf, Germany, in 1926 and studied architecture at the “Hochschule für Baukunst und bildende Künste” in Weimar, successor to the famed Bauhaus. He arrived in Canada in the 1950s and designed dozens of important local buildings, including the Eaton Centre, Sick Kids Hospital, and Queen’s Quay terminal.

Ontario Place was built on reclaimed land in Lake Ontario and includes the hulls of three lake freighters that serve as breakwalls along the south side. Though it’s undergone changes since opening, Zeidler’s most remarkable buildings are the Cinesphere theatre and the square pods suspended over water, all connected by catwalks. Designed in the “high tech” style, their exposed engineering gives them a look that still seems futuristic even half a century later and is a special place unlike any other in the country.

Roncesvalles is known today as the centre of Toronto’s Polish-Canadian community, but its European presence includes a local German population that grew on the west side in the latter half of the Twentieth Century. The Revue Cinema is one of the few remaining independent movie houses in the city and continues to show a wide variety of old and new movies, as well as art house films.

In 1911 there was a theatre-building boom in Toronto and that year the Suburban Amusement Company was granted a permit to build a theatre here. The name of the developer gives a sense of how “out there” this part of Toronto was at the time, with farmland not so far away as the city grew into the countryside. By the 1960s, it was a hotspot for that growing German community as German-language films were shown throughout the decade. Despite the precarious nature of independent cinema in Toronto, the Revue continues to operate, today as a nonprofit cultural community organization. Not far from here German born artist Gustav Hahn, brother of sculptor Emmanuel Hahn, painted a well-known graphic record of the 1913 "Great Meteor Procession".