8. Yorkville Park - “The Big Rock” - 115 Cumberland Street

This 700-ton granite outcrop in the Village of Yorkville Park has become a landmark, a place to meet up with a friend, but it’s part of a series of 11 distinct environments that are part of the award-winning landscape design by Oleson Worland Architects in association with Schwartz Smith Meyer Landscape Architects and PWP Landscape Architecture.

Completed in 1994, the park was created on a strip of land that had been cleared of its Victorian houses for the Bloor subway which runs underneath. It languished as a parking lot for decades, though a well-known one, as the University Theatre on Bloor Street, an early Toronto International Film Festival venue, backed onto it.

The park's different segments mimic the lot lines of the buildings on the other side of the street, an homage to the houses that were here before, and each is a different Ontario landscape said to have been inspired by the Victorian style of collecting. The rock may be the most prominent, but there’s a waterfall, pine forest, marsh and so on. While Ontario-inspired, it’s one Toronto’s most European public parks, with formal elements and movable chairs.