Fun Facts About Toronto: 9 Surprising Stories From the CN Tower to the Ice Rink

Toronto hides some genuinely odd history behind its glass towers: a courthouse gargoyle carved to mock a councillor, an island chain created by two storms, and a hockey museum living inside an 1885 bank. These fun facts about Toronto are the kind of thing you actually remember and retell.

What are the best fun facts about Toronto?

If you want fun facts about Toronto that aren’t the usual “biggest city in Canada” line, start with the gargoyles on Old City Hall’s clock tower. Local legend holds that some of these grotesques caricatured city councillors who opposed the architect, E.J. Lennox, who even carved his own face among them. The originals wore down from weather, so bronze replicas took their place in 2002.

The Hockey Hall of Fame isn’t in a purpose built museum at all. It moved into the former Bank of Montreal building, constructed in 1885, the only building on its block that survived Toronto’s Great Fire in 1904. The bank kept operating as a branch until 1982, then sat empty until the Hall arrived in 1993.

Nathan Phillips Square looks futuristic, but the ground underneath has a much older story. The site was once part of St. John’s Ward, home to successive waves of immigrants, a Jewish community, and the city’s first Chinatown. The whole neighbourhood was cleared to build the new City Hall in the 1960s.

The CN Tower’s fame almost got overtaken twice, and it’s tied to a very specific number. The CN Tower is the tallest structure in the Western Hemisphere, standing at 1815 feet tall, and it was the world’s tallest freestanding structure for 32 years from 1975 until the Burj Khalifa took the title in 2007. On a clear day you can supposedly spot Niagara Falls from the top pod.

Underneath the Financial District runs a tunnel network most tourists never plan for. The PATH is a 17 mile network of underground pedestrian tunnels and elevated walkways connecting more than 70 buildings, eight hotels, six subway stations and a railway terminal, and yes, it links straight into the Hockey Hall of Fame too.

The Toronto Islands, right across the harbour, weren’t always islands. Two powerful storms in 1852 and 1858 separated the islands from the mainland and created the body of water now known as the Eastern Gap. Before that, it was just a long sandy peninsula.

The old courthouse next to City Hall carries a darker footnote. Courtroom 33 is at the heart of ghost stories tied to the last two men sentenced to capital punishment in Canada in 1962, and staff still report tugged robes and unexplained footsteps in the rear stairwell.

Toronto’s induction ceremony for hockey greats has its own quirky rule. Be there for the yearly Induction Day, when new players are added to the Hall of Fame during a two-hour public ceremony, but note that the museum actually closes to the public that day.

City Hall’s twin towers were picked from a genuinely massive contest. Finnish architect Viljo Revell won with his bold, futuristic concept, selected from over 500 submissions, and the building was completed in 1965, a year after Revell died and never saw it finished.

What legend is tied to Old City Hall's tower?

Look up at the clock tower gargoyles next time you’re crossing Queen Street. The story that’s stuck around for over a century says architect E.J. Lennox tucked mocking caricatures of the councillors who fought him during construction right into the stonework, and slipped his own portrait in among the grotesques as a private joke. Nobody has ever proven exactly which face belongs to which councillor, which is half the fun of the legend.

A short history of Toronto

The settlement that became Toronto was renamed from York in 1834, with the first city hall set up in a modest market building at King Street East and Jarvis Street. The city grew fast through the 1800s and into the 1900s, building the Romanesque Old City Hall in 1899 and later the modernist New City Hall in 1965, a project that displaced the old immigrant neighbourhood known as The Ward. Waves of immigration, an amalgamation with surrounding municipalities in 1998, and a building boom around the waterfront and Financial District turned Toronto into the largest city in Canada, a status it took over from Montreal in 1971.

What three dishes should you try in Toronto?

Peameal bacon on a bun is the one everyone points you toward, and the busiest spot to get it is St. Lawrence Market on Front Street, a five minute walk from Union Station. Toronto style butter chicken and roti, brought over through decades of South Asian immigration, is worth chasing down along Gerrard Street East, sometimes called Little India. And don’t skip a proper plate of dim sum in Chinatown along Spadina Avenue, where family run spots have been rolling dumplings since the neighbourhood’s early days.

What three places do most visitors miss?

Roundhouse Park, right beside the CN Tower, holds the John Street Roundhouse and a working steam train display that most people walk straight past on their way to the tower elevators. Graffiti Alley, running parallel to Queen Street West, is full of legal, constantly changing street art and rarely makes it onto a first day itinerary. And the Peace Garden inside Nathan Phillips Square, a quiet memorial to the bombing of Hiroshima, sits a few steps from the busy reflecting pool but gets almost no foot traffic.

Where	Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Best season	Late spring to early autumn for walking routes, winter if you want to skate on the Nathan Phillips Square rink
Cost	Many stops like Nathan Phillips Square, Old City Hall and Roundhouse Park are free; CN Tower and Hockey Hall of Fame require paid tickets
How long	A full day covers all ten stops at an easy walking pace

Questions people ask about Toronto