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This family-oriented, summertime amusement park built beside, around, and literally on top of Lake Ontario embraces its waterfront perch with enthusiasm. Water-fun options include giant waterslides and river rides. Visitors looking for more serene activities can paddle around the lagoon in a pedal boat. The Cinesphere IMAX theater, housed in a futuristic Triodetic dome, shows documentary films on subjects ranging from caves to rainforests to auto racing on its six-story screen (see Ontario Place).

In a grand 1926 building that looks like a layered cake, this retail complex is bursting with boutiques selling unusual gift items, Native art, crafts, clothing, kitchen-ware, toys, and chocolates. Many restaurants, several with patios overlooking the water, offer good fare. Harbor cruises depart alongside the terminal.

At the base of the CN Tower, this sports and large-events venue is home to the city’s baseball team, the Blue Jays, and football team, the Argonauts. When built in 1989, it had the world’s only fully retractable roof of its kind, which takes just 20 minutes to open or close. When teams are not in action, you can tour the facility and peek into players’ dressing rooms. Outside, on the northeast corner of the building, a frieze by Toronto artist Michael Snow depicts 14 spectators.

Recreational opportunities – from sunbathing to cycling to children’s amusement rides – abound on the car-free islands, Toronto’s summer playground for more than a century. Ferries depart regularly for the islands from the foot of Bay Street; the 10-minute trip across the harbor offers unparalleled views of downtown (see Toronto Islands).

This playfully elegant garden, a collaboration between famed cellist Yo Yo Ma, landscape architect Julie Moir Messervy, and Toronto landscape architects, was inspired by J. S. Bach’s First Suite for Unaccompanied Cello . Each dance movement in the suite – allemande, courante, sarabande, menuett, and gigue – plus a prelude, is represented by the plantings in one of the six sections of the garden. Summer concerts are held in the grassy amphitheater.

This six-tower complex is one of the most important pieces of architecture in the city (see Toronto-Dominion Centre). The black steel I-beams of the 1968 Toronto Dominion Bank Tower are trademark Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969), and perfectly reflect the architect’s modernist dictum that “Less is more.” In the plaza, a circular bronze sculpture, Al McWilliams’s Wall and Chairs , echoes the towers’ austerity. Below ground is a shopping mall, the only one van der Rohe ever designed.