Cashing in on some of these free birthday deals offer a great way to try out some local businesses in and around the city. Some require that you bring a (paying) friend--but hey, it's your birthday...there are few other days when guilt can be so effectively applied.

Here are the top 10 birthday freebies in Toronto, in no particular order:

Free Yoga Class

Offered by Kula Toronto, 304 Brunswick Avenue. Call beforehand to let them know.

Free Coffee

Offered by Jet Fuel Coffee, 519 Parliament Street. Like everything else at Jet Fuel, this is pretty relaxed. You may have to show I.D. to prove it's actually your birthday.

Free Admission to Ontario Place

If your birthday is during Ontario Place's summer operating season, you can get a free Play All Day Pass by showing I.D. at the Guest Services Pavilion.

Free Meal

Offered by Commensal Vegetarian Restaurant, 655 Bay Street (entrance on Elm). Come on your birthday at you'll get a free lunch or dinner if your friends spend a minimum of $30 at the buffet.

Free Round of Golf

Offered by Bushwood Golf Club, 10905 Reesor Road, Markham. If you don't mind the trek, sign up for Bushwood's eClub and get a free round of golf up to one week before or one week after your birthday.

Free (or cheap) Dry Cleaning

Offered by Parkers Dry Cleaners, several locations. Register to become a member on their website and you'll get a $10 off coupon for signing up, and other $10 coupon sent to you on your birthday if you provide them with the day.

Free Buffet

Offered by Imperial Buffet, 3120 Dixie Road, Mississauga. Receive a free buffet dinner on your birthday with the purchase of two adult buffets and valid I.D.

Free Admission to Medieval Times

Nothing says 'happy birthday' like jousting knights and a chicken dinner, right? Sign up for the Birthday Fellowship online and you'll receive free admission on your birthday with the purchase of one regular-priced admission.

Free Dance Class

Offered by Java Dance, 22 Dorchester Avenue. Receive a free dance class if your birthday is three days before or three days after the inclusive Sunday evening lesson.

Free Gelato

Offered by Hotel Gelato, 532 Eglinton Avenue. Sign up for their newsletter and get a free gelato on your birthday.

Did I miss something? Add more birthday freebies to the comments below.

Photo by Tara Noelle in the blogTO Flickr pool

Yet, the world of social media can be a touchy subject for sports teams. The teams themselves are certainly active on sites like Facebook, and have big followings on Twitter. The Leafs, @mapleleafs, have over 30,000 followers and do a great job of constantly updating, and actually talking to fans. The Raptors, @Raptors, have over 23,000 and share photos and live-Tweet games. The Jays, though in the off-season, are still active on their @BlueJays Twitter account to keep their over 15,000 followers happy. And the Toronto FC (@TorontoFC, over 6,000 followers) and the Argos (@TorontoArgos, almost 4,000 followers) have small but loyal followings.

But what about when the players get involved? Teams across all pro sports leagues are increasingly getting their players tweeting, updating their Facebook pages, and blogging in order to engage fans and give a glimpse into a pro athlete's life. It's not always a good idea to give athletes a soapbox online, as you'll read, but they're Tweeting away nonetheless. Here are the top 10 Toronto athletes on Twitter, ranked by their followers - and no, Chris Bosh isn't on the list anymore.

Toronto Maple Leafs
@mkomisarek
Mike Komisarek
Followers: 15,067
Twitter style: If "not Tweeting for months" is a Twitter style, then Komisarek is acing it. He only has 168 Tweets, many of them from the off season. He did share some interesting updates about training camp, but I'm sure fans want to see some insight now that the season is in full swing.

@armdog
Colby Armstrong
Followers: 14,249
Twitter style: Armstrong is definitely more active than Komisarek, but here's his Twitter style: talk to other Leafs players and send out text-only Tweets. His stream is sprinkled with @ replies and links, but it's mostly just updates about Dexter, RealSports bar and his media appearances.

@bozie42
Tyler Bozak
Followers: 11,328
Twitter style: Bozak only has 136 Tweets, but he actually replies to fans, ReTweets them, and thanks them for their support on Twitter.

The Leafs have had a problem with fake accounts (trust me, @TheRealVersteeg isn't the real Versteeg). They posted this video recently to go over the only players who are actually on Twitter, so be wary of any impostors. You can read the players' insights about Twitter in this recent Toronto Star article.

Toronto Raptors
@DeMar_DoRozan
DeMar DeRozan
Followers: 56,549
Twitter style: Demar is one of the most active Raptor player on Twitter. He's posted almost 20 Tweets already today, many to fans. But quantity doesn't always mean quality - he doesn't offer much insight into his experiences on the Raptors beyond Tweets like "Dang, I'm not in the dunk contest this year?" But you definitely get a sense of his life outside of basketball, which seems to include a lot of YouTube videos and Call of Duty.

@IAmAmirJohnson
Amir Johnson
Followers: 16,141
Twitter style: Amir ReTweets his fellow players and photos from fans, and talks to fans and followers often. Also, if you're interested, he recently bought a Shake Weight - now that's insight you'd only find on Twitter.

@Sonny13
Sonny Weems
Followers: 15,686
Twitter style: Weems Tweets about basketball (duh), but also talks about his love for other sports (even curling) and interacts with fans.

Player Reggie Evans didn't make the list (he's only at 12,000 followers) but he often gives away tickets to games on his account, so make sure you follow. Andrea Bargnani might be a leading scorer on the team, but he hasn't passed the 10,000 follower mark yet - maybe he'll make the list next year. And the above players are just a few of the Raptors players on Twitter - they are many more engaged players, including Julian Wright and Jerryd Bayless. And, if you're interested, you can even follow The Raptor. Who wouldn't want to follow a mascot?

Toronto Blue Jays
@lunchboxhero45
Travis Snider
Followers: 5,379
Twitter style: Obviously it's the off-season for the Jays, so the players can't give insight into the season. But Snider is still active, Tweeting to fans, other Jays players and even trying to get other Jays players on Twitter (we'll see if he can successfully sign Adam Lind up).

@VernonWells10
Vernon Wells
Followers: 5,238
Twitter style: Wells was active on Twitter until late December - maybe he just needs the 2011 season to kick him back into shape. He Tweeted to thank fans for birthday wishes, posted photos, and conversed a lot - even if they were short answers.

The Jays have several other players on Twitter, including Jesse Litsch, Brett Cecil and JP Arencibia, who are more active than the players mentioned above. It just goes to show that big following doesn't always equal better Tweets.

Toronto Argonauts
@TR65
Taylor Robertson
Followers: 529
Twitter style: Taylor might have a small following, but he's seen as the most tech-savvy guy on the team. He Tweets consistently, even in the off-season, and not just about football (Angry Birds, anyone?).

It's also interesting to note that Argos player Rob Murphy is also on Twitter at @BIGMURPH56, but he has protected his Tweets. I'm not surprised, after the CFL and Argos fined the offensive tackle earlier this year for some controversial Tweets he sent out while on a road trip to Montreal.

Toronto FC
@dwaynederosario
Dwayne De Rosario
Followers: 10,964
Twitter style: De Rosario Tweets mostly about soccer (or 'futbol'), although I learned that he recently saw 127 Hours. He also told Drake to check out an FC game next summer - let's see if he takes him up on the offer...

So what about the teams' opinion of athletes on Twitter? After all, not all athletes are articulate or interesting, and not all stay consistently active. I've spoken to MLSE's social media guy Jonathan Sinden about it in the past, and he says they encourage Maple Leafs, Toronto FC and Raptors players to adopt Twitter, and there's no resistance from management. The CFL's Jaime Stein echoes Sinden, saying "The CFL views itself as a league that is accessible and authentic and having players interact with fans on Twitter is simply an extension of the CFL's brand statement 'This is OUR league.'"

He says the recent Tweet-up at the Grey Cup was a big success, and fans got to meet players they've followed and interacted with online all year long. The advantage of having players like Robertson interact online, he adds, is that they give an alternative to their "tough guy" personas. "The interesting aspect about Rob and Taylor on Twitter is that both players are seen as big, mean offensive linemen on the field, yet off the field they are two of the nicest guys you will meet. They do a great job interacting with not only Argonaut fans, but fans of all CFL teams."

So which athletes do you follow, if any? And more importantly, why?

Lead image courtesy of the Toronto Raptors.

ABC Bakery Coffee Shop
3618 Victoria Park Avenue

ABC stands out from a sea of Chinese bakeries because of their focused selection of sweet and savory buns (80 cents - 95 cents) that are just the right size for a mid-afternoon snack. My favourite is the pineapple bun which surprisingly has no pineapple but a sugar cookie crust. Also noteworthy is the tuna bun which makes me forget about all those soggy cafeteria sandwiches I've eaten in years past. For an amazing 95 cents, a snack size chicken pot pie can be had with discernable pieces of meat.

Francesca Italian Bakery
2 Invergordon Avenue

On any given day, Francesca offers between 20-30 Italian-style cookies ($25/kg) and pastries ($2-$3.75), along with a small selection of breads and cakes. Stay for the substantial cannoli ($2.25), dusted with icing sugar and filled with either sweet ricotta or vanilla custard. The former are the ones put on display, so for those who are a sucker for custard like me, be sure to ask for the latter. They're even better the next day when the filling has melded with the still-crisp shell.

Gerhard's Cafe & Bakery
1085 Bellamy Road North, Unit 1

A celebration calls for a cake from Gerhard's. Made in the German tradition, there are around 30 different kinds ranging from Apple Crumble Torte to White Chocolate Mousse Bombe. Prices start at $19.95 for a 6-inch cake. But what if you just want a nice Black Forest cake that isn't full of preservatives and enough sugar for a room full of screaming kids? Gerhard's not-too-sweet version is made with chocolate sponge layers sprinkled with kirsch, and garnished with fresh whipped cream.

Patisserie Royale
1801 Lawrence Avenue East, Unit 9

Patisserie Royale is the mecca for Middle Eastern pastry, where phyllo, honey, and nuts are layered in various combinations to create bite-sized pleasures. Will it be Balaurieh with its shredded wheat-like top and rosewater soaked pistachios? Or finger-shaped Assabeh filled with ground almonds and smothered with syrup? At $23.00/kg, the assorted box does the trick so I'm not burdened by choice.

Montmartre Bakery
105 Midwest Road

Since 1970, the Lang family has been selling preservative-free, homestyle European bread and other delectable baked goods directly out of their mid-size bakery. Tucked away in an industrial area, it's worth the trek for this reason alone: nothing is over $5. From soft pretzels (70 cents), to white or whole wheat sandwich loaf ($1.70), to strudel with their own blueberry filling ($4.95), it's no wonder that customers buy two, three, or ten at a time. Can't eat gluten? Rice bread, buns, and pizza shells ($2.75 - $3.50) are available by special order.

Writing and photos by Helen Lee

With the aid of government subsidies and the benefit of a close proximity to the U.S., Toronto continues to be an attractive and affordable shooting location for visiting international productions. Plus, the old girl can look like pretty much any place on earth, from New York to Detroit to Raccoon City, and so countless films are shot here, and a lot of them are... well, crap.

That may seem unfair, but the truth is that for every American Psycho and A History of Violence, there are three Death to Smoochys. It all comes down to basic economics. Go cheap, or go home. With that in mind, here is my list of the 10 worst Toronto-based productions. With so many to choose from, however, it's far from definitive -- so let me know if there are any films I've missed that you think deserve this dubious honour.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)

When Toronto isn't pretending to be New York, Detroit or Chicago, it also does a bang-up job playing an apocalyptic wasteland riddled with flesh-eating zombies. What is it about our fair city and the undead? George A. Romero has been unleashing animated corpses here for years (Land of the Dead, Diary of the Dead) and Zack Snyder's surprisingly good Dawn of the Dead remake had Sarah Polley battling her way through a Thornhill mall. But did any of those films contain an elaborate final fight scene outside of City Hall? I mean, Milla Jovovich scales the damn thing and BLOWS IT UP. Or what about the crowds of Raccoon City residents trapped on the Prince Edward Viaduct? Hell, the TD Canada Trust Tower is even prominent on the poster! Toronto. Apocalypse. City Hall. The jokes write themselves.

Picture Claire (2001)

So you have a thriller directed by the legendary Bruce McDonald, written by The Eleventh Hour co-creator Semi Chellas, and starring Juliette Lewis, Gina Gershon and Mickey Rourke. Sounds like it could be pretty good, right? Or maybe a bit fun and campy? It's neither. Mistaken identity, vengeful drug dealers, and Lewis delivering what has to be the worst faux-French Canadian accent ever committed to celluloid (when she's not mute and over-emoting). On the upside, the pic is a bit of a time-capsule of Toronto in flux - a chase scene utilizes the now-defunct moving sidewalk in Spadina Station, Shampoo in Kensington Market doubles as a coffee shop, and the gaping hole in the ground that would become 10 Dundas East figures largely in one sequence. Nearly 10 years on, who would have thought Mickey Rourke would be the biggest name on this project?

Four Brothers (2005)

John Singleton deserves a lot of credit for 1991's Boyz n the Hood, especially when you consider that he wrote and directed the film at the tender age of 24. Well, lightning only struck once it seems, because all of his subsequent films have been less than stellar - particularly this Mark Wahlberg vehicle about four adoptive brothers avenging their mother's death in Detroit. Shooting for this flick was split between Hamilton and Toronto, with certain scenes playing out in Regent Park and at Grossman's Tavern and the Horseshoe. Check out a pre-Tron Legacy's Garrett Hedlund as ill-fated brother Jack, OutKast's Andre "3000" Benjamin in his first film role, and Toronto's own "Maestro Fresh" Wesley Williams in the final showdown. More homoeroticism than you can shake a stick at!

Urban Legend (1998)

Way back in 1996, a little movie called Scream revitalized the horror genre, and the market was suddenly flooded with derivative self-referential horror films starring desperate WB stars in search of an out from their contracts. Sadly, Kevin Williamson was unable to write all of them (try as he might), and so we have Urban Legend, a perfunctory slasher film about a mysterious killer offing a bunch of desperate WB stars on the University of Toronto, Ryerson and Humber-Lakeshore campuses. Watch out, Rebecca Gayheart! There's a killer in the Ryerson Athletic Centre! Watch out, Alicia Witt! There's a killer in Convocation Hall! Watch out, Tara Reid! The only thing to fear is your future.

Three to Tango (1999)

Oh, that Matthew Perry. So gay. Wait, you mean he's not? Oh. My bad. Now imagine if Hollywood built an entire romantic comedy around this very concept, and then cast Canada's own Neve Campbell as his love interest? Oh, how the sparks will fly! Add Dylan McDermott, have Toronto play Chicago, and the crowds will just flock to this picture. Is that Chicago's majestic skyline looming over the Ontario Government Building? Does Perry's Oscar work in the ultra-chic Distillery District? Is he accepting his Gay Professional Man of the Year award (ugh) in the Winter Garden Theatre? Everything about this film just feels so real and genuine, like a straight man playing gay to win a girl's heart. Now there's a plot I can get behind.

The Ladies Man (2000)

How those responsible for this film convinced the lovely and talented Julianne Moore to don clown make-up and jump Tim Meadows will remain a mystery until the end of time. Meadows takes a relatively unfunny Saturday Night Live sketch and stretches it out to an unbearable 84 minutes. (This would probably be the time to ask Mr. Meadows what he was thinking, but the imminent release of Mean Girls 2 suggests to me that thought doesn't really factor into his script selection process.) In any case, the film hits a number of popular GTA haunts, including the waterfront, the Masonic Temple, and the TD Canada Trust Centre.

New York Minute (2004)

Back when the Olsen twins used to act instead of haunt people, they attempted to bridge the gap between their childish output and more grown-up cinematic fare with this glorious little turd about two sisters reenacting the plot of Ferris Bueller's Day Off with Eugene Levy or something. And considering that the film is so New York-centric as to have "New York" in the title, why not shoot parts of it... in Toronto! Most of the Toronto scenes are interiors, but there is one particularly stellar sequence involving taekwondo, Andy Richter and Lower Bay Station. Poor Eugene Levy. Has anyone seen him recently?

The Love Guru (2008)

Toronto native Michael Myers (the comedian, not the masked killer) made this little doozy as a love letter to his home town. And what a doozy! When the Toronto Maple Leafs' star player gets into some marital trouble, Myers' Love Guru is brought in to fix things and help lead the team to Stanley Cup victory. Jessica Alba, Justin Timberlake, offensive stereotypes, toilet humour, the Scarborough Bluffs, Casa Loma, and Maple Leaf Gardens abound. Reports from the set at the time of filming characterized Myers as a bit of a tyrant, which may explain why this pic lacks the warmth of his previous projects. Oh well.

Jason X (2002)

Camp Crystal Lake native Jason Vorhees (the masked killer, not the comedian) is placed in cryogenic suspension in 2010, only to awaken in 2455 and decimate a crew of unknown actors on a soundstage in East Toronto. Seeing as the plot takes place in the distant future and on a spacecraft, Toronto doesn't make any onscreen appearances, but I once knew a handsome server at Insomnia who made his film debut in this hunk of junk as a space soldier. That's gotta count for something.

The Incredible Hulk (2008)

For some reason, Hollywood felt that Ang Lee's thoughtful Hulk adaptation needed to be erased from the popular consciousness, and so they hired the guy behind those Transporter movies to reboot the franchise. The result is this horrible (but financially successful) clap-trap, with Ed Norton angrily stomping around Knox College and Morningside Park, leaving personal assistants, Liv Tyler, and the majority of the writer's room cowering in his wake. My favourite part of this film is the epic showdown between the Hulk and the Abomination on Yonge Street-as-Harlem, right in front of Zanzibar. I mean, who hasn't gotten into a fist fight outside of that place?

Got a Toronto-based dud to share? Let us know in the comments.

Still, it's always intriguing to look back and think about what might have been.

Spadina Expressway
Proposed: 1949
Fizzled: 1971
Why it wasn't meant to be: Although a portion did get built between Wilson Heights and Eglinton Avenue (Allen Road), urban theorists and activists, including Jane Jacobs, fiercely opposed the plan. It initially appeared as though their efforts to kill the expressway were in vain, but with the election of Bill Davis as Ontario Premier in 1971, fate shifted and the project was dead.

Ballet Opera
Proposed: 1984
Fizzled: 1990
Why it wasn't meant to be: Now the site of condos, Bay and Wellesley was almost home to Toronto's Opera House. Designed, if not built, by Moshe Safdie, the proposed building was would have been iconic, to say the least. But, despite securing both the land and a $65-millon building grant from the province in 1988, when Bob Rae and the New democrats took power in 1990, the funding was cut and the project died when the Ballet-Opera House board balked at building a less expensive structure.

Eaton Centre Towers
Proposed: 1965
Fizzled: 1967
Why it wasn't meant to be: In 1966 city council had approved Eaton's plans to develop a massive retail centre around Queen and Bay that would see the demolition of all but the clock tower of Old City Hall (later in negotiations that too was slated to go), but the City and Eaton's could never come to terms on the cost/value of the site, which led the latter to pull the plug on the project rather unexpectedly.

Eglinton West Subway Line
Proposed: 1994
Fizzled: 1995
Why it wasn't meant to be: Although work began on Allen Station (which would have existed below Eglinton West) in 1994, when Mike Harris took over from Bob Rae as premier of Ontario in 1995, the project was terminated. The current plan for public transportation along Eglinton is the Crosstown LRT.

Harbour City
Proposed: 1968
Fizzled: 1972
Why it wasn't meant to be: Harbour City would have been just that -- a canal-style city out in the harbour attached to the mainland by ring road with entrance/exits at Bathurst and Strachan. Although the project had its high-profile proponents -- including Jane Jacobs who once said that it was "probably the most important advance in planning for cities that has been made this century" -- ultimately concerns over the the environmental impact of the development led to its demise.

Project Toronto
Proposed: 1968
Fizzled: 1968
Why it wasn't meant to be: Project Toronto never really got beyond the theoretical phase, but Buckminster Fuller's plan to build a waterfront university that would feature a 20-storey pyramid and "Pro-To-Cities" built in the inner harbour, would have profoundly changed this city's downtown core and its relationship with the waterfront. With plans for Metro Centre arising at the same time, Project Toronto never really went anywhere.

Metro Centre
Proposed: 1968
Fizzled: 1975
Why it wasn't meant to be: Metro Centre was, bar none, the biggest project that never came to be in Toronto. Had it been completed, Union Station would have been demolished, the CBC would have got a huge broadcasting tower, the YUS Subway line would have been extended to Queen's Quay, and basically very little would look the same in the far downtown core. Although there are a plethora of reasons Metro Centre never came to be, chief among them was the recommendation by a joint committee from the provincial and municipal governments to retain Union Station, which led the railway companies behind the development (CN and CP) to pull out.

Queen Street Subway
Proposed: 1942
Fizzled: 1980 (but there's always the DRL)
Why it wasn't meant to be: The Queen Street Subway came very close to happening on more than one occasion, but was eventually killed when it became clear that passenger demand was greater to the north.

Cambrai Avenue and Vimy Circle
Proposed: 1911
Fizzled: 1930
Why it wasn't meant to be: Part of larger plans to ease traffic congestion and alter the street map of Toronto, both Vimy Circle and Cambrai (once set to called Federal) Avenue would have given Toronto two magnificent boulevards, but ultimately Torontonians killed the projects, which were part of a question on the municipal ballot in 1930. Shortly after the stock market crash of 1929, citizens voted narrowly against the City going into debt to finance the road improvements.

Island Tunnel
Proposed: 1935
Fizzled: It hasn't really
Why it wasn't meant to be: Believe it or not, the first plan to build a tunnel to the Island was hatched in 1935 -- not only that, they actually started building the thing. With federal funds secured for the project, it looked like a go, until -- you guessed it -- a changed in power. When William Lyon Mackenzie King took office, the project was almost immediately scrapped. But that hasn't stopped it from hanging around.

Images from the Toronto Archives, York University, Zeidler Partnership Architects, and Duke 360 on Flickr.

Mark Osbaldeston's Unbuilt Toronto was, obviously, very helpful in putting this post together, though credit should also go to David Kopulos and his site Toronto Pending.

Here are the 10 lost buildings that I "miss" the most.

The Temple Building
Built: 1896
Demolished: 1970
What exists there now: Queen-Bay Centre
Why it's missed: Aside from being the tallest building in Toronto upon its completion, it was a lovely Romanesque counterpart to nearby Old City Hall.

Trinity College (original)
Built: 1852
Demolished: 1950
What exists there now: Trinity Bellwoods Park, though the original gate and women's residence still stand, the latter as a retirement home.
Why it's missed: Designed by Kivas Tully, the building was an excellent example of Gothic-Revival architecture.

The Armouries
Built: 1894
Demolished: 1963
What exists there now: Provincial Court House (University Avenue)
Why it's missed: Thomas Fuller's Romanesque masterpiece was not only the largest armoury in Canada, but just look at what replaced it.

The Board of Trade Building
Built: 1892
Demolished: 1958
What exists there now: EDS Building
Why it's missed: Originally occupied both both the Board of Trade and the TTC, the rounded building would be the perfect companion of the still-standing Flatiron building a couple streets away.

Chorley Park
Built: 1915 (started in 1911)
Demolished: 1961
What exists there now: Parkland
Why it's missed: Chorley Park was the fourth and last official residence of the Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada. Modeled after the chateaux of the Loire Valley, the opulent building was closed in 1937 due to the high cost -- paid for by taxpayers -- required to maintain the building. After stints as a military hospital in WWII and and subsequently as offices of the RCMP, Mayor Nathan Phillips acquired the building in 1960, which would have cost a significant amount to restore, with the intention of demolishing it. Still, without any replacement other than parkland, it seems a sad waste to lose such a beautiful building.

Union Station II
Built: 1873
Demolished: 1931
What exists there now: Citigroup Place (and a rather anonymous brick building)
Why it's missed: As wonderful as the current Union Station is, think of what it'd be like to have the previous iteration of the station preserved and used for another purpose.

Grand Opera House
Built: 1874
Demolished: 1927
What exists there now: Scotia Plaza
Why it's missed: A fabulous Second Empire-style building with an an intriguing history courtesy of one-time owner Ambrose Small, the millionaire that one day up and vanished, nothing like it remains in Toronto.

The original Toronto Star Building
Built: 1929
Demolished: 1972
What exists there now: First Canadian Place
Why it's missed: Designed by Chapman and Oxley, it was one of Toronto's finest examples of Art Deco architecture.

Odeon Theatre
Built: 1947-48
Demolished: 1973
What exists there now: Carlton Tower
Why it's missed: Despite its short life span, the 2300 seat theatre, with its curved marquee was everything a cinema should be (and nothing what they look like today).

Sam the Record Man
Built: 1961
Demolished: 2008-2010
What exists there now: Rubble, but Ryerson University will be building on the site shortly.
Why it's missed: Although not an architectural marvel, Sam's nevertheless was a Toronto icon. And while the neon sign may one day return in some capacity, it'll never be the same.

Update:

Here is a Google map of the approximate locations of these buildings.

Photos from the Wikimedia Commons and the City of Toronto Archives with the exception of the last, which is by spotmaticfanatic in the blogTO Flickr pool.

That local limitation also disqualifies lots of stuff that's only loosely related to Toronto, but still tagged with the city's name. I've left those out for the sake of consistency and because there's plenty of other lists out there upon which they're featured. Speaking of which, my motivation for pulling these together today is to offer something of a local counterpart to UGO's recently released The 50 Awesomest Viral Videos Under 30 Seconds Long, which, despite the length of the videos is a supreme time-waster if there ever was one.

Oh, and on the "all time" of the title: while YouTube hasn't been around that long, I use it to distinguish from the yearly roundups that we've done and will likely continue to do.

The million plus club

Cheerleader devoured by Raptor
At over 3 million views, this little stunt at a Toronto Raptors game impressed more than just the announcers.

Oasis Attack
While the incident itself isn't really funny, I love that Laim Gallagher starts to play tough guy right at the moment the attacker -- who was later arrested and charged -- is apprehended by security staff.

Mermaids debate the existence of Dinosaurs
A Toronto Zoo ad that brought the viewers out in droves -- I wonder why?

CN Tower lightning strikes
This video takes the view count crown as far as Toronto thunderstorm videos go, but one shouldn't forget Sam Javanrouh's high quality time-lapse video on the same subject.

G20 Looter
There's quite a few G20 videos that went viral -- including the now infamous Officer Bubbles clip -- but this one remains my favourite.

HPO flight
Over a million people have watched the 19.3 second flight of the Human-Powered Ornithopter.

Under a million, but still worthy

The worst parking job ever
This isn't the original version, which was pulled at some point, but it still has over 200,00 views. The title pretty much says it all as far as descriptions go...

Fire on TTC Bus
Relatively low pageviews aren't enough to keep this one off the list. I always wonder what it is that the arsonist has forgotten when he pauses and checks his coat before leaving the scene.

Sunrise Propane Explosion
This is what a massive explosion looks like at night.

Pedal car pulled over by police
I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time...

Bonus

Workplace safety
More Ontario-based than Toronto, this series of commercials made their point rather, er, dramatically. Warning: somewhat NSFW.

For more locally based viral videos, check out the The Top 10 Toronto Viral Videos of 2009. And if I've missed a clip that you thinks demands inclusion, I'd be happy to put together a reader's choice section at the bottom.

Like any list, this one is subjective. But, I should note one major proviso right from the start. This list represents those moments and events that have happened post-1967. The reasoning for this is twofold: on the one hand I think it'll make the list more relevant to readers and, on the other, 1967 seemed like a good date to separate the "old" and "new" eras, what with the Leafs record of futility since then.

So here they are, not in any particular order except for number one.

Blue Jays World Series win 1993

Even if Toronto isn't a city in love with baseball -- in particular since the 1994-95 strike -- this takes top on my list because, well, you know, it's a championship win. Needless to say, the Raptors and the Leafs haven't delivered one of those during the time period in question. But, over and above just going all the way, the 1993 win was done in the most dramatic style imaginable: a home run in the bottom of the ninth inning. I still remember watching in astonishment and glee as Joe Carter ended the series and the SkyDome went bananas. Their win the prior year was every bit as good, just not quite as dramatic.

Darryl Sittler scores 10 points against the Boston Bruins, 1976

Despite the lack of overall team accomplishments, over the years there have been a handful of elite Leafs players who have distinguish themselves with team and NHL records. Though none of them were that pretty by today's standards, Darryl Sittler's 10-point night against the Bruins will probably stand for sometime as the most points in a single game (14 players have had eight). Sittler potted a double hat trick and added four assists on a night when the expression "everything he touches goes in" was almost true.

Donovan Bailey Beats Michael Johnson at SkyDome

Even if the whole thing felt too contrived, when Donovan Bailey matched up against American Michael Johnson in a 150 metre sprint to determine who was the "fastest man alive" the spectacle alone was worth tuning in. Johnson notoriously pulled up at around the 110-metre mark, but a defiant Bailey didn't buy that he had pulled a muscle in his quadriceps. "I think what we should do is run this race all over again, so I can kick his ass one more time," he remarked in a post-race interview. And though his arrogant side was on full display, all that mattered was that he had won.

The Toronto Raptors are born, 1995 season

Although they spent their first four seasons playing out of the SkyDome and their name will forever be associated with the popularity of Jurassic Park, it's hard to remember the city's professional sports scene without the Raptors. Playoff success has been virtually non-existent, but there have been highlights over the years, from beating the Bulls in their inaugural season, to the athleticism of Vince Carter and the steady development of the recently departed Chris Bosh. Better things are surely in store for the franchise, but having NBA basketball in Toronto ain't too bad either.

Toronto FC founded, 2007 season

Like the Raptors, TFC is now an integral part of Toronto's sports landscape. I have to admit I didn't expect MLS soccer to catch on the way it has, but it wouldn't be stretch to say that TFC fans are the best in the city. Sure the Leafs have the largest following by a landslide, but with skyrocketing ticket prices, the live games just aren't as accessible or fun. Although the team has yet to make it to the postseason, they have won the last two Canadian Championships.

Tiger Woods wins the Canadian Open, 2000

I was hesitant to add a golf moment to this list, but Tiger Wood's six iron from the fairway bunker on the 72nd hole of the 2000 Canadian Open was just to good to leave off. This was, of course, during the period in which Tiger was best known for drama inside the ropes rather than his extra-marital affairs, and as far as excitement in golf goes, this is near the top. Golfers at Glen Abbey still bang six irons out of the same fairway bunker in a mostly futile attempt to recreate the shot to this day.

Mats Sundin becomes the Leafs all-time leading scorer, 2007

While Mats Sundin couldn't bring the Leafs to the promised land, fans slowly warmed to him over the years. He was never an outright superstar, but always managed to put up point-per-game numbers and was remarkably durable, which along with a long tenure in a Leaf uniform helped him to eclipse the previously mentioned Darryl Sittler as the club's all time leading scorer. It wasn't much of goal when it happened, but the ovation was a nice moment for the much-maligned captain.

Blue Jays win AL East Championship, 1985
This one makes the list partially account of personal nostalgia. I was actually at the final game of the season with the Beavers (remember them) watching from the bleachers at Exhibition stadium, and I kept the pennant that I got at the game for years. Although they'd later go on to get crushed by the Kansas City Royals, this was the best moment in Jays history until their first world series win 1992.

1987 Canada Cup

This one is a bit of a cheat insofar as the game was played in Hamilton. But, given that the arena was filled with Toronto fans, I include it here. Besides, hockey glory has almost entirely eluded Toronto since 1967, so the 1987 Canada Cup win was quite special for local fans. Not only did they get to see what some call the best hockey ever played, but this was the only occasion in which Lemieux and Gretzky played on the same line in any meaningful way.

Argos win the Grey Cup, 1983
It wouldn't be right not to include the Argos in a list of this nature, and like the Jays win of the AL East in 1985, I remember this one, too. Well, not the game so much, but the parade that made it all the way up to Yonge and Davisville (and beyond). At the time I couldn't understand what all the fuss was about, and, sadly for Argos fans, I'd imagine that's how many would feel today were they to win this year. But, forgetting their current lack of popularity, back then it was a huge deal. All you could hear on Yonge Street was that extended moan of "Argos."

Perhaps surprisingly, a number of the entries here have been published in the last five years or so. That's not to deride books published in the past, so much as to underscore the mini-boom of Toronto-based books that have come out of presses like Coach House and DM Publishers. And, for pragmatic reasons, it doesn't make much sense to recommend books that have become somewhat difficult to find or that focus on subject matter that's no longer as relevant to current readers.

Historical Atlas of Toronto - Derek Hayes
Published in 2008, the Historical Atlas of Toronto is an endlessly fascinating survey of Toronto's development -- from the standpoint of geography, transportation, population and economics -- via the many maps that have captured the city over the years. A decidedly visual book, the analysis is kept in check so as to let the maps "do the talking." And that they do, given the many full page spreads and high reproduction quality of the historical documents.

Unbuilt Toronto: A History of the City that Might Have Been - Mark Osbaldeston
Toronto has a long history of urban plans that never came to fruition, some for the better and some for the worse. Osbaldeston sheds light on numerous projects that would have profoundly changed the city, from the Queen Street subway line to the better-known Spadina Expressway to alternative designs for City Hall. Insightful analysis is paired with images and mock-ups of the many projects that give the reader a sense of what it all might have looked like.

A Guidebook to Contemporary Architecture in Toronto - Margaret and Phil Goodfellow
A handy pocketbook-sized text, this is a perfect companion for the Torontonian who likes to explore the city on foot. Short entries -- usually two to three paragraphs -- on the most significant architecture built in the last 10 to 15 years (with an emphasis on newer projects) provide readers with just enough information to satisfy mild curiosity and with a starting point for those compelled to find out more. While the write-ups could be a bit more engaging on their own, the lovely images more than make up for this minor deficiency.

Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto - Shawn Micallef
The most recently published entry on this list, Stroll makes the cut because Shawn Micallef's insightful and sometimes quirky observations are the perfect antidote to the attitude that Toronto is an uninteresting or dry city. The pace of the book matches the walking tours he describes, and the book reads like an invitation to the reader to pay more attention to his surroundings without the didactic tone that one might expect. It's impossible to read Stroll without getting at least a little excited at the wealth of interest that our built environment reveals when its really looked at.

Concrete Toronto: A Guidebook to Concrete Architecture from the Fifties to the Seventies - Michael McClelland and Graeme Stewart (editors)
Published prior to the Contemporary Guidebook, the two can be used as companion texts that cover architectural development in Toronto from the 1950s to today. More than that, however, the book takes to the task of proving just how beautiful, innovative and challenging our concrete heritage really is. It's astonishing how popular the building material was during the period covered, and the book does a good job of explaining how and why this was the case. It'll also make many readers reconsider their negative view of structures like Robarts Library, the Gardiner Expressway and the Manulife Centre.

The Shape of the City - John Sewell
I first read this book when I was in a third year Urban Studies course that focused on Toronto. It left an impact because to that point, I had yet to think much about urban planning and the profound degree to which it shaped my experience of Toronto. From the forward by Jane Jacobs to Sewell's examination of the problems associated with sprawling development and the planning of insular neighbourhoods like Regent Park, the book remains relevant as the city continues to struggle with many of the same issues he outlined more than 15 years ago.

HTO: Toronto's Water from Lake Iroquois to Lost Rivers to Low-flow Toilets - Christina Palassio and Wayne Reeves (editors)
Water is something that I, like most Torontonians, often take for granted. That's not so easy to do after a read through this collection of essays on the myriad roles water plays in our city's natural and built environment. If it sounds potentially boring, it's not. At all. The greatest strength is the diversity of the essays and their focus, be this on Toronto's geological past or how our water is treated, there's loads of interesting facts and observations about, well, HTO.

Toronto: A City Becoming - David McFarlane (editor)
If I had written this list last year, I wouldn't have included this title. On my first read I was disappointed with what I thought was the conservatism of the essays and the sparse visuals (it is after all a nice big edition, perfect for more photographs). But over the last little while I've found myself picking up again, and after a more thorough read of the essays on offer, I can say that it's grown on me. A collection that grapples with the Toronto of the 21st century, there's ample insight within these pages to make up for the old, white guy factor that originally turned me off.

Toronto's Visual Legacy: Official City Photography from 1856 to the Present
As much as I'm converting my library into a digital collection, I still find space for photography books. There's something about being able to flip through the pages of a set of archival images that I find deeply satisfying. If I have a complaint about this text, it's that I wish it had even more images. A must-read for those interested in local history.

Toronto: No Mean City - Eric Arthur
Originally published in 1964, this is the oldest book on the list. But, it really completes the trio of books on Toronto architecture along with Concrete Toronto and the Contemporary Guidebook. Arthur was a tireless activist for the preservation of Toronto's architectural legacy at a time when not many seemed to share his views. But he was also a proponent of the contemporary architecture of his time as well. This book, then, is something of a love story and a lament, which I suspect, is why it so easily strikes a chord with its Toronto-based readers.

It's hard to make a list like this without lamenting the loss of so many contenders in the long, insecure years of Toronto's "second city" status - the gothic Toronto Board of Trade building that once sat on the NE corner of Front and Yonge; the outrageous Golden Lion storefront on King East; the Temple Building at Bay and Richmond. If more care had been taken with the transformation of Eaton's College Street into College Park, it might have made this list; ditto if we'd bothered maintaining half the buildings that once stood on the Exhibition grounds.

In the flame war this list will doubtless inspire, buildings missing from it will be a cause for complaint. While I can't speak for fellow contributors, I'd like to say that I want to live with Will Alsop's OCAD "tabletop" for a few more years before I make it a place on any list, and that much as I appreciate Frank Gehry's AGO redesign, I think it turned out to be quite the opposite of what we thought we were getting - an immensely serviceable space for art wrapped in an unexpectedly sedate exterior. How Toronto can you get?

1. Old & New City Hall - Taken together as an ad hoc complex, it's hard to give our municipal centrepiece anything less than pride of place. Ignoring the voices bent on demolition was probably one of the best things we ever did, since leaving E.J. Lennox' red sandstone monolith in place next to Viljo Revell's still-futuristic replacement lets you take in, in one view, where we've been and where we're going.

Richardsonian Romanesque was Toronto's high style when we reached our first zenith of mercantile prosperity in the late 19th century, and you'll find examples all over the city, from U of T to the Annex to High Park and Rosedale. (You'll also find eerily similar city halls in Cincinnati and Minneapolis.) And while maintaining Lennox's sandstone exterior will be a perpetual burden in a city of road salt and ice, the periodic cleanups and restorations will give new generations a chance to appreciate the wild ornamental carvings and galleries of gargoyles and grotesques.

There are problems, of course; we still haven't figured out what to do with Old City Hall so as to let locals really appreciate it inside and out (without going to court, of course,) and New City Hall really only provides one friendly face to the city on its Queen Street side, presenting a cold wall of corrugated concrete to the rest of the city at its back. If I were a bit more paranoid, I'd think this was some sort of clever metaphor for the business going on inside.

2. TD Centre - Around the time Toronto decided it wanted to be better than just OK, someone had the mad, wild idea to hire Mies van der Rohe to design one of the soaring new office towers replacing the Victorian and Edwardian storefronts and bank buildings in our business district. It probably would have stood out more if it wasn't duplicated three more times in subsequent decades - with diminishing success - but urban columnist Shawn Micallef still calls himself a fan: "This building is likely on everybody's list but though I've been looking at it for 10 years now, and it's 45 years old, it always seems perfectly new and sharp and absolutely in style when I see it."

"It's like a moment of order in all the (wonderful) chaos of the downtown skyline, and even as it's surrounded by taller buildings and many more of similar size now than when it appeared like a Kubrick monolith on Toronto's low colonial skyline, it still stands out. An office up high in here is the only thing that could lure me into a corporate job. Maybe."

3. Royal Conservatory of Music - Originally the home of McMaster University, this Bloor St. landmark has undergone a long renovation in the shadow of the ROM's showy revamp next door, but the results, while far less radical, are much more successful, in the eyes of Phil and Margaret Goodfellow, authors of A Guide To Contemporary Architecture in Toronto.

"Complimenting the historical restoration of McMaster Hall," they write, "the contemporary expansion of the Royal Conservatory of Music creates an urban experience in this music school. The tall public atrium nestled behind McMaster Hall, acts as an entry court into Koerner Concert Hall whose white oak and plaster sideways culminate in the twisting wood ribbons that cascade behind the stage."

4. Massey College - Probably the best way to describe Ron Thom's small but very notable graduate college at U of T is postmodernism without the punch line - Thom's building evokes the gothic edifices all around it without a hint of cartoony quotation. That it was built years before this way-too-'80s style had its zenith explains a lot.

Phil and Margaret Goodfellow applaud it for doing so much in such a modest footprint: "Enclosed by residences and the social heart of the college, the quadrangle at Massey College continues the University of Toronto's tradition of cloister-like spaces with a modern twist. Ondaatje Hall, the dining hall for the college, is a spectacular space anchored by a hearth and top-lit by a clerestory visible from Harbord Street at night."

5. Summerhill Station - It's worthwhile to stand in front of this wonderfully restored and repurposed train station and recall that when it was built, this was the northernmost edge of urbanized Toronto; beyond its tracks were dirt roads and tony garden suburbs, cottages and sparse shantytowns like Earlscourt. It must have been a marvel then, and it still is today, even if it hasn't seen a passenger disembark since World War Two.

Chicago did Beaux Arts in a big way, Toronto not so much, which is why Summerhill Station stood out, even when it was at its lowest ebb just over a decade ago, its Venetian campanile clock tower vacant except for a mountain of pigeon shit. The Woodcliffe Corporation's restoration is a benchmark of preservation, from the clock tower refitting to the cleaning of the Manitoba limestone to the square and fountain outside. There are even persistent rumours that it might be returned to service as a train station, which is what Torontonians accustomed to diminished expectations refer to as "crazy talk."

6. 401 Richmond West - Compared to anything else on this list, there's nothing physically remarkable about this nearly block-long red brick warehouse that presents Richmond Street with a rank of disused loading bays, but "meta-preservationist" Adam Sobolak thinks its excellence comes from its reincarnation as a creative centre: "Not that it's particularly ultra-unique or potboiler-spectacular either as an industrial vestige or as adaptive reuse (nor should it be); indeed, its de facto adaptive reuse was well underway when Margie Zeidler arrived on the scene."

"But by applying discipline and refinement to that well-underway process, what Zeidler - the landlord as an 'architect beyond architects' - did was a feat of cultural, conceptual, and marketing brilliance: she turned 401 Richmond into the living, breathing embodiment of Toronto-at-its-best as a Jane Jacobs/Richard Florida-friendly cultural-nexus utopia so many of us love, or love to hate, or whatever. Little wonder that it was one of the stars from day one of Doors Open - and all cynicism aside re the 'cultural class' concept, when it comes to organically respecting and maximizing our existing built environment, it is an example to learn from. In a sublimely 'Toronto' way.

7. Village Green - "These four residential buildings from 1965 between Yonge, Alexander, Church and Maitland are some of the best kept apartment buildings from this era (including the round 'Vaseline Tower')," writes Shawn Micallef. "Many buildings put up at the time were built with this swinging vibe (St. James Town and others all over the city) but lost it over the years as owners began to neglect their property and installed harsh lighting or chain link fences.

"At the Village Green the grass is still very green, in the summers the fountains work (it must be like living in a Busby Berkeley film) and the units themselves are bigger than most condos are today. Because modernism is at an awkward, unloved stage in its lifespan, so much of it is neglected. Here we can see it as it was intended."

8. Sunnyside Bathing Pavillion - This Chapman & Oxley bauble sits all by its lonesome on a stretch of the western beaches cut off from the city by train tracks, Lake Shore Boulevard, and the Gardiner Expressway. The first two didn't actually make for much of a barrier, but the third did, when its construction wiped out the lakeside amusement park that once thrived between the Bathing Pavillion on one end and the Palais Royale on the other.

It emerges like a mirage from around a bend in the lakeside boardwalk or the Martin Goodman Trail, even when you're expecting to see it. It's a poignant reminder of the briefness of summer here, and archive photos of the adjacent beach, crammed with locals in bathing suits, underlines how Torontonians have always embraced the season with ferocity.

9. Arts & Letters Club - "This is the kind of old building Toronto should have more of," writes Shawn Micallef, "but when we were building this sort of thing, Toronto wasn't the kind of city that needed more than a few (Detroit and Montreal, on the other hand, have lots of this kind of stuff)."

"Inside the main hall the giant fireplace is like something out of Citizen Kane. If social media didn't fulfill the roll joining a 'club' used to (and if I thought I'd have time to go often enough to make it worth it), I'd become a member. If the Spoke Club down on King Street is currently fashionable, the Arts and Letters Club is eternal style."

10. Humber Bay Arch Bridge - Although not a building, just down the shore from Sunnyside is a structure that gave me hope that the city, every now and then, can make sure something truly excellent gets built. This gleaming white single span footbridge over the foot of the Humber River is probably my favorite piece of civic infrastructure in Toronto; why everything the city touches can't turn out this well only underlines that, from the moment the planning paper is written to the day the ribbon is cut, it's just a roll of the dice.

The two best things about the Humber Arch Bridge are basically the two things it isn't: 1) a merely utilitarian span connecting Etobicoke and Toronto, and 2) designed by Santiago Calatrava. Toronto does have a Calatrava or two - the Brookfield Place Atrium at BCE Place and a bridge over Mimico Creek, just a bit further west of the Humber Arch - but architects Montgomery & Sisam duplicated the same sense of soaring, skeletal, technical bravado that the Spanish architect is famous for, wildly surpassing even the grandest expectation of the municipal planning department.

Honourable Mention: 652-672 Queen West block - There are more perfectly preserved Victorian commercial blocks in the city, but this stand of buildings between Tecumseth and Euclid on Queen West is probably my favorite. Unusual for the time, it's four stories tall at the centre - towering compared to most of the neighbourhood - and a showcase of red brick masonry, the supreme vernacular building material of Toronto.

The roofline is a testament to the wear and tear of decades and different landlords - well-preserved along one stretch, crudely repaired with mismatched bricks along another. Futurist Stewart Brand once wrote an influential book called How Buildings Learn; this block of Queen is an excellent illustration of how buildings endure.

See also: the top 10 landmarks in Toronto and the 10 ugliest buildings in Toronto.

(Please disregard the map below)

The problem with Toronto isn't that we have so much bad architecture, but that so much of it is mediocre, a legacy of being the country's utilitarian "second city" for so long, combined with a "developers first" municipal bias that's encouraged expedience over excellence, even after we overtook Montreal decades ago as the country's business nerve centre. A lot of very dull buildings have gone up in the wake of our condo boom, but it's as hard to be offended by most of them as it is to get excited.

This list, then, is a collection of real clunkers, notable for either their wildly failed ambitions as their aggressive, daunting mediocrity. Compiling and shooting this list left me with a lingering sensation of collecting locations for a horror movie; not the creaky, dim Victorian haunted house type, but the cold-daylight-and-green-fluorescent-lit urban modern creepshow pioneered - no coincidence - by Toronto residents like George Romero and David Cronenberg. These are Toronto's worst buildings; be afraid, be very afraid.

1. ROM Crystal - I've tried to warm to Daniel Libeskind's showpiece addition to the Royal Ontario Museum, but the three years since it opened have seen my wary curiosity turn to impatience, anger and disgust. The interior spaces are alternately claustrophobic or disorienting; the exterior is a flailing assault on both the original building and the adjacent neighbourhood, and now that the hype is past its half-life, we're starting to get some inkling of how dispiriting it will be to live with it ten, twenty-five, or even fifty years from now.

Which might not be our problem; the Crystal is, after all, a mulligan by the museum, which tore down the 1984 Queen Elizabeth II Terraces to make way for Libeskind's starchitect turn. With that sort of precedent, some future ROM board might not consider another shot unthinkable, and since Libeskind's buildings have a spotty record for holding up to weather - Toronto has a lot of it - it might actually be imperative.

2. Hudson's Bay Centre - Located as it is at the very heart of the city, it's hard to ignore this brutalist monstrosity, and Shawn Micallef has no intention of doing so: "People bemoan the Eaton Centre for turning its back on the street, but this is worse, at arguably Toronto's most important intersection. This one puts the brutal in brutalism - another thing I'm a fan of, but it's important to call out the bad stuff. I kind of like the Bay store inside - am nostalgic for the big department stores though I wish they'd spruce themselves up British-style - but the wall of concrete along Bloor is unforgivable."

"That entire side should be blown out and replaced with glass, then we'd have a glittering box and we could see the people shopping, and it would continue Bloor's Mink Mile east of Yonge. The squat and dumpy Royal Bank branch sitting high and snooty above the intersection should be completely renovated or destroyed. It is a shame the G20 vandals didn't go further up Yonge Street and attack this one."

Adam Sobolak is willing to play contrarian, admitting that "my treatment of the place practically became a love letter, invoking Black Sabbath and rock-star debauchery, primordial ooze and sludge, gates-to-hell metaphors...and with genuine admiration of how Toronto's "worn" this oft-loathed bunker through the years." He adds, however, that "where while others might single out the Hudson's Bay Centre in toto as Toronto's worst, I'd rather focus upon the astonishingly crude pasted-on refacing of the NE corner of the HBC's parking-garage base on behalf of a postmodern condo tower looming above. As I often like to say: "if you think brutalism is bad, 'fixing' it can be worse."

3. St. Clair Place (Bathurst & Vaughan) - "I write about this building in the Bathurst chapter of Stroll and call it 'poo-brown,' says Shawn Micallef. "The brown is fine but it represents one of problems with modernism (of which I'm generally a big fan): they often screwed up how the ground floor meets the sidewalk. This could be a fantastic 'flatiron' building (Vaughan meets Bathurst here at a 45 degree angle) greeting people as they come up Bathurst towards St. Clair, but we're met with a wasteland of wasted opportunity."

"If it was redone (not torn down, but make that podium hospitable for humans) it would be a link from St. Clair to the Bathurst retail strip and the gem of a Library (a Carnegie branch) across the street wouldn't be overshadowed. Now that there is another tower on the northwest corner of St. Clair and Bathurst, it isn't the only thing that catches the eye, and it's beginning to disappear into the neighbourhood more."

4. Sheraton Centre - Many sins were committed in the name of modernism, and the Sheraton Centre is one of the worst. The area around old City Hall was once startlingly shabby, with the slums of The Ward on what would be the site of the new City Hall, and a slightly shabby but undeniably urban row of theatres and storefronts facing what would become Nathan Phillips Square.

The burst of civic pride following the opening of Viljo Revell's City Hall meant that they all had to go, and it was Toronto's tragedy that we replaced them with this monstrous slab of hotel rooms and pedestrian-repellent concrete. This is the point where modernism took on a dystopic edge, embodied in the Sheraton's "forest behind glass" atrium, which feels like something right out of '70s bummer sci-fi flick Silent Running.

Even its relationship to the civic centre it faces is dysfunctional; there's a bridge over Queen Street linking the hotel's mezzanine to the pedestrian walkway overlooking Nathan Phillips Square but if you try to enter the hotel from the bridge, you'll find the door locked.

5. Old Mill Hotel & Spa - "I still can't help singling out the Old Mill Inn & Spa as Toronto's most astonishingly wrong-headed act of heritage destruction over the past generation," writes "meta-preservationist" Adam Sobolak. "Out of an Etobicoke heritage realm of Mariposan naivety combined with McMichaelesque stiff-upper-lipped 'we know best,' the ruins of the Old Mill, whose fundamental ruinousness became an emblem of the Home Smith real estate empire as well as Etobicoke and the Humber watershed, were dismantled and rebuilt into an insultingly de-ruined, faux-timbered (but 'useful') concoction, curdling the Home Smith 'old English' vocabulary into overbearing Disney kitsch - an insult to the memory of the Old Mill ruins, an insult to Home Smith, an insult to Etobicoke, an insult to heritage, archaeology, and what have you."

"Such a solution would have been laughed out as destructively time-warped retro-Viollet-Le-Duc absurdity most elsewhere within the GTA; but Etobicoke, I suppose, constituted its own stunted heritage microclimate. Believe me, those of you who want to condemn the ROM Crystal on monstrous-carbuncle grounds - when it comes to disrespect for heritage, the Old Mill Inn is a far worse case in point. Roughly speaking, it's like Richard Serra versus Thomas Kinkade."

6. Bloor Dundas Square - My sister and her husband lived in this building in the '70s, not long after it was built, and they've both confirmed my salient memory of the place - a ghostly, moaning wind that came from the unfriendly corners of Bloor and Dundas West outside and seemed to seep through the windows and balconies. It was an atmosphere straight out of a J.G. Ballard novel, or an early Cronenberg film like Shivers or Rabid.

Sonics aside, this building is an eyesore, even without the Soviet-style stained and crumbling concrete. (Concrete was invented by the Romans - you'd think by now someone would have figured out its poor response to Toronto's rain and sun, freeze and thaw?) From a safe distance, it's more like three buildings - a banal low-rise apartment stuck on a stump of "poo brown" office block, crowning a bland stretch of retail storefront squatting on a much-tortured intersection. My sister endured roaches and abusive landlords, but a few unsettling months here sent her running to Mississauga.

7. Metro Convention Centre - The words "convention centre" tend not to evoke architectural excellence, and designing a stylish wrapper for a large, utilitarian space is probably an unwinnable war, but did anyone remember that the much-used MCC was located on a downtown city street? The MCC did manage one unlikely miracle, in making smoked glass a plausible surfacing for a bunker-like design; trudging unhappily along this inhospitable stretch of Front, there's never really anything to see behind all that glass. Not that you look, since you're either speeding your pace to get to a more pleasant stretch of street or looking for the next crossing.

The MCC also proves the inverse of my ad hoc "great architecture" rule, discovered while shooting Robarts Library for the landmarks post: I walked the whole circumference of this porridge-brown concrete hulk, and couldn't find a photo-worthy vista anywhere.

8. Wolfond Centre - Phil and Margaret Goodfellow, architects and authors of A Guidebook To Contemporary Architecture In Toronto, nominated this recent addition to U of T's architectural makeover for its inability to do one thing well. "Chock with every architectural reference imaginable," they write, "this campus life centre does not communicate strongly what it is and its relation to the overall campus."

Postmodern without being particularly playful, the jaunty copper awning slammed through the upper stories evokes a dull but pun-addicted junior faculty member donning a lampshade to help liven up a tedious mixer, to no one's particular amusement. There's not a lot going on with this building, but it still seems like too much, and probably wouldn't be much improved if it was allowed to spread out or grow a few more floors.

9. Canadian Tire (Main & Danforth) - "Canadian Tires are fine," writes Shawn Micallef. "They sell actual useful stuff, not frilly letterhead or cupcakes or special cheeses, but they seem unable to understand that when they build a store in an urban environment it's different than when they're out in the 'burbs or on the outskirts of Orillia."

"They plop down the same cookie-cutter, one storey design everywhere, so on the Danforth we're left with a 100+ metre wall of dead sidewalk. Same with the Lake Shore and Leslie location. The urban neighbourhood eventually created here will have to deal with this big box blight. Happily, they're not built very substantially and a wrecking ball or tornado could easily take care of them quickly."

10. Alan Brown Building (77 Elm) - Architect Uno Prii filled the Annex with at least half a dozen apartment buildings that showed the antic side of modernism, which are probably as close as mid-century Toronto ever got to the high style of Miami Beach or Palm Springs, and he even managed to infuse a bit of that into his Jane Exbury Towers. He tried to bring that playfulness to brutalism with this later project, and might have succeeded were it not for the massive, glaring flaw where this hospital district building meets the street.

Look up and notice the sculptural concrete work on the terraces, looking down on the street below like minimalist gargoyles, and the vertical slab window shades, now considered cutting edge passive climate control. The only problem is that they're perched atop a five-storey parking garage that treats the street below like a potential war zone, to be defended against at all odds. Those five floors of parking will doubtless come in useful when Lake Ontario rises thirty or forty feet, or when they're barricaded and booby-trapped to defend residents from a zombie holocaust.

This the second in a series of top 10 lists on Toronto architecture and landmarks. The first entry was the top 10 Toronto landmarks, which was followed by an impromptu part II, and the conclusion will come later this week with a list of the best architecture in Toronto.

Landmarks present another difficulty for the creation of top ten lists over and above the difficulty of reducing the many possibilities down to smaller set of selections. On the one hand, they do have to be wide-known in order to live up to the term (at least in contemporary usage), but, on the other, popularity alone can't - or perhaps shouldn't - really be the sole factor under consideration. The historical significance, aesthetic merit and contemporary relevance of these places or structures must be taken into account in addition to the degree to which they're recognizable.

That's why I like yesterday's list. Sure, I wouldn't have chosen all the same landmarks, but that's what made the list thought-provoking. So, in an effort to keep the conversation alive, let me present a second set of selections, some of which take heed of reader recommendations, some of which don't. I could position this as landmarks 11-20, but I think it makes sense to run it as a counter-list to our first offering. The only proviso I'll make is that I won't repeat any of Rick's selections (so no CN Tower for this list!).

Oh, and to those who say there can't be two top 10 lists of this sort, I say that's ridiculous...there are already thousands of competing versions of these lists in the minds of Torontonians. The question is, which of these two lists will readers deem better?

Lead image by Phil Marion.

City Hall (and Old City Hall)
The omission of this from Rick's list is probably my only real disagreement. The Viljo Revell designed City Hall is an iconic and important piece of Toronto architecture, and has been crucial to the city's branding efforts over the years. Photo by rh89.

Flatiron Building (a.k.a. Gooderham Building)
Despite its relative lack of height - only five storeys - Toronto's Flatiron is nevertheless a gorgeous structure, with its dignified red brick facade and rear mural by Derek Michael Besant. Built in 1892, it precedes its more famous counterpart in New York, which, though taller, wasn't completed until 1902. Photo by blainekendall.com.

Princes' Gates
Toronto seems to lack many gates of this type, which is why I suspect that the Princes' Gates (not Princess!) have become such an icon. Completed in 1927, the structure was to be called The Diamond Jubilee of Confederation Gates, but was changed to the current name when it was discovered that Edward, Prince of Wales and Price George were touring the country the year the gates were finished. Photo by Neil Ta | I am Bidong.

King's College Circle
This might a bit of a cop out, but instead of choosing University College or Convocation Hall (or even Hart House), I think it makes the most sense to label the nexus at which all of these buildings meet as the U of T landmark that makes this list. And besides, there's nothing like walking across the Circle on a brisk autumn day with the skyline in the background to make one feel like he's in a special place. Photo by wvs.

Royal York Hotel
This one is a must-include for me if only because the Toronto skyline was defined by the hotel's presence from 1929 all the way to the mid seventies when the CN Tower arrived. That presence is quickly fading, but not so fast that it doesn't make the cut. Photo by dan cronin.jpg

TD Centre
The Mies van der Rohe-designed TD Centre was Toronto's first modern office tower complex, and paved the way for the development of our skyscraper-heavy financial district. And, for black, rectangular buildings, they remain somehow remarkably pleasing to the eye. Photo by arcticlamb.

OCADU
The Wil Alsop designed Sharp Centre for design may not rub everyone the right way (though I suspect it's more widely liked than the ROM crystal), but it's impossible to argue that the building isn't dramatic, challenging and memorable. Photo by Scott Norsworthy.

High Park
This is the first one I have my doubts about. But, it seems strange to me to have a list of Toronto landmarks without a single bit of greenspace making the cut. So, the question becomes, why High Park over Trinity Bellwoods or even the Don Valley? Well, the Don Valley isn't really a park, and Trinity Bellwoods doesn't offer nearly as much territory to explore. Good enough? Photo by thru the night.

The SkyDome
Yes, I'm aware that the building is now properly referred to as the Rogers Centre, but it'll always remain the SkyDome to me. And while baseball's popularity has certainly struggled in this city over the last decade or so, and the Dome is far from the technological marvel it once was, I can't help but think that Toronto would be a radically different place were it to disappear. Photo by Chewie2008~.

The Cubes (UniTri modular "space structures")
This might not have made many people's lists, but there's something about these that scream Toronto to me, despite the fact that there are similar examples of this type of housing in Rotterdam. Inspired by Piet Blom's design, Ben Kutner took a parcel of land deemed unfit for development and built what's become a memorable bit of Toronto architecture. Photo by picturenarrative.

St. James Town
Not many would put St. James Town on such a list either, but the 1960s community housing development, the site of a recent fire that's stranded residents of 200 Wellesley St., speaks volumes about the planning philosophies of a period that saw the rise of the concrete apartment structure throughout the city. Photo by Phil Marion.

Honourable mentions:

Casa Loma, the ROM, Brookfield Place atrium, Union Station, Filmores, and the Eaton Centre.

(Please disregard the map below for the time being).

Calling a building a landmark is a lot different than appraising its quality; a landmark can be either lovely or appalling, but its importance is difficult to dispute. It was either built or evolved to fulfill a function, defining some essential aspect of the city, providing geographical guidance, or evoking some crucial stage in the city's history. Lists of best and worst buildings will follow shortly, but the 10 entries below are, to my mind and those of our contributors, crucial to the Toronto we know and love, and would measurably diminish the city if they were to vanish somehow

1. CN Tower - You could try to be coy and demote it lower on this list, or pretend to be cool and ignore it altogether, but the fact remains that this freestanding relic of pre-digital telecommunications is the gargantuan souvenir pen than anchors Toronto to the Lake Ontario shoreline like a straight pin through a butterfly.

You can be an engaged, proud, fully-fledged citizen and never ascend to its observation deck, but chances are if you've lived or worked downtown you've used it to orient yourself, or shrugged and sent visiting friends or relatives there as part of their sight-seeing itinerary. Even before it provided the title to a pretty good punk rock song, its name had become a self-contained entity, and by now there's at least a generation that's grown up in its shadow that probably can't tell you what the "CN" stands for. For those of us with memories of its epic construction, there's something jarring about getting an up-close view of the patchwork stains on its concrete and our memories of it when it was new, gleaming with the dull white glow of a slightly qualified future.

If you're a pessimist, you might even go so far as to regard the tawdry little diorama at its base as being too quintessentially Canadian - a banal interlock patio with picnic tables and a garden gazebo and cutesy flowerbeds celebrating provincial tourist destinations. Maybe I'm being overdramatic, but to my mind a structure this audacious deserves something better, like a vast flaming moat.

2. The Gardiner Expressway - The longstanding urban pipe dream of tearing down or burying the Gardiner seems to be dying a slow, hard death, but it seems like Toronto is finally making its peace with the concrete and asphalt ribbon that was punched through its lakeshore back when cars had tailfins and rock and roll had ducktails. Architect Graeme Stewart, author of Concrete Toronto: A Guide to Concrete Architecture From The Fifties To The Seventies, calls it "a heroic mid-century construction that defines the experience of entry into Toronto - the platform for the most spectacular views."

Stewart is a fan, not just an apologist, and points out hopefully that "our relationship to it continues to evolve - the winning design for the Fort York Museum showing how the spaces underneath create beautiful urban rooms." With time, it's become obvious that a curtain of condos have done more to cut us off from our lakeshore than the Gardiner's forest of columns, and that reclaiming the DMZ under the roadway is potentially more creative and rewarding than tearing it down. Reconnecting the western beaches where the Gardiner runs at ground level, however, will be a much bigger challenge.

3. Robarts Library - They called it "brutalism" for a reason, but this U of T landmark has weathered far better than most other examples of this '70s architectural genre. Shawn Micallef, Spacing editor, eye weekly columnist and author of Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto, is forthright in his affection for "Fort Book."

"I genuinely love this building," Micallef writes, "and not because I get a kick out of the near-violent reactions some people have to it. It's everything you want in a library: solid, safe, lots of passages and nooks to hide in and read. Separation from the outside is also important - almost like going on a book vacation, where the troubles of regular life are left on the sidewalk. On all the floors there are surprising windows looking out over Toronto from various angles, and equally surprising atriums on the higher floors. I'm not sure what the haters are angry about as the details are done right too: smooth wood and sculptural concrete."

"If this was nature, it would be a world-wonder and we'd all want to hike there, but since people made it, somehow it's bad. One of the best libraries I've been in. Perhaps outside could use some more activity and animation, but a library is not a store, arcade or tavern - the approach of a building like this is as important. I wonder if those haters aren't just a tad over sensitive to things."

Micallef's enthusiasm had me re-examining my own feelings for Robarts, but it was while walking around it with my camera that I was forced to admit that, in at least one way, it has something essential to great architecture - no matter where you point your lens, you can't take a bad picture of the damn thing.

4. The Bloor Viaduct - It isn't the only bridge over the Don River, but it's the most iconic - the physical symbol of the connection between the city's eastern and western halves, which are divided by the Don more firmly than Yonge Street. If you believe that Toronto has a split personality parsed neatly on either side of that river - and I do - then you know how crossing this bridge is a palpable journey from one to the other.

Besides being a setting for one of the most famous and unreadable novels about the city, it's also a fantastic symbol for the city's past and present. Finished in the final months of WW1, it was built with a lower deck meant to accommodate the subway that wouldn't cross it until 1966 - foresight and ambition that seems to have been lost today. With the recent completion of the suicide-thwarting "Luminous Veil," the bridge became a symbol of a more anxious city, willing to sacrifice unimpeded views in the name of diminished risk.

5. Knox College (1 Spadina Crescent) - There's another building on the U of T campus with this name, but the original sits athwart Spadina north of College in all its slightly decrepit Victorian haunted house glory. Queen's Park and Old City Hall do the same thing to University Avenue and Bay Street, but Graeme Stewart calls it "one of best examples of the tradition in Toronto where a major institution terminates the north end of an avenue. Spadina's Knox College is the most vibrant and urban of these terminating vistas."

Since the Presbyterian Church moved to newer digs, it's been a veteran's hospital where Amelia Earhart was a nurse, a medical research lab, and the site of an unsolved murder and a recent ghost-hunting death. For years it was inaccessible to pedestrians unless you made an illegal crossing, one eye watching for a streetcar hurtling around the shoreline of this Gothic revival island.

6. TTC signs - In the opinion of self-styled "meta-preservationist urban gadfly" Adam Sobolak, a landmark doesn't need to be a building, so he nominates the TTC's distinctive "ribbon and shield" logo: "Other than London Transport, I don't know of any other major comprehensive municipal transportation network that is so defined by its unique symbolic identity; and one which in its turn so indelibly defines one's experience of the city."

"While not as self-consciously 'modern' as other identities (London's pioneering efforts not excluded), it also transcends any inherent and equally self-conscious 'retro' qualities - as such, it may be the timeless ultimate in transit identities, anywhere. Wherever you go, encountering a TTC logo (on a t-shirt or wherever) point-blank exclaims, 'Toronto' - and more viscerally than your usual postcard New City Halls or CN Towers." Given the TTC's much-diminished reputation, it seems like its visual branding is the one thing it hasn't screwed up, though it's tempting to imagine how much it could be improved by contracting out its souvenir business to, say, Red Canoe.

7. Maple Leaf Gardens - Even in the long intermission to its post-Leafs glory days, Shawn Micallef considers the Carlton St. hockey palace, currently undergoing major renovations, a cultural and civic monument. "Admittedly being an arena, it didn't do much for the sidewalks surrounding it (though that's being changed with its new uses), but we had an arena right in the middle of a residential and commercial neighbourhood, and it worked just fine for decades."

"It's subtle Art Deco flourishes are quite lovely and I hope they leave the long marquee along Carlton Street intact as it's the best and most explicit historic plaque in the country. What a font. Though it's big, because of its urban location, it doesn't seem big enough to hold the capacity it does inside. It's such an efficient use of space. And apologies to Montreal, but on Saturday nights for so many years, this was the centre of Canada."

8. Honest Ed's - The essence of colloquial architecture, if you'll pardon my Latin, this Bloor St. bargain emporium is more sign than structure, though the current version is far more polished and unified than any time in its raucous, garish past. It's the point where Toronto is nearest to Vegas though, tellingly, it's an institution devoted to thrift, not risk.

"An undeniable landmark of the undeniably vibrant Annex and Koreatown," writes Graeme Stewart. "It is one of those icons and institutions that once you've experienced it, you'll never forget, and is representative of many layers of Toronto's history. We look forward with interest to see how it will evolve."

9. Palace Pier - The twin towers of Toronto, although their '70s luxury condo heritage is more likely to evoke turtlenecks and key parties than financial giants astride the city. In an age before amalgamation, they were the signpost for the city's westernmost border, and the gateway to Etobicoke, the eternal garden suburb. "At the mouth of the Humber River," writes Shawn Micallef, "these two (originally just one tower) are the markers for people entering and leaving the city."

"For many years they stood alone above Etobicoke's lowrise skyline, but now with the addition of new condo towers where the old Motel Strip was, we've got an almost Chicagoan 'Gold Coast' city-scape out here. Unlike that famed highrise neighbourhood along Lake Michigan, it isn't separated from the water by wide Lake Shore Drive as our Lake Shore Blvd is on the city-side. The Palace Pier towers, with their smoky disco-era glass still are the tallest around and are the ones who decide when we're in and out."

10. Ashbridge's Bay Pumping Station T - Like a Martello tower in a Jetson's landscape, this drum-like utility building has style to spare, and has long been a favourite of photographers. Fans will be outraged to discover that its crenellated roofline is being altered as part of a city project to upgrade this east end sewage treatment facility and remediate the lingering odours for which it's long been notorious.

Here's hoping that the finished result won't diminish its fabulous midcentury modern lines, a legacy of the last time when form clearly outshone function in civic architecture. There are many who wish that a building this fabulous did more than pump sewage, and Shawn Micallef says he's fond of misinforming visitors to the city that Pumping Station T is actually the city's nonexistent mayor's residence, and it is - in an alternate timeline when this would actually have been a stunning counterpart to Viljo Revell's New City Hall.

And although the truly cold stuff is still a ways off, highs above 25 C will soon be a thing of the past. So, by way of a send off, here are 10 things to do around Toronto that just aren't quite the same post-Labour Day.

Get a tan without the tan lines at Hanlan's Point
Yes, Toronto has had a nude beach for quite some time. And though it's mostly populated by men, women (and even rather progressive families) do occasionally make an appearance. And, really, what better way to ensure that you never forget this summer than by strutting your stuff for the regulars on the point. Not feeling so brave (or frisky)? Well, a trip to the Island sans Hanlan's would still be a most wonderful way to spend a summer day.

Ride your bike!
I know, I know, there's no need to stop riding in September, but I mean dedicated, bike-path exploring, recreational riding rather than the daily commute. It's such a simple pleasure to explore the Lower Don, the Martin Goodman trail around Cheery Beach and Tommy Thompson Park that it's worth a day devoted to it.

Catch an outdoor film screening
A decidedly summer activity -- even in September the nights can get uncomfortably cold -- the choice of outdoor screening options have steadily increased in Toronto. And, though it's late in the season, there are still screenings to be seen at Yonge-Dundas and Metro squares in late August. Open Roof Films is also showing their last film of the season tonight (check out our Twitter feed for a ticket giveaway).

Buy local produce from a farmer's market
Another one that can technically be done throughout the fall (depending on what it is you're eating), there's nothing quite like buying locally grown corn and chowing down on it during a warm summer evening. Similarly, biting into a tomato that's ripe enough to remind you that you're eating a piece of fruit rather than a vegetable is great reminder of the growing season that's just passed.

Have a pint on a patio
This one requires no additional description, does it? While Torontonians are known to extend patio season from April to early October, for fair weather patio-goers, the season is nearing its end.

Take in a TFC game
Featuring some of the best fans in the city, the experience of taking in a game at BMO Field has received rave reviews for quite some time. And though the team is hovering at about .500, that's all the more reason to get out there and support them. Don't like soccer (excuse me, football)? There's always the Jays...

Head to the CNE
This one's a no-brainer. Few things capture late summer in Toronto as well as a trip to the Ex. Even though there's some pretty corny stuff featured this year, a visit to the food building and the midway should be enough to satisfy that nostalgic fix. And while you're in the area, a visit to the soon-to-be-revitalized Ontario Place might be in order. Super Slide anyone?

Eat ice cream
The more wholesome sibling of the patio pint, for me, ice cream is best enjoyed when it's hot enough outside that it just might melt all over your hands.

Go for a swim
Not only are Toronto's beaches far cleaner than is commonly thought, but the city's outdoor pools are all open until Labour Day. And nothing says urban summer like splashing around in mildly polluted or chlorine-saturated water!