In an article entitled
When Did Toronto Get So Cool?, the BBC comes to a realization: Toronto is cool.
"After all, the definitive, if circular logic of coolness is that cool things don’t need to convince anyone. They don’t even care. Because they’re cool.
"That’s why Toronto is cool: it has been for a long time, and since it doesn’t feel the need to advertise the fact, most of the world doesn’t even know. Canada in general is understated in this way; it’s not very Canadian to point out one’s own awesomeness. Toronto is so cool, it might not even know it is," the article says.
Our coolness is realized by many factors. Reporter David G. Allan first started to notice it when he visited Monkey's Paw, one of Toronto's most unique bookstores, specializing in rare books. Then it was in the "Wes Anderson aesthetic" of the Drake. Furthermore in the "exceptional local [coffee] franchises."
"At the bright and airy Dark Horse Espresso Bars you’re as likely to find small groups playing cards as typing on laptops. Then there is Balzac’s, a small chain located in unique, at times historic, locations around town. The one I visited was housed inside a 1800s pump house in the Distillery District, where I sipped a bowl-sized café au lait from a balcony overlooking an enormous chandelier…My favourite coffeehouse was Kensington Market’s Café Panemar, with its retro-meets-industrial steampunk style, including track lighting of copper plumbing tubes."
The tubes fascinated the writer so much he makes a nod to Metropolis Living, the Junction-based furniture collective.
The author's desire to visit Toronto was in part sparked by viewing Take This Waltz, the film by local native Sarah Polley. "…we kept asking ourselves, 'What city is that? It looks so cool. I want to go there!'" He romanticized the movie, and while staying at the Gladstone in West Queen West he "used the iPad supplied in [his] motorcycle-themed room" to look up the exact address. In true Toronto fashion, he walked there and could only think of one word to describe the experience: cool.
Read the full story
here.
Original Source: BBC