With a Foreword by Anne Michaels

This spring, 80,000 people will take to the streets to explore exciting city spaces that are too often closed to them. They will be taking part in the Doors Open festival, a weekend-long celebration of Toronto’s civic culture and history through 100 of its finest and most important buildings.

Generously illustrated with some 200 photographs and sidebars, and accompanied by seven hand-drawn maps, Doors Open Toronto is the essential book for anyone who cares about the city they live in, for lovers of secret places, for adventurers at heart.

2.5 million people live in Toronto, but how many know the stories of their city? In this accessible, lively literary companion to the Doors Open Toronto festival -- now in its third year -- irrepressible city advocate and former mayor John Sewell takes us on a tour of the places in Toronto every citizen or visitor should explore. Step inside the old Don Jail, with its rotunda ringed with serpents and gargoyles, once home to the infamous bank-robbing Boyd Gang, until they escaped -- twice. Go to the original Don Mills to see where the lumber was sawn for the Simcoe’s 1795 country home, Castle Frank, and the paper produced for William Lyon Mackenzie’s newspaper, The Colonial Advocate. Or explore the Chapel of St. James-the-Less, with its cemetery established in response to the cholera epidemic of 1834 that killed 10% of the city’s population. Doors Open Toronto illuminates these wondrous places and nearly one hundred more, bringing life and meaning to the streets we walk down every day.

The Flatiron (Gooderham) Building, the old Don Jail, Osgoode Hall, Enoch Turner School House, One King West, Hart House, University College, St. James’ Cathedral, Gooderham & Worts Complex, George Brown House, R. C. Harris Water Filtration Plant, The Elgin and Winter Garden theatres, the Canadian Opera Company, Union Station, The Arts & Letters Club, Commerce Court North, the Design Exchange, St. Paul’s Basilica, Canada Life building, and many more…

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“The annual weekend event that attracts thousands of locals to discover Toronto buildings is over for this year, but the excellent book it led to remains available all year.” -- Toronto Star

“John Sewell [is] arguably Toronto’s most effective radical since William Lyon Mackenzie…. Doors Open Toronto … has a lot to say about Toronto even to those who couldn’t care less about it, never mind to those who live in it…. [It] has integrity. Sewell is an honest witness to the context and importance of the buildings he chooses to focus on…. It is precisely this degree of historical sensitivity that is so lacking in the current talk concerning the course of Toronto’s future development. Doors Open Toronto…gives eloquent voice to the ideals [of a participatory civil democracy.]” -- Douglas Bell, The Globe and Mail

“The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand.” -- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“This first-rate book…is sensitive, balanced, even wry…. With thumbnail sketches that seamlessly merge each building’s historic, literary, aesthetic, and, yes, political aspects, Sewell enriches the cityscape.” -- Quill & Quire

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Visit the Doors Open Toronto Web site

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John Sewell is the author of five books on Toronto, and the city’s former mayor. A lawyer by training, he has spent the last three decades as a public policy entrepreneur and activist, with an interest in land-use planning, social policy, history and urban issues. Now a columnist for Eye Weekly, John Sewell lives in Toronto.

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