As a Canadian from the west coast, having visited SF since I was a little kid about 12 times, and later, having lived in Toronto for about a year aged 20 / 21, I think this is rather apples and oranges. Overall, both areas have that metropolitan feel.
There extensive suburbs and cities link by Commuter rail in SF to Santa Clara, San Jose, etc, just as there is a GO train network. SF still has several major freeways. TO has several major freeways. And so on. Both are major "Alpha" cities and centres for texhnologiy and finance, both have big financial downtowns with very tall buildings .... OK, OK, the difference?
Due to perhaps a cold winter, Toronto, as many other Eastern Canadian and Northern US cities, have most houses, local public buldings, and even highrises, (on occasion) are made of brick. At the time of Toronto's founding, and subsequent periods of growth, (from the 20's to now) Scottish Utilitarianism was in vogue, and this reflects somewhat in the often-austere, some say "hard" feel to the city.
*
(((( Hey, Toronto has fantastic netwrk ravine parks and loads of greenspace
*[bzzzt* TO, hey, I wonder if the way they buit right to the top of Peaks in SF, totally mutilating those sacred peaks),.. be allowed if that were TO????? .... as a kid, I remeber watching from my aunt's balcony, the bare grass pointed hills, and the fog pushing up and over them Maybe TO would have respected that more.] ))))
*But Toronto maximizes what it has geographically, the flat downtown, then the slope up and along Eglinton.... in addition, Toronto has streets of Gingerbread Victorian done in Brick, and a rather elegant feel here and there, not to mention the network of small, smart steets in the central city.
What does San Francisco have, in that case?
Three essential things: 1: a sunny, mild climate; 2: An architecture that more exhuberantly expresses its historic past. 3; The redoubtably splendid aspect of its location.
Yes, SF has the Tenderloin, (bring your airsickness bag), hunters point, and a lot of bleak industrial areas
along the east shore (so does TO, along much of the lakeshore),
but the charm, the texture, the magic in SF is in the onmnispresent vies (for starters): at any point in the city where you can see down a street, any dockland, any hill, you are forced to take in the red GGB, the steep hills, -the ones you're walking up, and the cliffs and high bliffs of Marin County.
If you don't like that, there's the double-deck gigantor, The Bay Bridge (which makes a stunning way to enter the city).
Don't like either sunny weather or fog, year-round temps 12° to 25°C? You're in the wrong city, 'cause here it's like this pretty much year-round.****
(compare this with five months of winter; an up-and-down yo-yo autumn, a 13.25 day spring, and a summer of heat, humidity, and haze, back in TO -- hey sorry, TO --but that's just the way it is, you understand)
The salubrious climate of San Francisco which often includes more fog in summer than inwinter, due to the thermal trough effect of the Central Valley, and the cool, foggy Pacific on the city's west shore, is due largely to the mostly-year-round-presence of the California High Pressure zone (even more evident in LA)
The result ......... temperate sunny mild inviting weather most of the time, with winter spurts of rain, and an autumn that includes the highest average temperatures of the year. Sunny, often breezy spring months. Flowers and blooming plants year-round. Often T-shirt weather in January.
§ This, architecture-wise has the tendency to want to "bring the outside" in, and many (if not perhaps most) houses and apartments have terraces, balconies, with a palm of nearly any species studding gardens, along with cactus.
Not being made of brick, but of wood, the houses in some areas are painted in different colors.
* I do not believe this is the case much in Toronto. I have seen magnificent townhouses in the central city, but they are more or less all brick, like much of the suburbs, (though I remeber one area in Islington, wealthy and fairly recent, where many houses used white siding to give a 'farmhouse' effect)
Back to SF. The mult-colored houses give a luminosity to the city. The views, often sudden and unexpected, are heart-stopping. Whereas Toronto was founded strictly on an English/Scottish plan of principle, SF was at first Spanish, then American, and in addition SF had something Toronto didn't have on the same scale: a major economic boom brought on by the gold rush, and resulting in a lot of money coming into the city, such that it was nicknamed 'The Paris of the West'
The houses that cover the hills of san fran are about the same epoch - the Victorian houses, that is- only trimmed with style and flair done more easily with wood, but the bright white stucco of Spanish-origin designed houses.
avoiding the tenderloin, find The venerable Fisherman's wharf, North Beach, The Cliff House restaurant, in daytime, .......... (when you look out to the Pacific)
If it sounds like I'm rooting for San Fran, I'm not really. I'm trying to be ojective. Toronto has charms and aspects that are great and unique to it.
Overall, I admit having to give the ribbon to SF. It just has a beauty and invigoration, combined with classic elegance (like the 1905 Palace of Fine Arts) that seems to surpass - in beaty - TO
But hold it, right there TO. You're one of the 10 most important cities finacially in the world, big no-nonses freeways and buildings as a statement,
have a huge airport to one day rival ORD or ATL. You're the financial centre of one of the G7. Great park and green belt system. Don't lose any sleep!
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
an opinion from elsewhere
