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Brussels: Outside of the fairytale center is a city that's ugly, boring and grimy. Tons of ethnic restaurants with bad food, terrible zoning (dumpsters in front of Gucci stores) and really disgusting public structures. The Palais de Justice looks like it hasn't been washed in 20 years. My best memory of the structure was the overabundance of public urinals around it (for the homeless to pee). Absolutely terrible city. And the EU/bureaucratic culture does not help at.all. A lot of European cities are boring. But boring AND ugly? Pass.
Oslo: I have never been more bored in my life. The Opera House is fun. The architecture is sort of okay. I tried to see The Scream at the Munch Museum. It was closed. The City Hall was beautiful but after that I just found myself kind of wandering around trying to find stuff to do. Overall a dud
Budapest: Everyone loves it. I found it boring. Beautiful architecture but nothing I can't find better in nearby Krakow or Prague or Vienna. I'd love to give it a second chance though.
Toronto: Cookie-cutter condos and really bland suburbs. Downtown is nice until you realize you could have seen it all in Chicago and saved yourself $150 in airfare. The ethnic diversity is nothing novel, particularly if you've been to New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco. So, as an American, I felt that I saw just another mundane North American city. Tall residentials are not particularly amazing. You can see better in other places. And the Waterfront is much better in Chicago with Buckingham Fountain, The Parks, Navy Pier and Museum Campus (not to mention Millennium Park, Crown Fountain, The Marina, etc). Also really unfriendly people.
Dallas: Snoozefest. I actually enjoyed Houston. Dallas was a complete bore. Downtown had nothing to do except see where Kennedy died. Quite a lame star attraction for a metro area of 7,000,000+. It seems that most people visit Arlington for Cowboys Stadium or for Six Flags or even Fort Worth for the Stockyards. But Dallas had little going for it. I guess the State Fair Ferris Wheel was nice. Then again, I was raised in Oklahoma so maybe the Cowboy culture stuff just came off as really tacky.
Shanghai: Okay. I actually DID enjoy Shanghai. But for a metro of 25,000,000, I expected more. Beijing and Hong Kong both were fantastic and I had so many things to do I ran out of time. Shanghai was rather meh on attractions. Pudong was amazing. I loved eating on the Oriental Pearl Tower while watching my pod move so I could take in more of the skyline. The Bund was gorgeous and Nanjing Road was incredible. I'm a sucker for colonial architecture. I enjoyed most of what I saw. I just thought it was less than expected for a city its size.
Jerusalem: Outside of the Old City, it can be really ugly and boring. But the Old City is fantastic so that makes it easier to swallow the boring-ness of West Jerusalem.
My favorites, still:
Athens (Enjoyed it far more than expected)
Barcelona
Chicago
Hong Kong
Istanbul
London (I've grown to like it)
Madrid
New York
Paris
Vienna
Washington (I live here so I've had the time to actually check out all the Smithsonians. The city is hard to see in one go, especially since the main attractions include tons of museums. And museum fatigue sets in quickly.)
Surprised by your impression of Toronto. Where did you go? What time of year? If you ever come again touch base with the people on the Toronto forum for better advise on where to go to help ensure you get a better taste of what Toronto has to offer.
Another poster from a few entries back agrees with my point of view:
"..Toronto: Cookie-cutter condos and really bland suburbs. Downtown is nice until you realize you could have seen it all in Chicago and saved yourself $150 in airfare. The ethnic diversity is nothing novel, particularly if you've been to New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco. So, as an American, I felt that I saw just another mundane North American city. Tall residentials are not particularly amazing. You can see better in other places. And the Waterfront is much better in Chicago with Buckingham Fountain, The Parks, Navy Pier and Museum Campus (not to mention Millennium Park, Crown Fountain, The Marina, etc). Also really unfriendly people..."
if toronto wants to upgrade its image then it will have EARN it through investments in better publc spaces, transit, and more interesting architecture. Until it's willing to do that (..and I don't hold out much hope that it ever will due to...well, 'cultural' factors, let's just say..) then it shall remain a place prinicipally for conducting business and for visiting family.
If you want to play in the big leagues, you've got to step up to the plate and swing for the fences.
P.S. Nothing wrong with being a business city, just wish it would lose the pretence of be anything more than that.
I am really curious as to where people who express such negative views of Toronto go when they are here?
Paris may be exciting for tourists but is very boring, grey and unwelcoming for locals.
Brussels, ugly architecture
Geneva, clean orderly but has a very dull vibe to it.
Los Angeles, just like Paris once the myth built around it drops you discover a city that has one foot in the developed world, and one in the third world. Dirty, built without any esthetic consideration in mind, overpriced (though there is even worse) and very racially segregated though natives love to brag about how multicultural it is.
Comparing Paris aesthetically and its urban planing with Los Angeles. I think i have read it all!
Most swiss cities looks dull and very grey. Oslo looks extremely developed but also soulless as an iceberg. Most us midwest cities (minus Denver) seem like the cradle of boredom aswel as Atlanta (the worst case of sprawl in the first world). Dubai makes Las Vegas looks natural. Toronto lacks identity.
Comparing Paris aesthetically and its urban planing with Los Angeles. I think i have read it all!
Most swiss cities looks dull and very grey. Oslo looks extremely developed but also soulless as an iceberg. Most us midwest cities (minus Denver) seem like the cradle of boredom aswel as Atlanta (the worst case of sprawl in the first world). Dubai makes Las Vegas looks natural. Toronto lacks identity.
I'm not comparing Paris and LA from an esthetic perspective. Actually I wasn't making any comparison. I was saying both have an aura, a worldwide reputation.
I am really curious as to where people who express such negative views of Toronto go when they are here?
The thing is that, from a visitors perspective, what is the first takeaway from Toronto?
It's probably "Holy hell, there are a TON of glassy condo towers everywhere." That has been my impression every time I've visited in recent years, and that was the impression of my work colleagues and, during one visit, for a wedding, my wife. You drive down the Gardiner Expressway and it looks like you're in some Hong Kong mini-me.
So, yeah, there are interesting things in Toronto, of course, but it really has a generic, glassy-city feel, like it could be Singapore or Dallas or Rotterdam. An anodyne "international city" feel. Usually, from a tourist perspective, you want local character and city-specific quirks. Toronto is not into that, at all. It's basically the anti-New Orleans, the anti-Quebec City. It looks kind of like a movie set for "generic western city".
Comparing Paris aesthetically and its urban planing with Los Angeles. I think i have read it all!
Most swiss cities looks dull and very grey. Oslo looks extremely developed but also soulless as an iceberg. Most us midwest cities (minus Denver) seem like the cradle of boredom aswel as Atlanta (the worst case of sprawl in the first world). Dubai makes Las Vegas looks natural. Toronto lacks identity.
Have you even visited the cities you are listing? Paris is nothing like Los Angeles, but I like them both. I prefer Dubai over Las Vegas. The latter is a city with casinos. That is pretty much it. At least Dubai has a beach and markets in the old town.
It is easy to diss Oslo, but I think that the city has some character. Oslo is 1,000 years old and hosted the 1952 Winter Olympics. It is surrounded by forests, lakes and a fjord with islands.
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Originally Posted by manitopiaaa
^^ That article is factually incorrect. The District of Columbia has grown 11.7% from 2010 to 2015. Arlington County has grown 10.3% in the same time frame. If the first sentence is wrong, that makes me question everything else in the article. I also think it's a bit specious to call a city having the Arlington National Cemetery, the United States Marine Corps War Memorial, Pentagon Memorial, Pentagon City and a bunch of thriving neighborhoods (practically the entire Orange Line Corridor from Ballston to Rosslyn) as boring and soulless. It's the least fun city in the triad - Washington, Alexandria and Arlington - but it's not soulless. I could name you a thousand DC suburbs worse than Arlington.
I think the bigger picture is posed at the end quote, in terms of any statistics they are not my own they are the newspapers. However it is clear many people actively like living in the suburbs, and many such areas have seen significant growth.
Perhaps it’s because “soulless” and “boring” are to some extent judgmental code words for “stuff I don’t like.” Sophisticated urbanites tend to look down on much of suburban life. But I suspect many suburbanites find downtown obsessions – contemporary art, say, or elaborate ways of preparing coffee – equally tedious. Why isn’t their thumbs-down verdict on urban pretentiousness just as valid?
Paris may be exciting for tourists but is very boring, grey and unwelcoming for locals.
How is Paris boring for locals? Locals and tourists might not hang out in the same places but there are tonnes of stuff to do, even if you are not a tourist.
The thing is that, from a visitors perspective, what is the first takeaway from Toronto?
It's probably "Holy hell, there are a TON of glassy condo towers everywhere." That has been my impression every time I've visited in recent years, and that was the impression of my work colleagues and, during one visit, for a wedding, my wife. You drive down the Gardiner Expressway and it looks like you're in some Hong Kong mini-me.
So, yeah, there are interesting things in Toronto, of course, but it really has a generic, glassy-city feel, like it could be Singapore or Dallas or Rotterdam. An anodyne "international city" feel. Usually, from a tourist perspective, you want local character and city-specific quirks. Toronto is not into that, at all. It's basically the anti-New Orleans, the anti-Quebec City. It looks kind of like a movie set for "generic western city".
Very well put and completely accurate. By the way, Toronto used to have many beautiful old buildings that, for reasons I simply can't fathom, were torn down in the late 50s and the 1960s to make way for parking lots, of all things (??!!). You should have seen the old Toronto Dominion Bank building and the old Toronto Star newspaper headquarters in all its jazz- age splendour. City council allowed land speculators to pave paradise and put up a parking yet seem to want everyone to get all excited about a bunch of poorly designed arranged condo eyesores scattered about the city? Don't think so..hehe. That's what happens when any city allows greedy, grasping developers too much sway in planning decisions. You get a Toronto
Last edited by lookyhere; 05-06-2016 at 01:44 PM..
Very well put and completely accurate. By the way, Toronto used to have many beautiful old buildings that, for reasons I simply can't fathom, were torn down in the late 50s and the 1960s to make way for parking lots, of all things (??!!). You should have seen the old Toronto Dominion Bank building and the old Toronto Star newspaper headquarters in all its jazz- age splendour. City council allowed land speculators to pave paradise and put up a parking yet seem to want everyone to get all excited about a bunch of poorly designed arranged condo eyesores scattered about the city? Don't think so..hehe. That's what happens when any city allows greedy, grasping developers too much sway in planning decisions. You get a Toronto
Development from a skyline point of view is mostly from the 60's onwards coinciding with the upward trajectory in growth of the city. That said, walking through the streets of DT Toronto there are still a plethora of old heritage buildings - mostly mid rise but they are scattered and not clumped. Any google street tour would show that. Any Torontonian who has legs can walk around the core and see.. I just did yesterday and yes, they are still there. That is just in the DT core - Old Toronto itself has an impressive array of Victorian and Edwardian stock by any measure. Why all this focus simply on 2000's development is beyond me. Toronto has a whole lot more (it isn't Dubai) but sure, if you guys want to dismiss what is here that is up to you. Its my prerogative to point out what you are not.
Speaking of visitors, there were quite a bit of people taking pics of Old City Hall when I was eating my Polish Sausage on the steps to it. I finally moved off to the side so they didn't see some local into his hot dog. I'm glad people who are visiting the city are actually walking around it instead of allowing a drive on the Gardiner to form their only opinion of the city.
I do agree with you though, some buildings that were tore down shouldn't have been and in some cases brilliant heritage buildings. Of course, Toronto lost quite a bit during the great fire but certainly there are still old stock stuff and quite a bit actually - if you would like to tour the DT core of Toronto with me sometime let me know and i'll be sure to acquaint or reacquaint you to them as you either purposefully dismiss them or you simply don't know they exist, so only get back to me re this offer if you have an open mind and a good pair of walking shoes.
For everyone else, I post quite a bit of pics of the city in C/D in the official Toronto photo thread so take a look. There is quite the assortment and yes, you'll see quite a bit of heritage stuff too.. Pics don't lie!
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