My last photo was sort of a goodbye to summer, but with the frequent changes in temperature and weather recently, the trees and plants seem to be unsure what time of year it is. If you look closely at this shot, the trees on one side of the street have lost almost all of their leaves already, while many on the right have not even begun to change colour yet.
We’re well into fall here in Toronto, and there’s even rumours that some weather reports are beginning to call for snow in the near future! At 0 degrees this morning, it certainly feels cold enough, so I thought today I would post this picture I took at the height of summer from the field behind my house. These flowers are long gone now, replaced with the falling leaves from the trees, but they will be back next year. And, if the Toronto climate stays true to form, we should get one or two good blasts of relative warmth before settling in for the winter.
This is another picture of the Royal York Hotel, this time looking up from the same vantage point as the previous image. In this shot you get an idea of the size of the Hotel, as well as some of the architecture that makes it such a prominent landmark. And if you look carefully at the top of the building you can make out the Fairmont Royal York sign that was the result of a compromise between the owners, who wanted a massive glowing “Fairmont”, and the local citizens who preferred the older, traditional “Royal York” signage.
The Royal York Hotel, or Fairmont Royal York as it is now known, is a historic up-scale hotel and landmark in Toronto. The builiding, erected on the site of an even older hotel, opened in 1929 and at the time was the largest building in the British Empire. The hotel still exudes a distinctly colonail feel – much like its cousins the Empress Hotel in Victoria, or the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa.
You can’t see it from this picture, but the Royal York is directly across the street from the main Toronto train and subway stations at Union Station, and the contrast between the quiet, orderly scene in front of the hotel, and the mayhem of pedistrians and taxi stands in front of the station makes for an interesting urban scene – especially around afternoon rush hour.
I probably don’t need to add much of a description to this picture, beyond the title of the post. This is a standard Toronto Transit Commission, or TTC, bus – one of the newer energy efficient hybrid models that are increasingly common on the city roads.
For locals this may not be a terribly unique image, but I have always been fascinated in the varied transit and urban sign colour schemes of different cities, so I thought it might be of interest to non-Torontonian visitors.
