Toronto Skyline Notes is an independent visitor journal. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any attraction operator. We do not sell tickets and never process payments.
Toronto Skyline Notes An independent visitor's journal from the top of the city

About

Who writes this, and why

A short, honest introduction to the person keeping this notebook and the reasons it exists as a proper site rather than a scattering of Instagram captions.

I’m Priya. I moved to Toronto in 2019 for a contract in structural engineering, and I ended up staying for the city. I spent my first year here photographing the skyline from every rooftop I could talk my way into — a friend’s Cabbagetown balcony, the terrace of a Bay Street office I definitely was not supposed to be on, a fire escape in Kensington Market at four in the morning after a wedding. The city is unusually photogenic and unusually easy to get lost in, and I think both things are related.

My favourite building was the obvious one. The tower is not subtle and it does not have to be — it dominates every south-facing view in the downtown and quietly features in every north-facing one. Over the first few winters I got into a habit of going up on a slow Tuesday morning with a thermos and a real camera, mostly to compare one week’s weather against another. That is where these notes started.

A midwinter night from just outside the downtown — one of the first frames I liked well enough to keep.
A midwinter night from just outside the downtown — one of the first frames I liked well enough to keep. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons · Skeezix1000 · CC BY-SA 2.0.

The journal became a proper site in 2021, after I sent the same set of tips to three different visiting friends by e-mail and realised I might as well write it down properly. It has grown slowly since then. I add or rewrite a section whenever I go up again and something changes — a new exhibit opens on the upper level, a piece of construction changes the west-facing view, the queue policy shifts. There is no schedule and no deadline. This is not a job.

A few things this site is deliberately not:

  • It is not a ticket seller. I have never sold a ticket in my life and I do not plan to. There is no checkout on this site and there never will be.
  • It is not an official operator page. The tower’s operators have not asked me to write this and would probably fix a few of my honest criticisms if they had. That is fine. That is the point of independent writing.
  • It is not sponsored. I have refused three unsolicited approaches to make it sponsored. If a page here recommends pairing your visit with the Aquarium next door, it is because it is a good afternoon, not because anyone paid for the mention.
  • It is not perfect. If I have got something wrong — a policy that has changed, a queue that no longer exists, a viewpoint that has been closed for construction — please write in through the contact page and I will fix it on the next update.

Off the tower, I photograph a lot of the same neighbourhood over and over — Palmerston, Trinity Bellwoods, the lakeshore rail bridges — and I have a full-time job that has nothing to do with any of this. The journal is a small honest thing on the side. Thank you for reading it.