Toronto Street Art Strolls

Toronto Street Art Strolls is a unique walking guide with self-guided maps to discover Toronto's best graffiti, murals and public art, with caf's and decadent places on the side.

Stroll celebrates Toronto's details at the speed of walking and, in so doing, helps us to better get to know its many neighbourhoods, taking us from well-known spots like the CN Tower and Pearson Airport to the overlooked corners of Scarborough and all the way to the end of the Leslie Street Spit in Lake Ontario.

Toronto has been hailed as “a city in the making” and “the city that works.” It’s an ongoing project: in recent years Canada’s largest city has experienced transformative, exciting change. But just what does contemporary Toronto look like? This authoritative architectural guide, newly updated and expanded, leads readers on 26 walking tours—revealing the evolution of the place from a quiet Georgian town to a dynamic global city. More than 1,000 designs are featured: from modest Victorian houses to shimmering downtown towers and cultural landmarks. Over 300 photographs, 29 maps, a description of architectural styles, a glossary of architectural terms, and indexes of architects and buildings pilot readers through Toronto’s diverse cityscape. New sections illustrate the swiftly changing face of Toronto’s waterfront and design highlights across the region. Originally written by architectural journalist Patricia McHugh and enhanced with new material and insights by Globe and Mail architecture critic Alex Bozikovic, this definitive guide offers a revealing exploration of Toronto’s past and future, for the city’s visitors and locals alike.

What's been said about Secret Montreal:

Award-winning author Lawrence Weschler’s book on the young Mexican American artist Ramiro Gomez explores questions of social equity and the chasms between cultures and classes in America. Gomez, born in 1986 in San Bernardino, California, to undocumented Mexican immigrant parents, bridges the divide between the affluent wealthy and their usually invisible domestic help—the nannies, gardeners, housecleaners, and others who make their lifestyles possible—by inserting images of these workers into sly pastiches of iconic David Hockney paintings, subtly doctoring glossy magazine ads, and subversively slotting life-size painted cardboard cutouts into real-life situations. Domestic Scenes engages with Gomez and his work, offering an inspiring vision of the purposes and possibilities of art.

A must-have for any street art enthusiast, this book presents the most mind blowing examples of renegade creativity in San Francisco. San Francisco's vibrant street art scene exists in areas off the city's well-worn tourist paths. The alleyways and hidden side streets of the Haight, the Tenderloin, and especially the Mission district's Clarion Alley offer unexpected treats to visitors lucky enough to stumble upon them. For more than five years, photographer Steve Rotman has obsessively documented this scene as it evolved on walls, sidewalks, billboards, fences, doors, and other public spaces. Culled from thousands of images, the result is a collection of work that attests to the artists' personal and stylistic diversity, from Mars1's robotic depictions of alternate universes which reflect the local counterculture spirit, to Neck Face's whimsically ghoulish creatures that serve as a testament to entrepreneurial hipsterdom, to Bigfoot's friendly green primates inspired by the area's rich graffiti culture. San Francisco's charm as an international destination also causes foreign artists to contribute to the street dialogue--Brazilian duo Os Gemeos, Londoner D*Face and German painter Dome have all graced the city's walls with their unique points of view. An enterprising photographer, Rotman has forged relationships with many of these often-reclusive artists, allowing him access to some of the lesser-known corners of the street art world.