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Photo: Canmenwalker, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This grand park used to be the ample front lawn of The Grange before it became a museum. It features a carriage way, water features, a Henry Moore sculpture (Large Two Forms), a playground with an artistic theme and the ruins of a church (at John St).
Grange Park is a prominent and well-used public park in downtown Toronto, Ontario in Canada. It is located south of the Art Gallery of Ontario, next to the Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCADU) and north of University Settlement House, at the north end of John Street. The park lends its name to the Grange Park neighbourhood in the vicinity of the park. Historically, the park was the backyard of The Grange, a manor that was later expanded and became the Art Gallery of Ontario.
© OpenStreetMap contributors
The Grange, a national historic site, is a Georgian manor which is today part of the Art Gallery of Ontario. The structure was built in 1817, making it the 12th oldest surviving building in Toronto and the oldest remaining brick house in the city. Visitors to the AGO may be able to view exhibits within the building.
Ontario College of Art & Design
This stunning, fanciful building, designed by British Architect Will Alsop, is a box suspended four storeys off the ground by a series of multi-coloured pillars. The box is connected to the older building below by escalator and elevator shafts.
AGO
The largest art gallery in Canada, redesigned from 2004 to 2008 by architect Frank Gehry. Home to many famous pieces of art ranging from very recent to artwork hundreds of years old. Artists from Monet to Warhol are represented here and the AGO has one of the largest collections of Henry Moore sculptures in the world. It has a great Canadian paintings exhibit and the European paintings exhibit has a few excellent pieces. The gallery also has one of the world's most expensive paintings on view (Ruben's The Massacre of the Innocents).
Thirty women artists created a series of murals on buildings along an L-shaped laneway running from McCaul Street through to D'Arcy Street. The project name was "Uplifting Each Other".
When walking along Dundas St east of Spadina Ave, look down the alleys between buildings as there are 4 long alley murals, 3 on the north side and 1 on the south side, each having a Chinese theme.
Two streetcar stops are decorated with dragons coiled in a figure 8 perched on top of columns. Because the pronunciations of "eight" and "luck" in Chinese are similar (both sounding like "baht"), eight is thus a lucky number to the Chinese community.