Not nearly enough people, apparently. So now the city on the lake is building striking new cultural venues and, says Clive Irving, learning how to boost its many other assets

"Tronno, eh?" The young Chinese-Canadian serving me Algerian Coffee in an Italian bar, using the colloquial compression of the name of his hometown, spoke with a note of naked surprise. He had asked me why I was visiting. I had told him that I wanted to see how the city had changed in the twenty or so years since I'd been a resident—and to write about it. As proud as he obviously was to have grown up in Toronto, he still found it a stretch to believe that the city was worthy of being profiled in this magazine. "Tronno, eh?" he repeated. "The coffee is hot, be careful."

Modesty becomes Toronto; without any hype, it has evolved into an exceptional place for those who live in it—safe, clean, courteous, and, in total, nice. The problem: Modesty doesn't sell. Last year, those whose job it is to promote the city as a magnet for travelers spent $400,000 to find out how Toronto is perceived in the world at large. In short, it isn't. Researchers found that "Toronto is uncharted territory throughout much of the world—people may recognize the name, but they do not know much about it. Toronto has a low level of international awareness."

What I found fly below the global radar is a very large city—trying hard to temper its size by encouraging a rich patchwork of diverse neighborhoods, some based on ethnicities that reflect the large immigrant population and some on cultural and vocational concentrations, such as the entertainment and financial districts. This is not a preservation exercise in social terms, since the ethnic neighborhoods don't have a long history, but it is one in architectural terms, because the older parts of Toronto include large swaths of Victorian and Edwardian buildings of the sort that many other cities have carelessly destroyed—a lot of very fine redbrick town houses, row houses, churches, warehouses, small factories and shops.

Canada's least Canadian prime minister, the raffish Pierre Trudeau, once said that he wanted the country to be more than just a collection of shopping malls, at a time when it seemed that this laterally extended nation, with most if its population centers just north of the U.S. border, might end up being exactly that, an entirely consumerized limbo. Toronto does have its share of malls, but I bet that Trudeau, who died in 2000, would have been happy with Toronto's success in creating a cellular city rather than a monolithic one.

As I walked around the neighborhoods at the height of the summer, the atmosphere was invigorating. I remembered living near a particularly lively intersection of the West Indian and Chinese populations at Spadina Avenue, a wide north–south axis that extended from neat bourgeois villas at its upper reaches to the garment district a mile or so down. The West Indian streets included the odd Jewish deli and discount tailor, as they still do, but this area west of Spadina, called Kensington Market, now embraces Islamic and Latino pockets as well. The food markets are equally multicultural today, selling everything from deep-fried plantains to kebabs, with the steady throb of reggae from Jamaican bars as background. The markets in Chinatown, on the other hand, immediately east of Spadina, remain examples of undiluted industrial-strength Chinese—not so much a case of soup to nuts as of strange early sea forms to herbal Viagra.