Hotels in Toronto

Hotels such as the Four Seasons, Windsor Arms, and Sutton Place are at the centre of the Toronto International Film Festival each year.

Outside of the downtown area around Toronto Pearson International Airport has a cluster of hotels and convention centres.

When the legislature was burned by the Americans during the War of 1812, it was at the York that the assembly met for a year while awaiting the construction of a new building.

Beginning about 1820, travelling troops of actors would put on works of Shakespeare and other plays in the ballroom that sat about 100.

For travellers by land small inns and taverns grew up along each of the major routes out of the city.

Now a city of Toronto museum, it is located on Dundas Street, which was then the main road heading westwards.

Two examples are John Finch's Hotel and the Miller Tavern, both located on Yonge, then the major route north.

[6] Outside the central core smaller hotels grew up to serve the stations in what were then the outer reaches of the city.

When the smaller railway stations closed in the middle of the 20th century, these hotels lost their main source of business.

The recent revival of Parkdale has seen the Drake and Gladstone transformed in boutique hotels and cultural venues.

In the 1950s and 1960s this led to the creation of Toronto's famous "motel strip" along Lake Shore Boulevard, then the main western route out of the city.

At its height the strip had many motels, each attempting to draw attention through eye catching architecture and street side advertising.

[9][10] A similar, but less prominent, strip developed along Kingston Road in Scarborough, then the main eastern route out of town.

In 2003 the hotel industry was badly hurt by the SARS outbreak that saw room occupancy rates plunge to 29%, far below the usual range in the 70s.