Excerpts from a 1971 MacLeans article, by Douglas Marshall:
—- “It seems only yesterday that TORONTO was just another leafy provincial capital – hardly more than a village, really – full of a lot of dull Protestants preoccupied with money.  Only the people who loved the city, and they were few, realized that what TORONTO lacked in public greatness it made up for in private joys.”

—- “In TORONTO each year about 50 major new buildings go up in the downtown core; some 23,500 apartment units and 8,300 homes are completed . . . and $20 million is spent improving the efficiency of what is already Canada’s finest and longest (4,284 miles) sewer system.”

—- “Expansion has left it facing crises in transportation, in urban renewal, in the fundamental decision-making machinery of municipal government.”

—- “You might say that TORONTO qualifies as a great citiy . . . partly because the street-corner newspaper boxes are beginning to be protected by coin-operated locking devices.”

—- “TORONTO may be big.  It may even be great.  But it is fast losing its private joys.”

—-  “City Hall is at the heart of the problem.  TORONTO continues to be run mainly by men who still think of it as a village – only grown larger.”