Yonge-Dundas Square

Yonge-Dundas Square (also known as Dundas Square) is a public square, situated at the southeast corner of the intersection of Yonge Street and Dundas Street East in Downtown Toronto. The square was first conceived in 1997 as part of revitalizing the intersection, and was designed by Brown and Storey Architects. Since its completion in 2002, the square has hosted numerous public events, performances and art displays, establishing itself as a prominent landmark in Toronto and one of the city's prime tourist attractions. Central to the Downtown Yonge business improvement area, the square is owned by the city and is the first public square in Canada to be maintained through a public-private partnership. The intersection is one of the busiest in Canada, serving over 100,000 pedestrians daily.

Surrounding the square are other major landmarks, including the Toronto Eaton Centre, 10 Dundas Street East, 33 Dundas Street East, Ryerson University, Ed Mirvish Theatre, Atrium on Bay and the Citytv building. The intersection is served by the Yonge-University-Spadina line of the Toronto Subway via Dundas station, connected to the PATH, and contains the city's first pedestrian scramble. The square is continuously illuminated by several corporate and brand-name logos in neon and electric signs and large liquid-crystal display (LCD) and light-emitting diode (LED) screens, which often display advertisements. Because of this, critics have referred to the square as "Toronto's Times Square".

Toronto

Toronto (ⁱ/təˈrɒntoʊ, -tə/,local /təˈrɒnoʊ, ˈtrɒ-/) is the most populous city in Canada, the provincial capital of Ontario, and the centre of the Greater Toronto Area, the most populous metropolitan area in Canada. In the 2011 census, Toronto had a population of 2,615,060, making it the fourth most populous city in North America, after Mexico City, New York City, and Los Angeles. An alpha global city, Toronto is an international centre of business, finance, arts, and culture, and is widely recognized as one of the most multicultural and cosmopolitan cities in the world.

Aboriginal peoples have inhabited the area now known as Toronto for thousands of years. The urban history of the city dates back to 1787, when British officials negotiated the Toronto Purchase with the Mississaugas of the New Credit. They established the Town of York, and later designated it as the capital of Upper Canada. During the War of 1812, the town was the site of the Battle of York and suffered heavy damage by U.S. troops. York was renamed and incorporated as the City of Toronto in 1834, and became the capital of the province of Ontario in 1867. The original borders of Toronto were expanded through amalgamation with surrounding municipalities at various times in its history, the results of which can been seen in the 140 independently unique and clearly defined official neighbourhoods that make up the city.

Square

In geometry, a square is a regular quadrilateral, which means that it has four equal sides and four equal angles (90-degree angles, or right angles). It can also be defined as a rectangle in which two adjacent sides have equal length. A square with vertices ABCD would be denoted ABCD.

The square is the n=2 case of the families of n-hypercubes and n-orthoplexes.

A square has Schläfli symbol {4}. A truncated square, t{4}, is an octagon, {8}. An alternated square, h{4}, is a digon, {2}.

Properties

A square is a special case of a rhombus (equal sides, opposite equal angles), a kite (two pairs of adjacent equal sides), a parallelogram (opposite sides parallel), a quadrilateral or tetragon (four-sided polygon), and a rectangle (opposite sides equal, right-angles) and therefore has all the properties of all these shapes, namely:

Downtown Toronto

Downtown Toronto is the primary central business district in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Located entirely within the former municipality of Old Toronto, it is approximately bounded by Bloor Street to the north, Lake Ontario to the south, the Don River to the east, and Bathurst Street to the west. The area is made up of the city's largest concentration of skyscrapers and businesses. It also contains buildings of the municipal government of Toronto and provincial government of Ontario. Toronto has a prominent skyline and, by 2015, will have the third most skyscrapers in North America exceeding 200 metres (656 ft) in height, behind New York City and Chicago, respectively.

Districts

The Financial District, centred on the intersection of Bay Street and King Street is the centre of Canada's financial industry. It contains the Toronto Stock Exchange, which is the largest in Canada and seventh in the world by market capitalization. The construction of skyscrapers in Downtown Toronto had started to rapidly increase during the 1960s.

Dundas Street

Dundas Street /ˈdʌnˌdæs/, formerly known as Highway 5, is a major arterial road connecting the Canadian city of Toronto with its western suburbs and several cities in southwestern Ontario. Originally intended as a military route to connect the shipping port of York (now Toronto) to the envisioned future capital of London, Ontario, the street today connects Toronto landmarks such as Yonge-Dundas Square and the city's principal Chinatown to rural villages and the regional centres of Hamilton and London.

Dundas Street is also one of the few east–west routes to run uninterrupted through the Greater Toronto Area, from Toronto to Halton Region (the others are Eglinton Avenue, Steeles Avenue, Highway 7, Bovaird Drive/Castlemore Road/Rutherford Road/Carrville Road/16th Avenue and Lake Shore Boulevard). Within Toronto, the TTC's 505 Dundas streetcar route serves the street from Riverdale to the Junction.

Route description

The route of Dundas through the city of Toronto is irregular. The street's various sections were originally constructed as several smaller named streets, running parallel but unconnected. Proceeding southwest and approximately parallel to the Lake Ontario shore in central Toronto, Dundas Street East originates near the Beaches neighbourhood at Kingston Road, itself a historic route to eastern Lake Ontario and the town of Kingston.