Toronto is a wonderful metropolitan city that enjoys visitors every year in every season, from around the world. You will find languages spoken from many nations, including French, English, Spanish, Asian languages, Middle Eastern dialects, and more. One of the most interesting parts of Toronto is located along part of downtown Yonge Street.

The Magic of Yonge Street

One store on downtown Toronto's Yonge Street is an especially mysterious treat. One of my friends, when he went to this shop for the first time, had deja vu. This friend of mine has visited Totonto several times more often than myself since his first visit to this special store -- Sam the Record Man. It is a very large place, but when he got to eh entrance door the first time, he knew what the entire store looked like, hwo it was designed, where all the selections were located, etc. He had never been thre before, and netiehr had his mother or is father. It was eey and, being a vinyl record afficionado, he loved it.

The place still offers vinyl recordings, as well as many other collectors' and vintage pieces on vinyl, 8-track, cassette and CD. It probably had DVDs by now. The store itself is three stories tall, much like the Chapters Books stores of the region.

However, the most famous book shop on Yonge Street is the World's Biggest Bookstore with miles and miles of book shelves and bins. You could spend a week in there alone.

Yonge Street covers about 1,200 miles in all, all the way from one of the Great Lakes, Lake Ontario, over to the Minnesota border. This fact makes Yonge Street most likely the longest street on earth. In America, Rt 40 is longer, but it is an inter-state highway and not a street. US Route 66 is also long, but it is also a highway and not a street.

While Yonge Street is interesting expressly for its great length, it is also interesting for the sites along its route. There is a section about a couple of dozen blocks blocks long that spans the length of the street from Lake Ontario to Bloor Street and visitors as well as locals have a high opinion of this stretch of road. There are many restaurants and some great electronics stores with new gadgets and good sales events. Some people line up the night before to be the first in to some of these events.

This downtown area has many stores and shops on Yonge Street.

Don't miss Honest Ed's

Honest Ed has been in business for decades and still offers some 1960s prices on its merchandise. This is another place that people line up for the night before, especially for good buys like a loaf of fresh bread for less than 50 cents.

Ed Mirvish was the founder of Honest Ed's in 1948. He was a high school dropout that became a great success. He became a successful theater producer in Canada and a retail wizard at Honest Ed's

At Honest Ed's, which is a full block long and a block wide, some prices are always low. For example, some good shirts are priced at under $3.00 all the time. Ed and his successors have kept prices low with good marketing and advertising techniques that keep sales volume and customer counts high. The outside of the facility has gigantic red and yellow signs posted so that you can see the name of the store from far away, probably form an airplane as well. Advertising studies in the 1960s-1980s found that the combination of red and yellow produced the highest amount of sales and new customers, so Honest Ed uses that fact to its successful advantage. The front signage also looks like a movie house marquee with many white lights to breed excitement and curiosity. Shopping becomes a grand event. An interesting skywalk connects the main building to a secondary facility.

Along this area of Yonge Street, some of the shops and homes have been sold by the original owners or their families as they aged and died. Part of this area has been re-named Mirvish Village.This is a group of older homes on either side of Markham Street that Ed himself bought. From homes and households, he and his company transformed them into art studios, cafes, shops, art galleries, and other sites to see.