Ten days from Toronto to New York: two big cities that agree on almost nothing, and a waterfall in between

Toronto's downtown fits in a walk, so start at the bottom of it. St Lawrence Market has been the city's food market since 1803, in a hall built in 1845, and the south building is the one that matters: two floors of butchers, cheesemongers, a Portuguese bakery and the peameal bacon sandwich that Toronto claims as its own contribution to world cuisine. It is shut on Sundays and Mondays, which is worth knowing before you plan the arrival.

Ten minutes west, the Hockey Hall of Fame occupies a Beaux Arts bank hall from 1885, and the Stanley Cup lives in what was the vault. It is a deeply silly building for the purpose and completely the right one. Even without an interest in the sport, the room is worth the ten minutes.

Then the tower, after dark. The CN Tower held the record for the world's tallest free-standing structure from 1975 to 2007 and is still the tallest in the Americas at 553 metres. The lift takes under a minute, there is a glass floor on the way down, and there is an outdoor walk on a ledge around the pod for people who want to pay extra to be frightened.

The Royal Ontario Museum is the largest in Canada and the only one with a Daniel Libeskind extension crashing through the front of it, a set of intersecting crystals in aluminium and glass bolted onto a 1914 building in 2007. Opinions in the city remain divided, which is the fate of every building of that period. Inside, the dinosaurs and the Chinese galleries are the strongest rooms.

Across the road, the Bata Shoe Museum is the best small museum in Toronto and sounds like a joke until you are in it. Thirteen thousand items covering four and a half thousand years, arranged to explain class, gender and labour through footwear, in a Raymond Moriyama building shaped like a shoebox with the lid ajar.

Finish uphill at Casa Loma, a ninety eight room Gothic revival house built between 1911 and 1914 by a financier who made his money electrifying Ontario, and who moved out ten years later owing the city more in tax than he could pay. The stables, the tunnel under the road and the two towers are the parts to see.

Frank Gehry grew up two streets from the Art Gallery of Ontario and rebuilt it in 2008, and the restraint in what he did there is unlike almost anything else with his name on it: a curved wood and glass gallery running the length of Dundas Street and a blue titanium box on the south side. The Thomson collection of Canadian art inside includes the Group of Seven, which is the school that taught Canada what its own landscape looked like.

Ten minutes south, the lane behind Queen Street West has been legally painted end to end for years and runs about a kilometre. It changes constantly, it is free, and it is the one bit of Toronto that photographs like a city with an attitude problem.

Then take the ferry. The Toronto Islands are fifteen minutes offshore, have no cars on them, and hold a small residential community, several beaches and the only angle from which the skyline reads properly. Ward's Island at the eastern end is the quiet one, with a boardwalk and a cafe and a lot of people who live there and would rather you did not.

The morning train from Union runs along the lake to Burlington and then cuts inland across the peninsula, about two hours. From the station it is fifteen minutes downhill to the river.

Nothing prepares you for the volume. Around two thousand eight hundred cubic metres of water go over the Horseshoe every second during summer daylight hours, and then the flow is halved overnight when the treaty allows more of it to be sent to the power stations. The drop is 57 metres, which is not tall as waterfalls go. The width and the noise are what make it.

Do the boat first. The catamarans that run under the Horseshoe from the Canadian side operate as Niagara City Cruises now, they hand out ponchos that do not work, and being in the middle of the basin looking up is the entire point of coming here. Then the tunnels, which take you behind the sheet of water to two openings cut through the rock, and finish walking the park along the rim as the floodlights come on.

The best thing at Niagara is not the waterfall. The Niagara Parks Power Station is a 1905 generating hall at the edge of Queen Victoria Park that ran until 2006 and was opened to the public in 2021 with its turbine floor untouched: marble control panels, brass railings, and generators the size of a bus. In 2022 they opened the tailrace tunnel underneath it, 670 metres of brick-lined bore that comes out at the bottom of the gorge with the falls off to your left.

Then drive downstream. Six kilometres along the parkway, the whirlpool is where the river turns ninety degrees and reverses on itself, and a cable car designed by a Spanish engineer has been crossing above it since 1916. It is an antique carried on six cables and it is not for everybody.

Keep going to Niagara-on-the-Lake, where the river meets Lake Ontario. Fort George is the British post that held this side of the line in the War of 1812, was destroyed by American artillery from across the river and rebuilt in the 1930s. The town behind it is all clapboard and hanging baskets, has run a Shaw theatre festival since 1962 and is surrounded by vineyards.

Cross the Rainbow Bridge, answer the questions, and be at Buffalo airport for a mid morning flight. You will be at LaGuardia by early afternoon, and the airport that used to be a national joke was rebuilt between 2018 and 2022 and is now genuinely pleasant, which nobody was expecting.

Do not attempt anything ambitious on the arrival day. Start at Grand Central Terminal, which opened in 1913, has more platforms than any station on earth and a ceiling painted with a zodiac that is back to front, apparently because the painter worked from a medieval manuscript that showed the sky from the outside. The oyster bar in the basement has been there since the station opened.

Walk west into Times Square, which is loud, commercial and worth exactly twenty minutes, and then go up. Top of the Rock is on the seventieth floor of the Rockefeller Center and has the one thing the taller decks cannot offer, which is the Empire State Building in the view. Book the slot that starts about forty minutes before sunset.

Be at Battery Park by half past eight. The ferry to Liberty Island is the only legitimate way onto it, the queue for security is the bottleneck rather than the boat, and the first two departures are the difference between a good morning and two hours standing in a line.

The statue was a gift from France, dedicated in 1886, and the pedestal is included in the ordinary ticket while the crown is a separate reservation that goes months in advance. Ellis Island is the second stop on the same ferry and it is the more affecting of the two: twelve million people were processed through the great hall between 1892 and 1954, and the registry room upstairs is left almost empty on purpose.

Come back to the mainland in the afternoon for the September 11 memorial, where the footprints of the two towers have been turned into sunken pools with the water falling into a square void in the middle of each. The museum underneath is seven storeys down, is very good and is extremely hard going. Give it two hours, or give it none and sit by the pools instead.

Walk the Brooklyn Bridge early, from the Manhattan side, going east. It opened in 1883 with a main span of 486 metres, half as long again as anything built before it, and the promenade runs down the middle above the traffic. Since the cycle lane was moved off it in 2021 the walkway is pedestrians only, which has made it bearable again. By ten in the morning it is full.

You come off in Dumbo under the Manhattan Bridge, and from there two subway stops get you to the other Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Museum is the second largest in the city and gets a fraction of the traffic: an Egyptian collection that rivals anything in Manhattan, American painting, and Judy Chicago's Dinner Party installed permanently on the fourth floor.

Prospect Park is across the road. Olmsted and Vaux built it after Central Park and both of them said it was the better job, mostly because they were given a shape they could work with: one long meadow, one wooded ravine and a lake, with no cross streets cutting through. Sunday afternoons on the Long Meadow are the best free thing in New York.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds around two million objects and no visitor has ever seen a meaningful fraction of them, so pick two departments and accept the rest. The Egyptian wing with the temple of Dendur in its glass hall, the American period rooms, the arms and armour, the European paintings: any two of those is a morning. Note that pay-what-you-wish now applies only to residents of New York State and students from the three neighbouring states. Everybody else pays the full price.

Then walk out of the back of it into Central Park, which is 340 hectares that Olmsted and Vaux designed from 1858 onwards on land that had to be cleared of an existing Black settlement to make room, a fact the park spent a century not mentioning. Go north through the Ramble and the Bethesda arcade rather than along the roads.

Come out at 89th Street for the Guggenheim, which is Frank Lloyd Wright's last building, finished in 1959 six months after he died, and which works by putting you in a lift to the top and letting you walk down a single continuous ramp. It takes ninety minutes and the building is more interesting than most of what hangs in it.

The Empire State Building opened in 1931, went up in 410 days during the worst year of the Depression, and stood as the tallest building in the world for forty years. The observatory on the 86th floor is outdoors and wraps all four sides, and the first slot of the morning at nine is the only one without a queue.

The exhibition on the way up was rebuilt in 2019 and is better than the usual filler, particularly the room on how the thing was actually assembled, which involves a good deal of riveting and very little in the way of safety equipment.

Then go. Allow an hour to LaGuardia, ninety minutes to Kennedy, and add half of that again in the afternoon. The subway to the airport is cheap and slow and works fine if the bags are small.