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University Avenue cuts north from Dundas to College, lined by gleaming tower blocks and overlooked by the pink-sandstone mass of the Ontario Legislative Assembly Building (late May to Aug Mon-Fri 8.30am-6.30pm & Sat-Sun 9am-4.30pm; Sept to late May Mon-Fri 8.30am-6.30pm; free; frequent & free 30min guided tours from Mon-Fri 10am-4pm, plus Sat & Sun 10am-4pm from late May to Aug), which was completed in 1892. No one could say this Romanesque Revival edifice was elegant, but its ponderous symmetries speak volumes of the bourgeois assertiveness that drove the provincial economy. Inside, the foyer leads to the wide and thickly carpeted grand staircase, whose massive timbers are supported by gilded iron pillars. Beyond, among the long corridors and arcaded galleries, is the Legislative Chamber , where the formal mahogany and sycamore panels are offset by a series of whimsical little carvings: look for the owl overlooking the doings of the government and the eagle overseeing the opposition benches. Under the Speaker's gallery, righteous inscriptions have been carved into the pillars - which is a bit of a hoot considering the behaviour of the building's architect, Richard Waite. Waite was chairman of the committee responsible for selecting an architect. And as chairman, he selected himself. Behind the Legislative Building stands a heavyweight equestrian statue of King Edward VII in full-dress uniform, an imperial leftover that was originally plonked down in Delhi - and you can't help but feel the Indians must have been pleased to offload it. A couple of hundred metres to the west are the various faculties of the University of Toronto , opened in 1843 and the province's most prestigious academic institution. Its older buildings, with their quadrangles, ivy-covered walls and Gothic interiors, deliberately evoke Oxbridge: Hart House , at the end of Wellesley Street, is the best example, attached to the Soldier's Tower , a neo-Gothic memorial to those students who died in both world wars. The arcaded gallery abutting the tower lists the dead of World War I and is inscribed with the Canadian John McCrae's In Flanders Fields , arguably the war's best-known Canadian poem.
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