What cities/states/regions of the US do Torontonians have ties to the most?

[wild goose chase]

While I know a few people mentioning having cross-border family ties between Windsor and Detroit, I know of far fewer people who have ties between Toronto and the next closest sizeable US city, Buffalo in terms of family but many do in terms of having visited/passed through at least a few times, if not shopped there. I often also occasionally hear lots of Torontonians mention visiting their relatives stateside, but I don't really perceive a particular strong trend of more individuals having relatives in states closer to the border (eg. Upstate New York, Michigan) any more than states farther away (say California or something). Perhaps it is because Toronto and other Great Lakes cities (many which are now "rust belt") peaked at different times or attracted separate waves of settlement/migration/immigration? Perhaps it also depends on how distant/long ago the family ties were and peoples' family histories of moving to the city. I have heard of my former Torontonian classmates who moved to US locations ranging from the South, West, East etc. and moving for particular industries or opportunities in large US cities is often the reason, but these are often recent.

What places do you think in the US do Torontonians have stronger ties to?

 

[King of Kensington]

At this point, most Torontonians going to the US probably move to New York, California and Florida.

Toronto and southern Ontario never seemed to have the same relationship to upstate New York akin to say, Detroit and Windsor/Chatham or even (at least historically) Boston with the Maritimes.

 

[wild goose chase]

I wonder, if not upstate New York, if Torontonians ever at least had a wider or stronger connection to the Great Lakes region of the US, and if perhaps not this generation or in the past couple of generations, at least in the 20th century when many of those other cities were larger and more bustling.

I'm thinking of someone like Joe Shuster, the famous co-creator of Superman, who was born to an immigrant Jewish family in Toronto and grew up there for part of his childhood before moving to Cleveland, Ohio in the 1920s. Even though the superhero was created in Cleveland, Shuster still acknowledged his childhood hometown by basing his Metropolis on Toronto's skyline and the Daily Star newspaper on Toronto's, where he worked as a newspaper boy.

 

[King of Kensington]

Canadian birth or parentage, 1930:

Detroit 175,658 11.2%
Chicago 74,350 2.2%
Buffalo 36,006 6.2%
Rochester 21,622 6.6%
Cleveland 17,959 2%

 

[wild goose chase]

I'd imagine that the peak timing of people having ties between Toronto and most Midwestern cities by birth/family has been long ago enough that people today travelling to Midwestern cities to visit family is not that common (especially since the Midwest got very little of the same post 1960s immigration waves as Toronto did, though you do have some, like Arab-American/Canadian families with links between Michigan and Southwestern Ontario).

In terms of travelling/visiting in general (not specifically family-related), I feel like just based on impression, the Northeast actually has more travel between it and Toronto (eg. by plane/train/intercity bus) than the Midwest and Toronto, although I've heard radio ads for Porter Airlines a lot on Chicago's NPR station. If I'm not mistaken, I feel like NYC to Toronto trips are much more common than Chicago to Toronto ones. However, that could be due to things like tourism and the more "international" or "cosmopolitan" nature of NYC, it being a bigger city to begin with, and the northeast also being more influential economically/culturally than the midwestern area. I don't know if economically, Ontario is linked more to the Northeast or Midwest. However, you do occasionally see people group Toronto in with the Great Lakes area stateside as a "megalopolis"area, analogous to the BosWash corridor.

 

[King of Kensington]

I definitely think Toronto is more oriented towards the Northeast than the Midwest. It seems to me that far more Torontonians have been to NYC or even Boston than Chicago.

 

[wild goose chase]

Windsor-Detroit still seems to me to be one of the stronger cross-border city/regional ties. Toronto and upstate New York aren't particularly strong to me, and the Maritimes/New England or Montreal/Montpelier links I don't know about too much but they seem more historic than contemporary. I don't know anything about Seattle-Vancouver either though but I'd imagine that ties aren't strong because there was so much recent British immigration to BC but not the American PNW. Urban Alberta seems too far from Montana or the sparsely populated Great Plains, but there's that energy industry that got it tied to Texas somewhat (Ted Cruz-style). Another interesting thing is comparing the Mexico-US border to the Canada-US one -- it seems like Mexican-American ties do relate to geographical closeness, while Canadian-American ones not so much (with big city to more distant big city ties probably stronger than nearby town to nearby town).

Going back to Toronto specifically again and its ties to the Northeast specifically rather than the Midwest, it's interesting that TD Bank in terms of its American subsidiary had set up shop on the east coast of the US and has banks in states all up and down the coast from Florida to Maine, but not in the Midwest at all.

 

[Johnny Au]

Boston's main hockey/basketball arena is named TD Gardens (yes, the same TD as Toronto-Dominion Bank, albeit its American subsidiary).

 

[King of Kensington]

Boston and Detroit were historically the most "Canadian" cities in the US: in 1930, people of Canadian birth or parentage numbered more than 100,000 and exceeded 10% of the population.

 

[wild goose chase]

When it comes to Detroit-Windsor and nearby southwestern Ontario, I wonder if cross-border families (as in Americans and Canadians having relatives within a couple generations, like uncles/aunts, cousins etc.) are still common even though I don't expect it to be as common as in the 1930s. I'm thinking about Polish, Italian, Greek and other ethnic European immigrant groups and their descendants still characterized by cross-border ties between the GTA/Southwestern Ontario and Metro Detroit/Michigan. It seems like some groups like the Lebanese/Middle Easterners might have close ties.

When it comes to visible minorities in London or Windsor in 2011, groups that seem to have more US counterparts (eg. Black Ontarians with African Americans in Michigan, Arab Ontarians with Arab Michiganders, Latin Americans with maybe the US Hispanic (Mexican?) community in Michigan) somewhat either more closely match or rank a bit higher percentage than the groups more associated with the GTA (South Asian, Chinese etc.) which have less of a well-known counterpart on the US side, which seems to make sense. Windsor has 4.2% Arab, 4.1% South Asian, 3.9% Black and 3.3% Chinese, and London has more Latin American, Arab and Black Canadians than Asian Canadians.

I think maybe Southern and Eastern European immigrants could have or have had in the past cross-border ethnic communities/ties, alongside Lebanese/Middle Easterners and of course the historic Black Canadian/American underground railroad connection. Not sure about Latin American Canadians and Hispanic Americans on either side, or Asian Canadians/Americans on either side (though the Hmong Americans in Michigan don't seem to have made a community on the other side).

 

[King of Kensington]

Johnie Chase, an African Canadian from Windsor who was a Polka Dot Door host, talks about how he spent a lot of time in Detroit growing up - "we grew up American."

 

[wild goose chase]

http://vancouversun.com/storyline/d...-is-the-most-american-city-outside-of-the-usa

Apparently Metro Vancouver not Toronto is the place in Canada with the most Americans currently living.

Canada’s third largest urban region is home to 183,155 eligible US voters.

That's much more than I'd expected. The same report lists Toronto (the next Canadian city) at 78,371.

This is for eligible voters, not all American citizens, so it's hard to tell how representative it is (for example, children and teens wouldn't be counted). As well, there are probably Americans who've given up citizenship after "immigrating" to Canada (though how common that is who knows).

 

[wild goose chase]

I definitely think Toronto is more oriented towards the Northeast than the Midwest. It seems to me that far more Torontonians have been to NYC or even Boston than Chicago.

I wonder if that would have been different when Chicago was at peak population, or times prior to that, when it was still a growing city. Ernest Hemingway, who was born in a Chicago suburb (Oak Park), worked for the Toronto Star as writer and foreign correspondent, and had a son who was born in Toronto.

http://torontoist.com/2012/03/in-our-town-ernest-hemingway-in-toronto/

However, Hemingway, like many outsiders who perceived Toronto at the time, saw it as austere, boring, not a particularly fun place, and was rather eager to leave it behind and move onto other places in his career.

 

[wild goose chase]

Later on in the 20th century, Mike Myers, a Torontonian with Chicago-related career ties is also an example of links between the two cities. Second City, and SCTV itself is also testament to Chicago's influence on Toronto.

Other influences that are more recent from Chicago come to mind -- Taste of the Danforth based on Taste of Chicago, and Mel Lastman's moose statues inspired by Cows on Parade.

 

[Johnny Au]

Later on in the 20th century, Mike Myers, a Torontonian with Chicago-related career ties is also an example of links between the two cities. Second City, and SCTV itself is also testament to Chicago's influence on Toronto.

Other influences that are more recent from Chicago come to mind -- Taste of the Danforth based on Taste of Chicago, and Mel Lastman's moose statues inspired by Cows on Parade.

Cows on Parade originated in Zurich a year before Chicago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CowParade

Chicago also had horse statues in 2015.