If you've lived near Bloor and Prince Edward long enough, you already know Taste of the Kingsway is coming back. What you might not know is how long it's been coming back for, or that a second show, with no sponsor and no street closure permit, has been running down the hill from your house every fall for a lot longer than the festival has existed.
This year's Taste of the Kingsway is the 28th edition. That's not a small number for a street festival. It means the event predates most of the shops currently lining Bloor for it, and it means the Kingsway BIA has been closing down Bloor Street West between Prince Edward Drive and Montgomery Street for a weekend in September since sometime in the late 1990s. This year it runs Friday, September 11 through Sunday, September 13.
That's the version of the neighborhood everyone already writes about. Here's the one that doesn't need a headline.
The Festival, For The Record
Taste of the Kingsway is presented by Mantella Corporation and runs on a schedule most locals have half-memorized by now:
- Friday, September 11: 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.
- Saturday, September 12: 11:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.
- Sunday, September 13: 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.
The charity partner this year is Campfire Circle, which supports children and families affected by childhood cancer through camp-style programming. Their Fun Zone runs Saturday and Sunday with a Canine Circus show and a rock climbing wall, and the BIA has added a new kids' entertainment zone to the lineup specifically to support Campfire Circle's programs. Between the food vendors, two music stages, licensed beverage gardens, and the roughly 160 stores and 30-plus restaurants and cafés that make up the BIA membership, it's a genuinely large footprint for three days on one street.
None of that is a secret. It's on the Kingsway BIA's own event page and it'll show up in every roundup of Toronto fall festivals published this month. What those roundups won't tell you is what's already happening at the bottom of the hill, a short walk from the same stretch of Bloor, for free, with no end date attached to it.
The Show That Doesn't Need A Permit
The Kingsway sits above the Humber River valley, and the trail system at the bottom of that hill runs through Étienne Brûlé Park, past the Old Mill, and up toward James Gardens. Every September, without a vendor application or a road closure request, Chinook and Coho salmon start pushing upstream through that stretch of river to spawn. The window runs from September into late October, which puts it at roughly two months against the festival's three days.
There's no stage for this one. There's a small waterfall about 350 meters up from the parking lot at Home Smith Park, and that's usually where people end up standing for ten minutes longer than they planned to, watching fish try to clear it. Parking along the path in Home Smith Park is free from May through October, which means for the entire run of the salmon migration, you can leave your car for as long as you want and just watch.
The Humber was designated a Canadian Heritage River on September 24, 1999, a formal recognition of a river that had been doing this every fall long before anyone put up a festival banner for it.
The Walk That Connects Both Of Them
Here's the part that actually changes how you'd plan the next few weekends. The festival closure and the trailhead aren't in different neighborhoods. They're a short walk apart, on the same slope.
From the Old Mill end of the park, the paved trail heads north along the Humber, past a run of small waterfalls, under the Dundas Street overpass, and eventually into the mature tree cover of Lambton Woods before opening up at James Gardens. James Gardens itself has a history that outdates the festival by nearly a century. Fred T. James bought the land in 1908 and spent the next forty years shaping it into the terraced flower gardens that are still open to the public, with the pools and stonework you see today built almost fifty years ago.
If you keep walking past the gardens toward Scarlett Road, there's a small bakery called Jadranka Pastries tucked into the residential streets just off the trail, the kind of stop that's easy to miss if you're driving but hard to miss if you're on foot and it's been forty minutes since breakfast.
None of this requires a car-to-car itinerary. Park once at Home Smith Park, walk the loop past the falls, and you've covered a flat, well-maintained three-mile round trip in under two hours, longer if the salmon are putting on a good show that day.
The Theatre That's Been Running Longer Than Either
There's a third thing in the neighborhood that gets less attention than it probably deserves, and it makes the same point as the salmon run. The Kingsway Theatre at 3030 Bloor Street West opened in 1939 as a single-screen cinema, and it's still running indie films and documentaries today, eighty-seven years later, with no festival attached to its calendar and no anniversary campaign to mark it.
That's three separate things in this neighborhood right now, a festival, a fish run, and a movie theatre, and only one of them needed a permit. The other two have just been quietly doing their thing every year, on a schedule nobody printed on a banner.
How To Actually Use The Next Six Weeks
If you're trying to get the most out of September in the Kingsway, the practical move isn't choosing between the festival and the river. It's sequencing them. Do the festival on the weekend it's scheduled, because Taste of the Kingsway only exists for those three days and the vendor lineup and stage acts won't repeat. Then treat the salmon run as the thing you can come back to on any weekend through the end of October, whenever the weather cooperates or you just need a reason to leave the house.
A few of the Bloor strip regulars are worth knowing if you're making a day of either one. ViBo, which has been serving the neighborhood under one name or another for more than 45 years, and Azarias further down at 3058 Bloor are two of the steadier dinner options once the festival crowds thin out. The Crooked Cue is the pick if you want a pint and a game on afterward. And if you catch a screening at the Kingsway Theatre on your way back from the trail, you've technically used three generations of neighborhood institutions in one afternoon without spending money on anything the festival was selling.
The Kingsway was laid out in the 1920s and 30s as a planned garden suburb, curving streets and all, and it still behaves like one. Things here tend to last. The festival is loud about it for one weekend. The river, the gardens, and the movie theatre have just been doing it quietly the whole time.
If you're thinking about what comes next for your own home in a neighborhood like this one, whether that's a move within the Kingsway or a step toward Mineola, Port Credit, or another corner of South Etobicoke, Corrie Harding-Keizs has spent years learning which streets hold their character and which changes actually matter to the people living on them. Request a personalized market consultation whenever you're ready to talk it through.
