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Once threatened with demolition to make way for an elevated highway, Old Fort York now brims with the fife-and-drum Redcoat flavor of a colonial English garrison. To visit this city within a city is to escape the 21^st-century metropolis outside its formidable defenses.

A designated National Historic Site, Fort York is fully restored, and today accommodates the country’s finest collection of authentic War-of-1812-era structures. (Sadly, many original buildings were demolished in the early 1950s.) In addition to tours of the fort and battlefields, there is period music, country dancing demonstrations, military displays, musket demonstrations, drill classes and more.

The modern attraction features employees in period costume who bring colonial York back to life, and provide helpful information about the fort’s continuously maintained barracks, blockhouses, and gunpowder magazines. And don’t forget to visit the handsomest of all the buildings: the red brick, single-story, ten-room quarters for senior officers. Those Redcoats had it pretty good.

Founded in 1793 on a triangular plot of land in York (now Toronto), the present fort is actually the second to occupy the seven-acre site. The first was destroyed in an American invasion during the War of 1812.

The British eventually ceded the fort to Canadian control in the 1840s, and today its eight remaining original structures comprise the oldest buildings in booming Toronto, once a colonial capital and British fort. During a century-and-a-half period, troops were mustered here for numerous wars and rebellions.

Wandering around the various installations today, it’s easy to imagine the large impact the fort had on the little town. Indeed, countless importers, merchants and pub owners set up shop outside its gates.