Where to Stay in Oshawa, Ontario

What is Oshawa known for?

Oshawa has been a centre of Canada's automotive industry since the early twentieth century, and the Canadian Automotive Museum lays that record out for visitors in a single building. Parkwood Estate draws its own traffic. The Robert McLaughlin Gallery holds the art collection and the Ontario Regiment Museum adds a military one, which leaves a manufacturing town with two museums and a public gallery in easy reach of one another.

What are the main landmarks in Oshawa?

Parkwood Estate is the set piece. The house and its grounds stand at the top of the city's list, and the Canadian Automotive Museum follows close behind with the machinery that built much of modern Oshawa. Older fabric survives downtown.

Simcoe Street United Church stands on the grid that King Street East still organises, Lupton House keeps its place among the newer frontages, and the Robert McLaughlin Gallery and Ontario Regiment Museum finish the list.

What is the history of Oshawa?

The name came before the city. Oshawa derives from the Ojibwa term aazhawe, meaning the crossing place, a description of the ground rather than of anything built on it. Settlement followed in the nineteenth century.

The city dates itself to 1850, by which point the Lake Ontario shoreline and the routes running inland from it had turned a crossing point into a settlement with its own standing. Then came the cars. Oshawa turned into a centre of Canada's automotive industry in the early twentieth century, and the weight of that industry left the city with Parkwood Estate and the Robert McLaughlin Gallery.

The Canadian Automotive Museum keeps the industrial record. The Ontario Regiment Museum records a separate service history in the same city. Growth of a different kind arrived with the region, as Oshawa became the largest municipality in the Regional Municipality of Durham and the eastern anchor of both the Greater Toronto Area and the Golden Horseshoe.

The old grid stayed put. Simcoe Street United Church, Lupton House and the frontages along King Street East still mark where the crossing place began.

Where is Oshawa?

Lake Ontario closes one side. Oshawa spreads back from the Lake Ontario shoreline over ground that runs inland from the water, a spread of built-up land wide enough to make it the largest municipality in the Regional Municipality of Durham. Toronto lies along the same shore.

The city holds the far end of the Greater Toronto Area and of the Golden Horseshoe, the point where the urban belt around the lake finally gives out.

What is the climate of Oshawa?

Lake Ontario runs the seasons here. The water lies close enough to hold Oshawa's autumn warm and to drag its spring out, and it feeds the snow that falls when cold air crosses open water toward the shore. Winters still bite.

Nights on the shoreline stay milder than they do in the inland parts of the Regional Municipality of Durham, which is the clearest sign of the lake at work.

How do you get to Oshawa?

Most arrivals come from Toronto. The drive east along the Lake Ontario shoreline crosses the Greater Toronto Area before it reaches Oshawa, and rail along the same corridor ties the two cities together. King Street East carries the middle.

Simcoe Street crosses it, and the two together still order the way visitors move between Parkwood Estate, the Canadian Automotive Museum and the downtown grid.