Last summer, a Toronto resident named Matthew Jordan went viral on TikTok for his passionate videos about the cities’ topographical history. His content gained so much traction in such a short amount of time that followers started requesting that he start an in-person walking tour. That was the start of Hidden Rivers — a tour that has now become so popular that Jordan is planning his own Eras Tour to close out the summer.
Jordan sold out every single tour he offered last summer — four or five a week, often multiple a day. One focused on different creeks in Toronto, while another delved into the city’s waterfront. Despite the amount of work it required, he knew it was a given that he was going to do it again, and the reason was primarily community.
“I’ve been saying since last summer, at the start of my tours, that this is about friends. This is about meeting people, feeling rooted in your city and feeling like you know the other people who live here, understanding things about the city you never knew before, and having a broader vantage point of the city of Toronto beyond your local neighborhood,” he explains.
He had some time to recalibrate and brainstorm how to improve his business model ahead of Hidden Rivers season two. Jordan spent the school year primarily living in Boston to TA an English course about Taylor Swift at Harvard. (You might wonder why he’s qualified to speak on that subject — oddly, he got his start on TikTok creating Taylor Swift song tutorials, as he’s a musician and an improv actor as well as an academic.)
An idea for an amendment for his tour came about when he went to see one of his favourite bands, Vulfpeck, and noticed that they had introduced a new show format. They performed eight shows in four nights in NYC, Thursday to Sunday back-to-back and that comprised the majority of the touring they did that year. It meant that neighbouring audiences had to come to them — and Jordan felt that he could apply the same format to his tours.
“Instead of giving the same walking tour four or five times a week, what if my tours were events that happened once or twice a month for a full weekend, Thursday to Sunday?” he says. “Your one chance to see this one route.”
He ultimately planned seven distinct tours this past summer, six in Toronto including the Spadina Expressway route, plus one in Hamilton. Once again, almost every tour sold out, but this time he started noticing familiar faces.
“Because I was giving different tours every time, the same people started showing up every weekend or every other weekend,” he says.
In fact, Jordan recently learned that there’s a group chat of people who have met on his tours, who now hangout and go on hikes together.
“They’ve talked about how they struggle to make friends in other walking groups, but for whatever reason people feel like they can make friends at mine,” he says.
At the start of his tours he always asks the participants where they’re from and he’s noticed that very few people say Toronto. Many are immigrants, approximately 25-35 in age, who have moved to Toronto in the last two to five years, or who live in the surrounding GTA.
“I think when you move somewhere new in your 20s, maybe for school or for a job, people tell you about the restaurants, bars and coffee shops. But it’s unlikely they are telling you about the rich history of the place you live: the deep ecology, the Indigenous history and the things that really make you feel like you have a sense of accountability over this place.”
He feels that sense is what people start to develop when they come on his tours, because they’re joining a community that collectively cares about Toronto.
“These are the people who are pushing the cultural fabric of our city forward, and they’re often people who are newer here, or trying to find a place for themselves,” he explains.
With the objective of creating more opportunity for the Hidden Rivers tours community to come together, Jordan decided he would close out his second summer season with back-to-back iterations of all six of his tours, culminating in a sunset picnic at Riverdale Park for anyone who would like to join. He’s calling it his “Eras Tour”– three days, six tours, complete with an “opening act” (educator Oleksandr [Alex] Sein, who was voted in by Jordan’s social media followers after he issued a challenge to aspiring tour guides).
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The first one kicks off at 10 a.m. in Tommy Thompson park on Aug. 23, and the last one ends at 6 p.m. at Riverdale Park East on Aug. 25. A number of the tours are already sold out, but anyone is welcome to participate in the finale picnic.
After the weekend, Jordan will be headed to Connecticut to do a PhD in the history of science and technology at Princeton University — but he’ll be back offering tours next summer.
He suspects in the future that the tour project may expand to some kind of collective, with potential collaborations with museums, universities, and other cultural institutions.
“I think the gap that allowed me to do this in the first place is the fact that Toronto is not great at showing off how much interesting and amazing stuff is here and why this is a place worth staying and investing in,” he says. That’s what he hopes his tours continue to achieve. “People have told me that I’ve taught them how to fall in love with Toronto again. They were disillusioned, but now they can speak about it with great reverence and appreciation, despite all of its flaws.”
