The Distillery District & Old Town

You are standing at the entrance to what is arguably the best-preserved collection of Victorian industrial architecture in North America. The red brick buildings stretching out before you were once the heart of the largest distillery in the British Empire — a factory complex that at its peak in the late nineteenth century produced nearly two million gallons of whisky per year and employed hundreds of workers in a city of fewer than one hundred thousand people. The scale of what went on here is hard to square with the boutique galleries and artisan cafes you see today.

The story begins in eighteen thirty-two, when James Worts arrived from Suffolk, England, and built a windmill on this site to grind grain for flour. You can still see the base of that original windmill if you walk to the eastern edge of the complex — it is the oldest surviving industrial structure in Toronto. Worts was joined by his brother-in-law William Gooderham the following year, and the two men pivoted from flour milling to distilling when they recognised that the surplus grain from their mill could be turned into whisky at considerable profit. Worts died in eighteen thirty-four, but Gooderham pressed on, and under the Gooderham family the operation grew into a sprawling enterprise that remade the waterfront.

The building directly in front of you is the Tank House, one of the most photographed structures in the Distillery District, and for good reason. Its perfectly proportioned brick facade, arched windows, and the restored wooden water tower rising from its roof give you the clearest sense of what this place looked like at the height of its industrial operation. The tank itself — a large wooden storage vessel that sat inside — has been removed, but the steel framework and the tower remain as architectural punctuation against the Toronto skyline.

This lane you are standing in, running east-west through the heart of the complex, is where the daily business of the distillery happened. Workers moved grain, coal, and barrels along routes not unlike this one. The narrow width of the lane was deliberate: it concentrated heat in winter, provided shelter from prevailing winds off Lake Ontario, and made it easier to control the movement of goods. Toronto winters could kill a man in the mid-nineteenth century if he did not keep moving, and the layout of this place reflects that practical understanding.

Welcome to what National Geographic once named the world's best food market. St Lawrence Market has been feeding Toronto since eighteen forty-four, when the current South Market building was constructed on the site of Toronto's first purpose-built city hall, which had stood here since eighteen fortyfive. That first city hall served the young city of Toronto for half a century before the community outgrew it, and when it was eventually demolished the South Market was built around its surviving facade — you can still see it incorporated into the building's north wall, a ghost of the original structure embedded within the market's brick.

The ground floor of the South Market is where you want to spend your time. Stalls selling cheese, charcuterie, smoked fish, fresh bread, and prepared foods are packed together in a dense, fragrant arrangement that reflects how Torontonians actually eat: eclectically, with no particular culinary nationalism, drawing from the extraordinary diversity of the city. Toronto is one of the most multicultural cities in the world — the majority of its residents were born outside Canada — and St Lawrence Market reflects that in every direction. You can buy Caribbean jerk chicken beside German sausage beside Philippine longganisa beside Mennonite cheddar, and none of it seems remotely incongruous.

Face south on Wellington Street East and look at the building at the corner. The Gooderham Building — known informally as Toronto's Flatiron Building — occupies the triangular wedge of land where Wellington Street meets Front Street East, and the result is a building that comes to a point as sharp as the bow of a ship. The narrow eastern facade, where the two streets converge, is only six metres wide. The building widens to the west, with a curved Romanesque facade of red brick and sandstone that flares out along Front Street like a fan being opened.

It was completed in eighteen ninety-two and designed by architect David Roberts Jr., the same man who designed the Distillery District's buildings for the Gooderham family. William Gooderham Jr. commissioned it as the administrative headquarters for the Gooderham and Worts empire — a statement building designed to announce the family's commercial ambitions to anyone arriving at Union Station and looking north up Yonge Street. The building still works as a landmark in exactly that way; it draws the eye from multiple directions and provides one of the best focal points in the city's streetscape.

Berczy Park sits in the triangular space between Front Street, Wellington Street East, and Scott Street, and it functions as a kind of breathing room between the Gooderham Building and the weight of the financial district to the west. The park was redesigned and reopened in twenty seventeen, and the centrepiece of the redesign is a fountain that has become one of the most beloved public artworks in Toronto: a three-tiered structure featuring twenty-seven bronze dogs of various breeds, all arrayed in careful social hierarchy around a central fountain jet, with a golden bone suspended above the topmost tier as the apparent prize. Designed by landscape architect Claude Cormier, the Berczy Park Dog Fountain has an air of absolute seriousness about something completely ridiculous, which makes it irresistible.

The park is named for William Berczy, an early settler and artist who arrived in Upper Canada in the late eighteenth century and led a group of German-speaking immigrants to settle in what is now Markham, north of Toronto. Berczy is best known today for his portrait of Joseph Brant, the Mohawk military and political leader who allied with the British during the American Revolutionary War and later settled in Upper Canada. The portrait, completed around eighteen oh-seven, is one of the most significant surviving likenesses of Brant and hangs in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

The Hockey Hall of Fame occupies a building whose architectural pedigree would be notable even if it had nothing to do with hockey. The main hall is housed in a former Bank of Montreal branch completed in eighteen eighty-five, designed by the firm of Darling and Curry in a Beaux-Arts classical style. The banking hall's great domed ceiling, marble floors, and ornate plasterwork were built to convey the permanence and probity of nineteenth-century financial institutions. They now convey the gravity of hockey, which in Canada amounts to roughly the same thing.

Hockey is not merely a sport in this country. You have probably been told this before and possibly found it a slight exaggeration. Spend a morning in this building and you will not find it an exaggeration at all. The Hall opened at this location in nineteen ninety-three, having moved from its original home at the Canadian National Exhibition grounds. It holds one of the largest collections of hockey memorabilia in the world: sticks, jerseys, skates, photographs, game films, and equipment from the full sweep of professional hockey history stretching back to the game's formalisation in the late nineteenth century.

Walk east along King Street and look for the copper-green spire rising over the Victorian streetscape. St James Cathedral has occupied this corner of King Street East and Church Street since the founding of the city — a succession of buildings on this site stretches back to eighteen oh-seven, when the first wooden church was erected here for the Anglican congregation of the young town of York. The current Gothic Revival cathedral, largely completed in eighteen seventy-three after a series of fires destroyed its predecessors, is the product of architect Frederick William Cumberland, who gave Toronto several of its most distinguished mid-Victorian institutional buildings.

The spire you see today is three hundred and six feet tall, making it the tallest spire in Canada at the time of its completion and still among the taller ecclesiastical structures in the country. From certain vantage points across downtown, the spire provides a useful vertical marker in a skyline otherwise dominated by glass and steel. Walk around the building to the south to see the full cathedral facade and the small park that separates it from King Street — it is one of the few places in this part of the city where you can step back far enough to see a nineteenth-century building in anything approaching its original spatial context.

You are walking through one of the best-preserved Victorian commercial streetscapes in Toronto, and you want to slow down and look up. The buildings along this stretch of King Street East between Church Street and Parliament Street were constructed primarily between eighteen sixty and nineteen ten, and they show you the full range of materials and ambitions available to a prosperous colonial commercial city in the decades after Confederation. Red brick from local kilns. Bay windows organised into vertical rhythms. Corbelled cornices. Arched window heads in brick, stone, and terracotta. Street-level facades that have been altered and restored with varying degrees of care, but upper floors that in many cases have changed very little in a hundred and fifty years.

This district is known informally as the Old Town of York, a reference to the city's pre-incorporation name. York was the capital of Upper Canada from seventeen ninety-three until eighteen forty-one, when the Province of Canada was created and the capital eventually moved. During those decades the settlement grew from a muddy outpost on the north shore of Lake Ontario into a functioning colonial town with churches, a courthouse, a market, taverns, and the full social infrastructure of a British colonial community. The street grid you are walking was laid out by Surveyor General John Graves Simcoe's team in the seventeen nineties, and it has barely changed.

The building at Two hundred and sixty King Street East is one of the most historically resonant structures in Toronto, and it is easy to walk past without registering what it is. This is Toronto's First Post Office, a modest two-storey red brick building constructed in eighteen thirty-three and the only surviving example in Canada of a post office from the British colonial era. It has been in continuous operation as a post office for most of its existence and remains a functioning Canada Post outlet today, which makes it arguably the oldest continuously operating post office in Canada, though the precise claim is contested by historians.

The post office was established as part of the British Imperial postal system that connected the colonies of British North America to each other and to the mother country. Mail moved by ship across the Atlantic and by road through an often difficult system of post roads that were, in the eighteen thirties, frequently impassable in spring when the mud reached axle depth. A letter from York to London, England could take anywhere from six to twelve weeks depending on weather and the season. The post office was the primary means by which the colonial administration communicated, by which merchants conducted business at a distance, and by which settlers maintained whatever connections they could to family left behind.

You are ending your walk in what many urban planners consider one of the most successful examples of mixed-income urban neighbourhood development in North America. The St Lawrence neighbourhood that surrounds you was built in the late nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties on a former rail yard and industrial land south of King Street, and it became internationally famous not for its architecture — which is solid and urbane but not spectacular — but for its social model. The city of Toronto required a mix of market-rate housing, co-operative housing, and non-profit housing throughout the neighbourhood, embedded block by block so that no single building type would dominate. The result, forty years later, is a neighbourhood that has not gentrified in the usual sense of the word because the social diversity was baked into the land use from the beginning.

The neighbourhood's success is often cited by housing advocates and urban planners as a proof of concept for what mixed-income development can achieve when political will exists to enforce it. Former mayor David Crombie, who championed the St Lawrence model in the nineteen seventies, argued that cities die when they become monolithic — when they become exclusively wealthy or exclusively poor, exclusively commercial or exclusively residential. St Lawrence was his demonstration that another arrangement was possible.