Distillery District

Where it sits. The Distillery District occupies roughly 13 acres east of downtown Toronto, bounded by Mill Street, Parliament Street, Cherry Street and the rail corridor, about a fifteen-minute walk from Union Station and immediately south of the Corktown and St. Lawrence neighbourhoods. The Gardiner Expressway and the rail viaduct cut it off from the lake, which it once fronted directly — the shoreline in the 1830s ran far closer, and the district's original wharves and windmill stood on water that has since been filled. Ten car-free lanes run through it, paved in Belgian block that punishes thin soles and wheeled luggage alike.

The story behind it. James Worts and his brother-in-law William Gooderham arrived from Suffolk and put up a windmill on the lakeshore in 1831 to grind grain. Distilling started as a way to use surplus and low-grade wheat, and it swallowed the milling business. By the 1860s Gooderham and Worts was producing more spirits than any other distillery on earth, shipping across the British Empire, and its owners had extended into banking, railways and shipping — the family's Bank of Toronto interests eventually became part of TD. The great limestone Stone Distillery, put up in 1859 and 1860 after fire destroyed the earlier works, still anchors the site. Production continued through Prohibition on the American side, wound down through the twentieth century, and stopped for good in 1990. The buildings sat largely empty for a decade, which is why so much survives: nobody could afford to modernise them.

What makes the fabric unusual. Forty-seven buildings remain, the largest concentration of Victorian industrial architecture in North America, and they were designated a National Historic Site in 1988. The interest is in the process, not the ornament: the Pure Spirits Building with its glazed north wall, the Cannery, the Case Goods Warehouse, the Rack House complex where barrels aged, the Boiler House, and Tank House Lane, named for the fermenting tanks. Cast-iron columns, heavy timber, arched windows in load-bearing brick, and interiors where the original chutes, hoppers and rail spurs are still legible. A Vancouver-based developer bought the site in 2001 and reopened it in May 2003 as a pedestrian arts and commerce district; the deal that preserved it also filled it with galleries, coffee roasters, a brewery, jewellery and design shops, and Soulpepper Theatre's Young Centre for the Performing Arts.

On screen. Toronto's film industry treats this place as an all-purpose period backlot, because it delivers something almost impossible to find intact in a North American city: multiple blocks of nineteenth-century industrial street with no visible modern intrusion, closed to traffic, under single ownership, with a location office that knows how to say yes. The district's own count of productions shot on the property runs into four figures. The best-known credits are period pieces that needed an American city of the 1920s or 1930s — Rob Marshall's Chicago (2002), which used Toronto extensively for its Prohibition-era streets, and Ron Howard's Cinderella Man (2005), which turned the lanes into Depression-era New York. Bryan Singer's X-Men (2000) also worked here during its Toronto shoot. Because the buildings read as generic industrial rather than specifically Canadian, the district almost never plays itself.

What you actually do there. It is compact enough to cross in ten minutes, so the visit is about pace: coffee at one of the roasteries, the Mill Street brewpub that started on site in 2002, the sake brewery, the chocolate makers, and a rotating set of galleries and craft studios in the Case Goods building. Public art is scattered through the lanes, including a much-photographed steel love-lock sculpture and large temporary installations. Soulpepper stages a full theatre season in the Young Centre. From mid-November to the end of December the Toronto Christmas Market fills the lanes with stalls, a large tree and heavy crowd control, with timed weekend tickets; it is the single busiest period of the year.

Getting there and timing. The 504 King and 121 Fort York–Esplanade routes drop you within a few hundred metres; the closest subway stations are King and Castle Frank, both a real walk away, so most visitors arrive by streetcar, taxi or on foot from St. Lawrence Market. Underground paid parking is available on Parliament Street. Weekday mornings are close to deserted and the light on the brick is best then; summer weekends and market season are shoulder-to-shoulder. The cobbles are genuinely difficult for wheelchairs, walkers and strollers — the smoothest routes are the flagstone strips laid along some building fronts. Winter visits are cold and wind-tunnelled but the low sun on the Stone Distillery is the best photograph the site offers.