Toronto: Distillery District

Distillery District, Toronto, November 10, 2015

CHANCES ARE YOU'VE SEEN THE OLD GOODERHAM & WORTS PLANT in a movie shot in Toronto - maybe in Chicago or X-Men or Three Men and a Baby. Construction began on the liquor distillery's lakefront site in 1859, and most of the old buildings were still around when it closed in 1990, by which point it was already a big favorite for movie productions looking for some Victorian industrial streetscape or a posh vintage shopping district.

I wandered around the edge of the fenced-in site nearly a quarter century ago with my friend Michael Ventruscolo, on the same day that I took my skyline photos. Thanks to an economic downturn or two it would be a few years before work started on turning Gooderham & Worts into the Distillery District - the posh vintage shopping destination that everyone, especially film location scouts, knew it was destined to become.

We ended up training our cameras on the walls of the old Stonehouse Distillery building, built from limestone shipped all the way from Kingston and a curiosity in a city built mostly from red brick.

Gooderham & Worts, Toronto, February 1991

Distillery District, Toronto, November 10, 2015

The southern edge of the G&W plant was bordered with railway sidings, long disused when I took my original picture, and replaced with a parking lot during the area's revitalization. The ground was raised up to meet the stoop of the archway door in the middle of my shot, once a loading dock and now the door to a building full of galleries and offices.

They kept the sign, which made it easy to find again. It wasn't much harder to find the next shot on my roll, where I tried to fill up the frame with the arched windows and iron anchors for the floor ties in the Stonehouse, which was gutted by a fire in 1869 and rebuilt from the inside. I remember thinking as I took these photos that there was no way these lovely old buildings would remain empty.

Gooderham & Worts, Toronto, February 1991

Distillery District, Toronto, November 10, 2015

The trucks parked where the old railway tracks once ran were probably from the crews setting up the Christmas Market nearby. The Distillery District features a theatre, several theatre and dance companies, a craft brewer, a chocolatier and a branch of Balzac's, an indie cafe chain. It's very nice.

It had a shaky start, but the Distillery District is a great example of heritage preservation and urban renewal - a thumbs-up I rarely give my hometown but in this case it's well deserved. The real challenge has been extending the city's downtown south and east into what were once the industrial precincts by the railway tracks, but a billion dollar redevelopment of the area adjacent to the old distillery for this year's Pan Am Games might finally bring the whole project off.

Gooderham & Worts, Toronto, February 1991

Distillery District, Toronto, November 10, 2015

It was a little harder to find this little stump of machinery, which had been helpfully retained in place, despite the ground beneath it being raised almost a foot when the area was paved with old bricks. The red bricks on the outside of Balzac's cafe are a lot more typically Toronto - the terracotta walls, stained with age, that I see in my dreams.

But let's pull back a little, why don't we, and get a bigger picture?

Distillery District, Toronto, November 10, 2015

Churlishly, though, I have to admit that I miss the old, abandoned Gooderham & Worts, much as I do Massey-Harris, the Inglis plant and all the other derelict and semi-utilized industrial sites left over from Toronto's nose-down, six-day-work-week, closed-on-Sunday, beauty-is-for-fairies-and-Catholics past. You have to travel a lot further and look a lot harder to find the bits of the city that have been left out in the rain.