The Distillery District

The Distillery District occupies the former grounds of the Gooderham and Worts distillery, founded in the 1830s and, by the late 19th century, the largest distillery in the British Empire, producing whisky from a sprawling complex of Victorian-era brick warehouses, mill buildings and tank houses near the mouth of the Don River. The company's founder, George Gooderham, also built the Gooderham Building downtown as the company's office headquarters.

Frozen in time, then reopened

The distillery ceased production in 1990, and its collection of roughly 40 heritage industrial buildings, largely unaltered since the Victorian era, sat mostly dormant through the 1990s, avoiding the demolition that claimed much of Toronto's other industrial heritage partly because redevelopment plans took years to materialize. When it did reopen in 2003, developers converted the complex into a pedestrian-only arts, dining and entertainment precinct, preserving the original brick facades and cobblestone streets rather than replacing them, creating what is now cited as the largest and best-preserved collection of Victorian-era industrial architecture in North America. The district has since hosted galleries, restaurants, Soulpepper Theatre, and a growing cluster of condominium towers on its edges, one of the more widely cited examples of adaptive industrial reuse in the city.

Sources

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Distillery District
• Wikipedia — Distillery District

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