A century-old brick quarry that literally built Toronto, reborn as an environmental centre
Evergreen Brick Works
The Don Valley Brick Works supplied clay bricks for much of Toronto's built city from 1889 to 1989, and its abandoned quarry and kiln buildings later became one of the city's best-known green redevelopment projects.
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The Don Valley Brick Works began operating in 1889, extracting clay directly from the Don Valley to manufacture the red bricks used to construct a large share of Toronto's Victorian and early-20th-century buildings, from modest row houses to major institutional buildings across the city. The quarry pit dug for clay extraction over a century of operation exposed a rare, deep cross-section of the valley's geological history, later prized by geologists for the layers of sediment it revealed.
From quarry to green landmark
The Brick Works closed in 1989 after a century of continuous operation, and the site sat largely derelict through the 1990s before the environmental charity Evergreen took over its redevelopment. Evergreen Brick Works reopened in stages starting in 2010 as an environmental education and community centre, restoring the old kiln buildings and quarry pond into event space, trails, a farmers' market and demonstration gardens, becoming one of the most frequently cited examples of industrial adaptive reuse in the city, alongside the R.C. Harris plant and the Distillery District.
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