The R.L. Hearn Generating Station

Few structures dominate Toronto's eastern Port Lands the way the R.L. Hearn Generating Station does. Built by the Toronto Hydro-Electric System starting in the years after the Second World War and expanded through the 1950s into one of the largest coal-fired power plants in Canada, the station was named for Richard L. Hearn, the utility's chief engineer and later chairman. Its most visible feature has always been its chimney, a freestanding concrete stack reported at well over 100 metres tall, built at a scale that made it a fixture on the skyline for decades.

From coal plant to cultural venue

The Hearn stopped generating power in the early 1980s, a casualty of changing energy economics and tightening air-quality standards, and sat largely unused for roughly three decades afterward. That changed when the Luminato Festival adopted the empty turbine hall as a temporary headquarters in the mid-2010s, demonstrating that the cavernous industrial interior could work as an event space with minimal alteration; since then the Hearn has become a recurring venue for large-scale arts events and film production, trading on the same scale that once made it purely functional.

Sources

• Wikipedia — Hearn Generating Station
• Luminato Festival — Venue history