Preservation as a Verb: How Gooderham and Worts Became the Distillery District

Walk into the Distillery District at the corner of Trinity and Mill and you are on private land, open to the public. Red brick warehouses line a pedestrian lane, pipes and walkways cross overhead, and a long grey stone building closes the view to the south. It is one of the most complete Victorian industrial sites in Canada, and it is complete because, when the whisky stopped, the buildings were kept and given new uses.

The firm

The business began with a windmill. The City of Toronto's heritage report says James Worts established a wind-powered flour mill in 1831, on what is now Gristmill Lane. Worts died in 1834. His brother-in-law, William Gooderham, carried on, and the Dictionary of Canadian Biography says that in 1837 he added a distillery to make use of surplus and second-grade grain. In 1845 Gooderham's nephew, James Gooderham Worts, became a partner, and the firm became Gooderham and Worts.

When the wind proved too erratic, the Distillery's own heritage guide says, the firm installed one of the earliest steam engines in Toronto. In 1859 it began the great limestone Stone Distillery, working by 1861. By the 1860s, the City says, it had become Canada's largest distilling company, and in the late nineteenth century it was one of the largest distilling operations in the world. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography gives the most checkable number: by the mid 1870s the firm's 150 workers were producing one of every three gallons of proof spirits made in Canada.

A factory designed in detail

The buildings went up between 1859 and 1927, mostly designed by one family: David Roberts Senior, an Irish engineer and millwright, and his son David Roberts Junior. The City's heritage report calls many of them unexpectedly ornate in decoration while being highly functional. Three things are worth finding:

• The Pure Spirits buildings of 1873, on the east side of Trinity Street, the son's first solo design. Alcohol was purified and stored there, and alcohol can explode, so the fronts are huge many-paned windows in cast iron, meant to blow out in an explosion and save the building.
• The malt kiln's cupola on the west side of Trinity. The Distillery's own guide says it is purely decorative, and so are the chimneys.
• The tank houses and rack houses east of Trinity, low brick boxes built between 1879 and 1891 when the law began to require whisky to be aged before sale. About a dozen were built and ten survive. The six-storey Rack House D, at the corner of Mill and Trinity, is the largest Victorian storage building on the site.

Closing and reopening

The firm was bought by the industrialist Harry Hatch in the 1920s. The Canadian Encyclopedia says whisky distilling stopped in 1957, but the plant carried on making other spirits, and the City records that the complex finally closed in 1990, following the sale of Hiram-Gooderham and Worts to Allied Vintners.

In 2001 the site was bought by Cityscape Holdings, and it reopened as the Distillery District in 2003. Trinity Street, once a public road, is now in the City's words a former right-of-way that has since been privatized and pedestrianized.

How it is protected

The complex was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1988. The Canadian Register's reasons call it an imposing landmark whose buildings collectively bear witness to the evolution of the Canadian distilling industry, and list its industrial skyline of pitched roofs, turrets and chimney stacks, its coordinated palette of materials and paint colours, its round-arched openings and the second-storey conveyance ways between buildings.

It is not a designated heritage conservation district. The City lists the Distillery District among its completed district studies, prepared in 2016, rather than its designated districts. The individual buildings carry their own protections, and the reuse kept fittings like pipes, conveyors, walkways and hoists, which is why the site still reads as a works rather than a set of facades.

Visiting

The district is free to walk and open most days of the year, on private property with its own site rules: casual photographs are fine, drones are not, and the cobblestones are uneven. From mid-November to early January the Distillery Winter Village takes over, and at peak evening times the whole district needs a ticket, so check the Winter Village site before you go.

On the walk

The Old Town walk ends here. It runs eleven stops over about three kilometres, about 110 minutes at an easy pace, from St James Cathedral through the first ten blocks of the Town of York, past St Lawrence Market, the Bank of Upper Canada and the First Parliament site, to the Distillery District. Its last three stops are here: Trinity and Mill, the Stone Distillery and Tank House Lane. For the oldest building on the site, read The Stone Distillery: Older Than Canada.