The Stone Distillery: Older Than Canada

The Stone Distillery stands in the centre of the Distillery District at the foot of Trinity Street. Four storeys of grey limestone, deep-set windows, iron tie-rods visible at the second-floor beam line. Construction began in 1859, eight years before the British North America Act. The Stone Distillery is a pre-Confederation industrial building whose preservation is the consequence of being too valuable to demolish and too obsolete to restore, which is the form Toronto's heritage economy takes. That sentence is the thesis. Everything else is how the building got here.

The building James Worts and William Gooderham built

Gooderham and Worts began in 1832 as a windmill at the mouth of the Don River, grinding wheat for a small distillery on the side. By 1859, after a generation of partnership tragedies and recoveries (the Worts family alone went through bankruptcy, a suicide, and a remarriage into the Gooderham family that braided the two surnames into one firm), the company commissioned a new central building from David Roberts Senior, an Anglo-Toronto architect with industrial credentials. Roberts specified locally available limestone, four storeys, no decoration that did not earn its place against the load. The limestone was sailed in from quarries near Kingston on schooners. Lake transport was cheaper than rail in 1859, and the rail corridor that would later run along the south edge of the site was still ten years from being built.

The building was completed in early 1861. By the standards of its moment, it was the largest private industrial undertaking in the history of Upper Canada. Inside, fermenting tanks ran the size of small rooms. The iron tie-rods at the beam line were not decoration. They held the masonry walls against the outward thrust of the tanks. The building was, in effect, a structural cage holding back the chemistry of grain.

By 1871, per Sally Gibson's history of the district, the firm was producing roughly two million gallons of whisky a year. By the late nineteenth century, by output, Gooderham and Worts was the largest distilling operation in the British Empire. The Empire-scale claim survives in the Parks Canada designation language and in the corporate records preserved in the Hiram Walker archive. It is a claim about output, not architectural ambition. The Stone Distillery looks the way it looks because grain fermentation generates outward force, not because anyone was trying to make a beautiful building.

What happens when a building too big to demolish becomes obsolete

The decline began in the early twentieth century. Prohibition in Ontario from 1916 to 1927, and longer in much of the United States, narrowed the market. Gooderham and Worts was bought by Harry Hatch in 1923, then folded into Hiram Walker and Sons in 1927. Production continued in a reduced form through the middle decades of the century. By 1957, almost all distilling on the site had been moved to other Hiram Walker plants. The buildings stayed standing because demolishing forty stone industrial buildings is more expensive than letting them deteriorate. They were used as warehouses, as overflow storage, as a film set for movies that needed Victorian industrial backdrop. From the 1980s into the late 1990s, the Stone Distillery was, in effect, a ruin in waiting. Mark Osbaldeston, in Unbuilt Toronto, documents the proposals that almost erased it: a 1990s casino bid, a demolition-and-condo plan, a public-private partnership that fell apart.

The site was sold to Cityscape Holdings in 2001. The new owners made a curatorial decision that has shaped every meaningful heritage redevelopment in the city since. No chain retail. No alteration to the building shells. Adaptive reuse only, with the interiors permitted to do whatever a private tenant needed them to do, provided the exterior masonry stayed untouched. The district reopened in May 2003 with this rule in place. In 2015, ERA Architects, led by Michael McClelland and Edwin Rowse, wrote the Heritage Conservation District plan that gave the curatorial rules statutory force under the Ontario Heritage Act.

The Stone Distillery sits inside that statutory cage. The shell is 1859. The interior is whatever the current tenant has built. At the time of this writing, the interior is a Mexican restaurant. The room a 1860s distiller would have entered has a margarita menu and a fire pit. The contradiction is on purpose.

Why this building matters more than the contradiction lets on

The Stone Distillery is one of the few surviving pieces of pre-Confederation industrial architecture in any Canadian city, and it is by some distance the largest. The 1988 federal designation as a National Historic Site rests on this. Parks Canada calls Gooderham and Worts the largest surviving collection of Victorian industrial architecture in North America. The Stone Distillery is the anchor of that collection. Without it, the rest of the campus is a set of nineteenth-century warehouses; with it, the campus is a complete industrial vernacular, the only one of its kind on the continent that did not get demolished.

What you are looking at, when you stand in the courtyard and face the four-storey north face, is the building that proves the rule. The rest of the Distillery District is preserved because the Stone Distillery anchored the case for preservation. The Empire-scale superlative attaches here. The federal designation attaches here. The Heritage Conservation District boundary draws around this building first and adds the others.

What to look for

Stand back in the central courtyard, the cobblestones underfoot, the building's main face filling your view to the north. Count four storeys. The deep-set windows are functional: thick limestone walls, narrow openings. The iron tie-rods at the second-floor beam line are the most legible engineering feature. Each rod runs through the building to a corresponding plate on the opposite wall, holding the masonry in compression against the historical outward thrust of the tanks. The tanks are long gone. The tie-rods are left as evidence that the building was once a chemical machine.

Look at the doorway nearest you. The interior shifts every few years as tenants change, but the threshold is consistent. You step from limestone built before Confederation into whatever the current decade has installed inside. The thinness of that threshold is the entire story of the district. Heritage value attaches to the wall. The wall is what was protected, what was designated, what was made permanent. The interior is the negotiable surface, where every tenant since 2003 has been free to do whatever a stone shell will permit.

The Stone Distillery is the proof of concept for what the rest of the Distillery District does and the proof that a building can outlive its industrial purpose by more than half a century if the masonry is strong enough and the city is willing to draw a heritage line around it. The masonry came from Kingston. The line came from ERA Architects in 2015. The building between them is older than Canada and continues to stand on a piece of ground that, in 1859, was the eastern industrial edge of a colonial town.