Cobblestone lanes closed to cars, lined with Victorian brick and stone buildings from a nineteenth century whisky works.
What Distillery District looks like
The Distillery District is a cluster of about forty Victorian brick and stone buildings on ten car-free streets and lanes on the east side of downtown Toronto. Cast iron loading doors and catwalks are still bolted to several of the walls, and the lanes keep their original cobblestone paving.
James Worts and William Gooderham, brothers-in-law, built a windmill on the site in 1832 to grind flour. Worts drowned himself in the windmill's well two years later, and Gooderham moved the business into distilling in 1837. The brick and stone buildings that still stand went up starting in 1859. By 1862 the distillery was making about 700,000 imperial gallons of spirits a year, a quarter of Canada's output. Growth continued under William's son George, past two million gallons a year.
Whisky production stopped in 1957. The plant kept making rum and industrial alcohol until it closed for good in 1990, and the buildings sat empty through the 1990s. Parks Canada listed the 30 buildings around Trinity and Mill Streets as a National Historic Site in 1988, while they still sat empty.
Cityscape Holdings bought the site in 2001 and reopened it in May 2003 as a pedestrian precinct with no chain stores. , the widest of the lanes, runs south from Mill Street and works as a public square on market days. The stands just off , and has operated nearby since the reopening. The , home to the Soulpepper Theatre Company, opened in 2006 on Tank House Lane. now has a patio farther down the same lane.
Films shot in Distillery District
The Gooderham and Worts complex sat vacant through most of the 1990s, and productions used the empty buildings as a ready-made set. More than 800 film and television productions have shot in the Distillery District since 1990.
Chicago, 2002
Rob Marshall shot Chicago entirely around Toronto rather than in Chicago. The story needed a deeper stage than most real theatres have, so the production built the film's Onyx Theatre, prison and courtroom sets inside the old Gooderham and Worts complex. The 's exterior plays Cook County Jail, including the prison yard scene where the inmate Hunyak is hanged. , altered with visual effects, is the street down which Roxie is driven away in a police wagon after shooting her lover.
X-Men, 2000
X-Men filmed its opening scenes in the Gooderham and Worts complex on Mill Street while the buildings still stood derelict and empty. Young Erik Lehnsherr discovers his powers at the gates of a Nazi concentration camp in one scene, and Wolverine is first found in a cage fighting bar the film sets in northern Alberta in another. The camp set is now the patio of the Mexican restaurant , at 18 Tank House Lane.
What Distillery District can double for
Distillery District can stand in for 1920s Chicago, both Cook County Jail's exterior and the street down which Roxie is driven away after a shooting (Chicago, 2002), a Nazi concentration camp in the prologue where young Erik Lehnsherr discovers his powers (X-Men, 2000), the New Jersey docks in a Depression era boxing biopic (Cinderella Man, 2005) and Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, in the CBC family drama Road to Avonlea.
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