A decommissioned power plant stands beside a working port on flat land built from reclaimed marsh.
What Port Lands looks like
The Port Lands sit about five kilometres southeast of downtown Toronto, built on marsh the Toronto Harbour Commission filled in starting in 1912. By the late 1920s the wetland between Cherry Street and Leslie Street was gone, and industry moved onto the new ground. The roads here are wide and built for trucks. Rail spurs and chain link fences run along many of them. No one lives here yet.
At 575 Commissioners Street, the Toronto Port Lands Company runs a cement and aggregate plant it calls the "concrete campus," consolidated in 2013 from several companies that used to operate separately. sit near where the ship channel meets the lake. Aggregate, cement, salt and sugar still move through both.
The is the district's landmark, a red brick plant at 440 Unwin Avenue with a single smokestack that runs 215 metres into the sky. It reached full output in 1961 and stopped generating power in 1983. It sat empty for years and became a draw for urban explorers, the same plain industrial shell that kept drawing productions looking for a stand-in for somewhere else.
sits across the channel from the Hearn, on a former Esso tank farm on Commissioners Street. Its seven sound stages include the Mega Stage. They are built for interior work, so what a crew sees on camera there is rarely the industrial yard outside.
Cherry Street crosses the channel on an old green steel bascule bridge. A newer bridge crosses a short distance south. The Port Lands still have no permanent housing. A mixed use development planned for newly created Villiers Island nearby isn't expected to see its first residents before 2031.
Films shot in Port Lands
The CBC series The Border used the customs hall at the on Unwin Avenue as the headquarters of a customs and border squad for its full three season run. A short distance east, the has done similar duty for years, standing in as a generic industrial site for one production after another.
Star Trek: Discovery, 2018
The opened in 1951 at 440 Unwin Avenue and ran at full capacity for two decades before switching to gas and shutting down in 1983. Productions have used its plain brick shell and single tall smokestack as a stand-in for a generic industrial site ever since. The 2010 film RED shot its climactic scene there, and the series 12 Monkeys used the building as the Raritan Valley National Laboratory across its 2015 to 2018 run. A 2018 location shoot for the Star Trek: Discovery episode "Brother" turned part of the site into the wreckage of the USS Hiawatha.
What Port Lands can double for
Port Lands can stand in for generic industrial factory or chemical plant, abandoned or derelict industrial complex and government law enforcement or customs facility.
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