Adaptive Reuse - Old building, who dis?

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]This is the Dawn Jail, but it's not a jail. Not anymore. It's an example of adaptive reuse. Taking a building that's no longer needed for its original purpose and reusing it for something else. Let's examine that topic.

[00:00:24]Toronto doesn't have anywhere near the stock of old buildings that many other cities do. For instance, if you go around a lot of cities in Europe, you'll find buildings that are way older than what we have here and lots of them. But that's not surprising. They've been putting up buildings made out of durable materials like stone and concrete a lot longer than we have. Also, Toronto has something of a reputation for tearing down its history. If you've been to Guild Park in Scarboro, you'll have seen things like these that were salvaged from buildings in Toronto that were being demolished. But we don't always demolish our old buildings. The Dawn Jail opened in 1864 and it was in operation as a jail for a little over a century, closing in 1977.

[00:01:08]An addition that was added on to it in the mid 1900s, continued operating for a few decades after that.

[00:01:15]This building was the site of the last hang two hangings in Canada in 1962. I talked about that in my video about capital punishment. There's a magic link up here, and I'll put a link down in the description so you can find it when you finish watching this video. About a decade ago, this building reopened as the administrative wing of the adjoining hospital next door.

[00:01:40]What we call today Old City Hall, open in 1899. I did a video on that building.

[00:01:46]Links in the usual places. It was not just city hall for Toronto. It was also the county seat for York County, which at the time included what today are York Region and the city of Toronto, and it was the local courthouse, as you can see here in the stone. In 1953, when the provincial government carved metropolitan Toronto out of York County, the county seat for York moved up to New Market. And in 1966, when Toronto's new city hall opened next door, the only functions left in here were the courts.

[00:02:18]and they expanded from just being a small part of the building to taking over pretty much the whole building, which meant that they were now using spaces that had never been designed as court spaces.

[00:02:31]The courts finally moved out of here in March 2025, and this is now a building in need of a purpose. Some of the suggestions for how to use it include a museum, an event space, and possibly as a temporary home for the Ontario Legislative Assembly when their building at Queens Park undergo some muchneeded renovations.

[00:02:54]I did a video on Queens Park. You know where to find the links.

[00:02:58]This, of course, is Maple Leaf Gardens, built in under half a year in 1931. It closed for hockey in 1999, though it was still used for a few other events, including concerts and Toronto Rock Lacrosse. It was purchased by Lobla in 2004, but mostly continued to sit empty.

[00:03:14]It opened as a food store in 2011 with the original location of Center Ice marked on the floor. The following year, a brand new hockey rink opened upstairs in the Madame Athletic Center, used by Toronto Metropolitan University. The Leafs, of course, moved to what is now called the Scotia Bank Arena. And on the exterior of that building, you can see the old postal delivery building, but it's just a facade. The building itself is gone, and only some of the exterior walls were retained. Queens Key Terminal was built in 1926 as a shipping and warehousing facility. Back then, Toronto's waterfront was an active port with rail lines to enable goods to be moved efficiently. There were two other parts of the building. In the photo, you can see rail lines going to the cold storage building, and beside it is the ice heat, and power plant. Here's how they looked in 1929.

[00:04:03]As port activities in Toronto declined and moved away from the central waterfront toward the portlands, the building was no longer needed. It was bought by the federal government in 1973 as part of plans to transform the waterfront into new uses. In the early 1980s, the cold storage building was demolished and the terminal building was converted into a mixeduse building with four residential stories added on top.

[00:04:26]The old ice heat and power plant was retained and is now the power plant art gallery. This may be the most elegant liquor store around. It's the CP North Toronto station. CP's original station was just west of Young, but it proved inadequate as traffic grew. Toronto's second Union station didn't work well and plans for its replacement, the one we all know today, kept getting delayed.

[00:04:48]Also, CP saw demand for trains servicing the growing and wealthy Rosedale area.

[00:04:54]So they went ahead and built a magnificent new North Toronto station where Grimby Street had previously been.

[00:05:00]Construction began in May 1915. Service began on June 4th, 1916. Even though the clock tower based on Companilia de San Marco in Venice wasn't yet complete with the official opening 10 days later. It wasn't in service very long. It closed for passengers on September 27th, 1930 after the new Union Station had opened.

[00:05:20]It temporarily reopened on May 22nd, 1939 for a visit by King George V 6th and Queen Elizabeth, who would later be known as the Queen Mother. It was also briefly used by troops returning home from the Second World War. Brewer's Retail began using part of the building as a warehouse in 1931, and the LCBO began doing the same in 1940.

[00:05:41]Restoration took place in the early 2000s, and it's been an LCBO store for a couple of decades now. This is the Distillery District, which is said to be the largest collection of Victorian era industrial buildings anywhere in North America. While the oldest building here today is this building, the Stone Distillery of 1859, the site has been used for distilling since around 1837.

[00:06:04]Gradual expansion took place in phases up to around 1880, followed by a much larger expansion over the next decade or so. Its location is ideal, right next to the railway and close to the shore, making it easy to get supplies in and product out. Distillery operations ended here in 1990. The property was bought by a developer in 2001 and began opening to the public in 2003. There are a number of new buildings, some of which basically just used the old building as a facade at the base of the new building, but a lot of the old buildings were retained largely intact. Some were in better shape than others. Many of them required extensive work, and some of the rackouses posed a particular problem. The racks that stored the barrels of whiskey were actually part of the building structure, so they couldn't just be removed to open up space, as you might do with a wall or a section of a floor. Nearby, there's another old industrial building that's been converted for a new use, a police station. This is the former Consumer's Gas Station, A built in 1898. Part of a plant that produced gas from coal until 1954 when Toronto's gas supply switched to natural gas delivered by pipeline.

[00:07:12]This building has a curious connection to the distillery district. Throughout the 1980s, both Goodam and Wartz, the company that built and operated the distillery, and Consumers Gas were owned by the Hyram Walker Distilling Company, known today as the Witchwood Barnes. The St. Clair car house was constructed in 1913 with additions over the next several years for Toronto Civic Railways, the predecessor of the TTC. I talked about the history of Toronto street car system in my video about the TTC's unique track gauge, yada yada yada. It was a street car maintenance and repair facility with an outdoor storage yard. As the street car system shrank in the midentth century, in part because some of it got replaced by subways, the TTC ended up with more street car facilities than it needed.

[00:07:58]and this one closed as an active street car barn in 1978. Some of the tracks that once connected it to the network are still there in the street, but they're disconnected at both ends.

[00:08:08]During the couple of decades after it closed, it was used for a variety of purposes, including testing of new street cars and as storage for retired street cars and trolley buses. The TTC sold the property to the city, and it reopened as a community cultural and arts facility in 2008 after a couple of years of renovation. This is the Abbey located on Sunnyside Avenue. Toronto is a much less religious place than it used to be, resulting in an excess of old church buildings, and many of them have become adaptive reuse projects. This was Howard Park Methodist Church, built in 1910. It became Howard Park United, then Howard Park Pentecostal, and was converted for residential use in 2007.

[00:08:50]West 40 on West Morland Avenue near Blur used to be the church of St. Mary the Virgin and St. Syrian, an Anglican church built around 1914, being named after two saints didn't save it, and it was converted to homes in 2016.

[00:09:05]This is Brunswick Lofts on Brunswick Avenue at Sussex. It had a number of previous uses, including a synagogue, an art school, and an office building.

[00:09:14]Mostly just the exterior walls of the old structure were preserved, with the rest being new construction.

[00:09:20]Sunday School Lofts on Doohurst Boulevard near Danforth was originally Temple Baptist built in 1925. It was converted in 2019, but it's mostly just a facade for a new building. And this last example is a bit weird. 722 Landown Avenue was originally St. Dunston's Anglican, but that church was basically just a basement with a small groundfloor entrance structure because the parish ran out of money. After the parish closed in 1982, the building became a Hindu temple. There are now two homes built on top of the old basement.

[00:09:55]And this is Evergreen Brick Works, formerly Dawn Valley Brick Works. The Valley of the Lower Dawn River was a major industrial site early in Toronto's history. I talked about that in my video about the Lower Dawn. I'm sure you can find the links. The clay in this valley turned out to be particularly good for making bricks. And the first brick works on this site opened in 1889. It was in operation for nearly a century with several expansions during that time.

[00:10:23]Castaloma, Osgood Hall, and the Ontario Legislative Building all used bricks that were made here.

[00:10:31]A developer bought this property in 1984 with the intention of developing it for residential uses, but it's in the flood plane as was demonstrated in July 2024 when this whole site flooded despite all of the flood mitigation measures that were in place. The Toronto Region Conservation Authority expropriated it in 1987.

[00:10:52]About a decade later, in this area behind me here, a naturalized area was opened as a green space in part of the former quarry. And about a decade later, a nonprofit called Evergreen began restoring the site, which opened in 2010 as a cultural center.

[00:11:11]Well, I hope you've enjoyed learning about some of Toronto's examples of adaptive reuse. If you did, you know what to do. Please like and subscribe.