St. Lawrence-East Bayfront-The Islands

<< Back to StrollTO Home

Explore St. Lawrence-East Bayfront-The Islands

Now is the time for residents to experience all that tourists have been raving about for years. Discover shops, stops, places and spaces on city main streets. Stay curious, Toronto.

We want to hear from you! Click here to complete a short survey

We hope that you enjoyed exploring this Toronto neighbourhood and found many other points of interest along the way. While StrollTO highlights some of the 'hidden gems' in the neighbourhood, there may be others that could be included in a future edition. Would you like to share a point of interest that you discovered in the neighbourhood? Email us at StrollTO@toronto.ca.

Neighbourhood Stroll

This bustling downtown neighbourhood covers several distinct areas with their own unique characteristics and histories, and includes some of the busiest transportation infrastructure and lively theatre space in the city. The waterfront portion of this neighbourhood has transformed rapidly over the past few decades, changing from a busy industrial harbourfront to a vibrant commercial and residential district. The area around St. Lawrence Market remains one of the best examples in the city of successful urban renewal with its tasteful midrise apartments and busy parks. The eastern edge of the neighbourhood around Corktown Common continues to rapidly develop into a modern new urban district from its inception as the athletes village for the 2015 Pan Am Games. Great local businesses can be found in the Toronto Downtown West, Waterfront, and St. Lawrence Market Neighbourhood BIAs. Please note that Toronto Island, which is part of this neighbourhood, is covered in its own distinct sub-stroll (click the red button below).

Toronto Island stroll

Main Streets: Front Street and Queens Quay

Union Station
65 Front Street West
Union Station is Canada's busiest multi-modal passenger transportation hub, a designated national historic site and a significant part of Toronto's history and identity. More than a quarter-million people use Union Station daily. Construction on this iconic landmark began in 1914 amidst a materials shortage during the First World War, but the station didn't officially open until 1927. Since then, Union Station has welcomed waves of immigrants to Toronto, survived a major fire, and endured more than 90 years of wear and tear. In 1975, Parks Canada designated Union Station a National Historic Site because it was, and still is, the country's finest example of a classical beaux-arts railway station. Union Station is the largest of the great urban train stations built during the early 20th century. Since acquiring Union Station in 2000, the City continues to own, manage and improve the station and is currently leading a multi-year revitalization that will make Union Station, one of Toronto's crown jewels, spectacular again.

Scotiabank Arena
40 Bay Street
This sports entertainment complex is home to 3 major teams - the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team, Toronto Raptors basketball team, and the Toronto Rock lacrosse team. It also hosts numerous concerts, comedy shows, and other significant international events. It first opened in 1999 as the Air Canada Centre, after being converted from what was previously the Toronto Postal Delivery Building. This heritage-designated structure was constructed between 1939-41 and designed in Art Deco and Art Moderne styles by noted architect Charles Dolphin, who also worked on other famous Toronto buildings such as Union Station, the Royal York Hotel, and Maple Leaf Gardens. It functioned as Toronto's main postal terminal until the 1990s. The building sat empty until the Toronto Raptors purchased it in 1994, and while much of the original structure was demolished, the team entered into an agreement with the City of Toronto to maintain the east and south facades.

Dean Drever 'Eagle V1'
1 The Esplanade
From artist Dean Drever: 'I got the idea to make this Eagle, I looked at the area around there. And the area has always had to do with some kind of transportation or movement of people, movement of objects. It's always been a major port, a major train station, a major bus station, always having this kind of an angle to it. So being a Haida Indian I think about animals a lot and eagle is one of my totems and something I'm very interested in obviously. And I would obviously associate eagle with a lot of very quick movement and a lot of very efficient movement. So that's really what got me thinking about the eagle, as well as the importance of the eagle to the people that used to live on this land before we moved in.'

Meridian Hall, The L-Tower & St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts
1 Front Street East (Meridian Hall), 8 The Esplanade (The L-Tower), and 27 Front Street East (St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts)
This heritage-designated major performing arts venue is the largest soft-seat theatre in Canada. It first opened as the O'Keefe Centre on October 1, 1960, designed by architect Peter Dickinson. Inside the lobby is a spectacular artwork by Toronto artist York Wilson entitled 'The Seven Lively Arts'. It hosted National Ballet of Canada and Canadian Opera Company performances until 2006, when the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts opened. Rising above Meridian Hall is the L-Tower, a striking modern tower designed by world-famous architect Daniel Libeskind. Across Scott Street from Meridian Hall is the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts, a smaller theatre complex that opened in 1970 as part of Toronto's Centennial Project started 3 years earlier. The centre features two theatres, one named in honour of Bluma Appel, a generous donor to the complex, and Jane Mallett, a Canadian actress who tragically died in 1984.

St. Lawrence Market & The Market Gallery
93-95 Front Street East, and 125 The Esplanade
Market Gallery
The St. Lawrence Market South Market building was built in 1845 and acted as Toronto's City Hall, housing the Mayor's Office, a jail, police station and council chambers until a new city hall (now known as Old City Hall) at Bay and Queen Streets was built. The center structure of the original building still exists. Upstairs, you'll find the Market Gallery in the former council chamber. The historic site presents a variety of changing exhibits related to the art, culture and history of Toronto. The gallery's signature fan windows, which once overlooked Toronto's harbour, today overlook the main floor of the market featuring various food vendors.

Sugar Beach
11 Dockside Drive (Toronto Islands plaque is located next to Sugar Beach on Corus Quay)
Sugar Beach draws upon the industrial heritage of the area and its relationship to the neighbouring Redpath Sugar Refinery Museum to create a whimsical urban beach at the water's edge. The beach allows visitors to while away the afternoon as they read, play in the sand or watch boats on the lake. A dynamic water feature embedded in a granite maple leaf beside the beach makes cooling off fun for adults and children. A large candy-striped granite rock outcropping and three grass mounds give the public unique vantage points and the space between the mounds result in a natural performance space.

Sherbourne Common & Jill Anholt 'Light Showers'
5 Lower Sherbourne Street
Sherbourne Common is a lovely park by the lake that provides some much needed greenspace to a formerly industrial section of the waterfront. It is notably the first park in Canada to integrate a stormwater management treatment facility into its design. The Ice Rink/Splash Pad at Sherbourne Common were named in honour of Paul Quarrington in 2014, who was a successful Toronto author, musician and screenwriter. The park also features an eye-catching piece of public art by artist Jill Anholt called 'Light Showers'. The three components of Light Showers are large-scale functional sculptures, which celebrate the collection and purification of a new community's rainwater and transform infrastructure into art. The series of works help to create a new gateway between Toronto and its waterfront whilst playing a crucial role in filtering and oxygenating stormwater from the entire district.

Jacquie Comrie Mural
291 Lake Shore Boulevard East
Through colour as the science of human emotion and tool of social change, this mural is a homage to the idea of ALL COLOURS AS EQUAL, celebrating the spectrum of colour that is our human kind.
David Crombie Park
131 The Esplanade
A 1.6 hectare park south of Front Street between Jarvis and Berkeley Street featuring a ball diamond, a basketball court, a dog off-leash area, two children's playgrounds and a wading pool. The park is named after the former Mayor of Toronto who served from 1972 to 1978 and oversaw the creation of the St. Lawrence neighbourhood in which the park is located.

Young People's Theatre
127 Front Street East
Susan Douglas Rubes formed Young People's Theatre (YPT) in 1966 with the intention of providing professional productions geared to children. The company became an integral part of Toronto's theatre scene by the mid-1970s, producing plays in venues such as the St. Lawrence Centre and the Ontario Science Centre. They moved into their permanent home here at 127 Front Street East in 1977. The building is heritage-designated and used to house the horses that pulled the Toronto Street Railway Company's streetcars in the 1800s. Zeidler Partnership Architects oversaw the restoration of the building, which won an Award of Merit from the Toronto Historical Board for its work. YPT is now Canada's largest and oldest professional theatre for young people, serving approximately 150,000 patrons each year.

Shalak Attack, Julien Periquet, and Bruno Smoky Mural
230 The Esplanade (Beside the David Crombie Park Basketball Court)
This mural honors First Nations and local history (the transition from water to reclaimed land to The Esplanade neighbourhood) and embraces our roots and diversity. The starting point for the creation of the mural was the theme 'Stories of our Mothers'.
Longboat Avenue
This avenue was named after one of Canada's most famous athletes: Tom Longboat. Longboat was an accomplished distance runner from Six Nations of Grand River First Nation. Tom Longboat won many marathons, including the Boston Marathon in 1907, before finally competing in the 1908 London Olympics. Unfortunately it was rumoured that his collapse during those Olympics was a result of his trainers tampering with his athletic preparation, illegally administering drugs. In the following year, Longboat won the Professional Champion of the World title. Long distance running in the sense of what we know it as today, was actually something that was quite different in Indigenous terms. Long distance running was not so much a sport as it was a way of life for many Indigenous People. Traveling far distances, certain individuals from each community were sometimes chosen to deliver messages and those most competent, and those with the most endurance were usually chosen to do this. It should be noted also that Six Nations invented the game of lacrosse, which is quite similar to hockey, and so it is evident that sometimes physical activity was done for leisure's sake. There's no question one had to be physically fit to carry out traditional day to day living.

Canadian Stage Berkeley Street Theatre
26 Berkeley Street
Canadian Stage's roots can be traced back to 1938, when Canadian actress Dora Mavor Moore was taken to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Ireland by Irish poet and writer William Butler Yeats. After this trip, Mavor Moore was inspired to believe that Canada deserved a national theatre of its own, and created the Village Players amateur theatre company, which performed in a converted barn on Bathurst Street. In the 1940s, Mavor Moore proposed to the City that a number of amateur theatre companies be merged together, but was rejected. It wasn't until the late 1980s that Mavor Moore's original vision came to fruition when a number of theatre companies merged together to create Canadian Stage, which has since produced over 500 shows. One of Canadian Stage's 3 main venues, the Berkeley Street Theatre is a heritage-designated building that was once home to Consumers Gas pumping station constructed in the 1890s, and was converted into a theatre in 1971.

Distillery District
Near Mill Street and Parliament Street
The area now known as the Distillery District was once the location of the massive Gooderham and Worts Distillery, which was originally founded in 1832 by brothers-in-law James Worts and William Gooderham. Starting out with a small windmill on the shores of Lake Ontario, the distillery grew to be the largest in the British Empire by the 1890s. The distillery continued to operate throughout much of the twentieth century, closing in 1990. The former distillery grounds have been used for numerous film and television shoots since its closure, including notable productions such as 'Chicago' and 'Cinderella Man'. The area was transformed into the pedestrian-oriented arts and culture Distillery District that it is today in 2003, with plenty of galleries, shops, and restaurants available to visitors. Several historical plaques throughout the area note the heritage of what is now recognized as the best conserved collection of Victorian-era industrial architecture in North America.

Corktown Common
155 Bayview Avenue
The jewel in the landscape of the West Don Lands, Corktown Common is a 7.3 hectare (18 acre) lush green space with a growing population of birds, amphibians and insects to listen to and watch. Situated on former industrial lands, the park has transformed an underutilized brownfield into a spectacular park and community meeting place featuring a marsh, sprawling lawns, urban prairies, playground areas and a splash pad. Built as part of the revitalization of the West Don Lands by Waterfront Toronto, this sophisticated park was designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.

Accessibility information: All of the points of interest on this walk are viewable from the street. Some uneven surfaces may be encountered while in the Distillery District.

The StrollTO itineraries may follow routes that do not receive winter maintenance. Please review winter safety tips and for more information contact 311.

Soundtracks of the City

From global superstars to local favourites and ones to watch, the Soundtracks of the City playlists all feature artists who have called Toronto home. Whether it’s a lyric about the neighborhood, an artist representing a cultural community, or a tie-in to the StrollTO itinerary itself, all the music reflects connections to an individual ward or the City as a whole.

Music was chosen based on an artist’s Spotify presence and each song’s broad appeal, as well as its associations with the cultures, languages and ethnicities that reflect Toronto’s neighborhoods and diverse music scene. Soundtracks of the City combines 425 songs that feature more than 500 different local artists or acts, showcasing songs in 23 different languages.