To St. Lawrence Market We Go

There are a few things you can always count on during a visit to Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market: a peameal bacon sandwich from Carousel Bakery, a sea of vintage tchotchkes at the Sunday antique market and people toting freshly caught fish. On the north side of Front Street, the mega-popular farmers’ market—the city’s largest—has been around since 1803. It’s changed locations a few times: to an enclosure built in 1820; a brick building that doubled as city hall in 1831; a new, south-facing structure after the 1849 Cathedral Fire; and a single-storey model erected in the late ’60s. By 2008, the city decided the community fixture needed a larger, mixed-use home.

In the summer of 2010, the city awarded the project to Toronto-based Adamson Associates Architects and U.K.-based RSHP, the firm behind Paris’s Centre Pompidou, a cultural complex that houses a public library and a modern art museum. Drawing from their British roots, the RSHP team reimagined the market’s north building as a modern moot hall (an assembly building in a market square). The construction was filled with surprises: after some budgetary back-and-forth, the city okayed a five-storey structure with a greenhouse-like atrium, offices and provincial courtrooms. Later, an excavation of the old site’s foundation in 2017 unearthed a stone sewer tunnel and artifacts like clay pipes, sheep bones and butcher’s hooks. In the end, the project’s total cost was $128 million, more than $50 million higher than the estimated budget in 2009.

The new steel-and-glass St. Lawrence Market North building now towers over Front Street, its orange sun shades mirroring the warm-hued bricks of its sister to the south. (The architects also added a pedestrian bridge linking the north building’s mezzanine to the even more northerly St. Lawrence Hall.) On the first level, a map of the old sewer network is etched into the terrazzo floor—a nod to where the old pipes were found. The 37 vendor stations are surrounded by glass doors, creating a pedestrian-friendly arcade when open. The site now serves other purposes, too: the mezzanine is earmarked for a gallery and a café and has rentable space for concerts and weddings.

After nearly a decade spent in a nearby tent, the weekly farmers’ market returned to its rightful spot in early April, with hundreds of shoppers flooding the new, sunlit floor in search of spring flowers, cinnamon buns and Ontario apples and cheeses. They’ll be there every Saturday starting at 5 a.m.—rain or shine.