West Don Lands

West Don Lands
Planned neighbourhood
The vacant West Don Lands in 2009
West Don Lands area
Location within Toronto
Coordinates: 43°39′18″N 79°21′11″W / 43.655°N 79.353°W / 43.655; -79.353Coordinates: 43°39′18″N 79°21′11″W / 43.655°N 79.353°W / 43.655; -79.353
Country	Canada
Province	Ontario
City	Toronto

The West Don Lands are the site of a neighbourhood under construction in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The area is bordered by the Don River, King Street, Parliament Street and the rail line adjacent to the Gardiner Expressway. It is 80 hectares (200 acres) in size. A former industrial area, the area is being rebuilt as a mixed-use neighbourhood.

After the purchase of Toronto, the area was set aside as a Crown Reserve when York was founded. The area from Berkeley east to the Don River and north to Queen Street was designated for a large city park. It was sold off to private developers in the 1830s to finance the construction of a new city hospital. The Corktown community grew, and was home to working class Irish immigrants. To the south, the Gooderham and Worts distillery was founded, and it dumped its waste in the area. It kept cattle and pigs in the area to feed off the distillery waste, but this introduced a manure problem. Railways came to Toronto in the 1850s, entering the Don Lands along the Don River from the north, and across the Don River from the east. The Don River was straightened and the Taddle Creek which ran through the area was buried. By the late nineteenth century, most of the land was industrial or owned by the railways, and it became the site of an array of factories and warehouses, including William Davies Company, one of the largest pork processing facilities in the world.

The Davies Company and Gooderham's were prosperous in the first half of the twentieth century, but both sites were in decline. Davies merged with other meat packers and moved the bulk of its operations to the west of Toronto. Gooderham's was merged with the Hiram Walker distillery and moved much of its production to the Hiram Walker facility out of town. The Davies Company closed in the 1980s, and Gooderham's closed in 1991. By the 1980s, the area was heavily polluted and not a desirable location for industry which sought locations for large one-storey facilities in the suburbs. The area declined and much of the land abandoned as it required expensive clean-up before conversion to other uses. Another factor against conversion to other uses was that the lands were floodplains and as such could not be the site of residences.