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  • Dreamworlds of Deindustrialization
  • Margaret Kohn (bio)

Walter Benjamin was fascinated by the images and artifacts of nineteenth century collective life. The draft of his earliest essay on the Parisian arcades (1927), however, opened with a depiction of a gleaming new arcade on the Champs-Elysées. Located between two modern hotels, the newest Parisian passage displayed luxury automobiles, leather goods, and imported kimonos that were meant to entice fashionable Paris. Benjamin's real interest in the essay, however, was one of the oldest arcades in the city – the Passage de l'Opera – a place where "a past becomes space."i Crammed with the deletrious of antiquated trades and unintelligible displays, this arcade evoked a sense of history that was not triumphalist; it was a space of memory that was antithetical to the monument and the museum.

I thought of Walter Benjamin the first time that I visited Toronto's Distillery District in the summer of 2003. The Distillery District is a 13 acre industrial heritage site located on the edge of downtown Toronto. Although alcohol production ceased over a decade earlier, most of the buildings still contained industrial equipment such as fermenting tanks, a spiral conveyor belt, massive industrial scales, a still, and bottling racks. In Benjamin's essay he contrasted the new fashionable arcade on the Champs-Elysées with the anachronistic remnants exposed in the Passage de l'Opera. After a whirlwind revitalization, the Distillery District combined the two. Retail shops selling handmade contemporary furniture, Swedish beds, Italian kitchen fixtures, wearable art, artisanal cheese, and gold jewelry are located next to industrial machinery that has the grandeur of dinosaur bones. In the Distillery District, as in the arcades, "the circus-like and theatrical element of commerce is quite extraordinarily heightened."ii

What does this fascination with industrial ruins tell us about North American and European cities in the twenty-first century? The transformation of the world's largest distillery into an upscale leisure destination illustrates many of the forces that are reconfiguring cities: commodification, gentrification, the city as theme park and spectacle, post-industrialism, and the consumer preferences of the creative class.iii But it would be wrong to dismiss the Distillery District simply as a Disneyified version of our industrial past. The Distillery District is very different from Faneuil Hall and the other festival marketplaces designed by the Rouse Company. There is no kitschy neo-Victoriana and no chain stores. High end boutiques are mixed in with studios of working artists and office space for dozens of non-profits; these tenants were recruited with long-term, below market leases. Yet there is something disturbing about the conversion of abandoned industrial spaces into high end cultural venues. Whereas most critics have faulted such projects for their nostalgic character, I ask whether nostalgia must always have a depoliticizing effect. When read in a certain way, the Distillery District makes the economic transformation from Fordism to post-Fordism visible. It brazenly exposes dynamics of gentrification and commodification of culture that are remaking other parts of the city in a more piecemeal fashion. With Walter Benjamin as a guide, this article shows how the Distillery District both conceals and reveals the social forces remaking contemporary urban life.

The Distillery District

Gooderham and Worts was a family owned distillery that opened near Toronto's waterfront in 1837. The business prospered, eventually becoming the largest distillery in the British Empire and the largest tax payer in Canada. To accommodate this vast scale of production, David Roberts, Sr. and Jr., a prominent father-son architectural team, designed a massive stone distillery building made of Kingston lime. Soon they added dozens of additional tank and barrel rack houses and other brick buildings that served to store supplies, house malt kilns, distill molasses, and age whisky. After the end of American prohibition, however, the new owners of Gooderham and Worts moved much of their production to another plant closer to the American boarder. In the post World War II period, the Toronto facility produced industrial alcohols and rum on a smaller scale and, in 1987, it was sold again to another international conglomerate that ceased production a few years later.

The story of the rise and...

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