Queen's Quay Terminal, shopping center in Harbourfront, Toronto, Canada

Queen's Quay Terminal is a mixed-use complex in the Harbourfront district right beside Lake Ontario. A long concrete block holds shops at street level, office floors above, and apartment floors added during a later rebuilding. Large windows and open interior walkways show off both the original structural ribs and the view toward the water.

Constructed as the Toronto Terminal Warehouse, the building opened in 1927 as one of the country's first large poured-concrete structures. When shipping declined in the 1960s and 1970s, the federal government bought it and, during the 1980s, added four residential floors and turned the former storage space into shops and offices.

The name recalls the site's shipping past: the Toronto Terminal Warehouse handled goods arriving by CN and CP rail and Great Lakes steamships. The dance theatre is not inside this building; the Premiere Dance Theatre, opened in the 1980s renovation and renamed the Fleck Dance Theatre in 2008, sits in the former plant building to the west, now shared with The Power Plant gallery.

The building sits on the north side of Queen's Quay, with the lake and the boat-cruise docks on its south side; the rail siding along that south facade is now a public promenade. The Arcade atrium at the south-east corner rises the full height of the building, so it is the easiest way up from the waterfront level. The clock tower's face is visible from the street.

The original floors were built to bear roughly 800 pounds per square foot, far more than a modern retail or office slab. That extra strength comes from the warehouse era and still supports the building today, though visitors rarely notice it beneath the polished floors.