iZone Lofts

History of iZone Lofts

The land was part of the huge lot Phillips Manufacturing, a picture-frame and mirror company, bought along Carlaw in 1906. The i-Zone buildings themselves went up later, for Crown Cork & Seal. The Baltimore company was founded in 1892 when William Painter patented the “crown cork,” the crimped metal bottle cap still used today, and its Toronto plant made caps for the city's bottlers. The City's heritage report dates the first building to 1929, with a four-storey wing added around 1954 to 1965 that carried the plant through to Dundas Street. Like Wrigley across the road, Crown Cork moved out to a bigger plant in the 1960s.

In the mid-1990s Gyan Jain, an engineer who had come to Canada from India in 1964 and had been buying up old warehouses on Carlaw, bought the building with his sons for $1.25 million. There were giant tarps strung inside to catch the leaks. After a year of demolition and repairs they rented it out as live/work units to photographers, artists and small businesses, and in 2003 their company, Atria Development, turned the rentals into condominiums.

Because it grew in pieces, the complex has three addresses: 326 Carlaw and 1159 and 1173 Dundas East. Inside it still feels like a factory, with steel doors, concrete floors and long industrial corridors. The roughly 100 lofts run from about 500 to over 3,000 square feet, many with mezzanines, skylights and ceilings as high as 30 feet, and most upper units can build a private roof terrace. It is properly zoned live/work, so some units are businesses that close up at night.

Stories you'll hear

“It was a bottling plant” or “a knitting mill.” Crown Cork & Seal made bottle caps, not drinks. The knitting-mill story probably comes from the Reliable Toy doll factory next door, which had its own knitting mill for doll clothes.