For ten years, the Saturday ritual at St. Lawrence Market came with an asterisk. Farmers still arrived before dawn. Shoppers still lined up for produce, cheese, and whatever a vendor had picked that week. But the market itself, the one operating since 1803 on the same block at Front and Jarvis, was running out of a temporary tent at 125 The Esplanade while its permanent home sat behind construction fencing across the street. In the spring of 2025, that arrangement ended. The Farmers' Market moved back into a purpose-built North Market building in April 2025, and the neighborhood's oldest weekly habit finally happens in the room it was designed for.
That sounds like a footnote. It isn't. The building that reopened is not a renovation of what stood there before. It replaces a one-story building from 1968, put up as a temporary measure, where vendors set up folding tables each week for farm produce and, on Sundays, antiques. What came back this time is a five-story building with a market hall on the ground floor, an atrium connecting it visually to St. Lawrence Hall next door, and courtrooms on the upper levels. The market didn't just move home. It moved into a different kind of building entirely.
The building took fifteen years and cost more than double the estimate
The City chose a design for the new North Market in June 2010, awarding the commission to a joint venture between Adamson Associates Architects and Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, the London firm behind the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The original budget was estimated around $58 million, with completion targeted for 2014. Neither number held. A construction contract wasn't finalized until 2019, work restarted that July, and the project moved through delays tied in part to archaeological finds on the site before the building's estimated cost was approved in 2024 at roughly $128 million, more than double the early figure.
The Farmers' Market held its first Saturday in the new building on April 5, 2025. A formal grand opening followed on May 10, and eight municipally run provincial offence courts relocated into the upper floors from Old City Hall that March. For anyone counting from the day the 1968 building came down in 2015, the market spent almost exactly a decade in a tent before getting its address back.
The bill for those delays is still being argued over
The building may be finished, but the accounting isn't. In March 2026, blogTO reported that the joint venture of contractors responsible for construction, known as BAJV, filed suit against the City for close to $83 million, citing damages and extra costs tied to delays over the course of the build. The City countersued. Neither claim has been resolved as of this writing. It's a detail worth knowing if you live nearby and wonder why a building that already opened keeps showing up in local news. The market is open. The dispute over who pays for how long it took to get there is not.
None of that changes what the building does for a Saturday morning. The ground-floor Market Hall now hosts both the Farmers' Market and the Sunday Variety Market, the successor to the original Sunday Antique Market, which relocated to Mississauga in 2022 after the operator objected to Market Street's closure to vehicle traffic. What runs on Sundays now is a broader mix of vintage and handmade goods rather than a strict antiques fair, run under different management than the market original Torontonians may remember.
The blocks around the market picked up the same year
The market complex wasn't the only thing that changed shape recently. A short walk from the South Market, the Esplanade has a new entry in Graham and Dan Hnatiw's Eloise, a dining room from the brothers behind the Old Spaghetti Factory that trades their family's red-sauce reputation for a softer, more composed room built around curves and quiet material choices. Through a hidden door at the back sits Bar Cart, a railcar-styled speakeasy meant for the after-dinner crowd rather than the pre-dinner one. It's the kind of opening that signals something about where Old Town's dining scene is heading: toward rooms built for repeat visits from people who already live in the area, not just for out-of-town appetites passing through on a market tour.
A few minutes north, Skoom Coffee opened inside the Nealon House at 197 King Street East, one of Old Town's historic buildings, adding another independent café to a stretch that has mostly been defined by the market's own food stalls. Neither of these openings shows up in the tourist guides built around Carousel Bakery's peameal bacon sandwich or Scheffler's cheese counter. Both are worth knowing if the market itself is a five-day-a-week habit rather than a once-a-visit stop.
The next two weeks matter more than most
If there's a seasonal window worth paying attention to, it's closing soon. The Arts at the Market program, which brings artisan vendors out onto the street around the main buildings, runs Fridays through Sundays from Easter through Thanksgiving. With Canadian Thanksgiving falling on October 12 this year, the outdoor stretch of the season has about two weekends left before it winds down for the year.
Indoors, the Market Gallery on the South Market's second floor keeps its own separate rhythm. Housed in what was once Toronto's first purpose-built City Council chamber, the space rotates its exhibitions on art, culture, and city history roughly every four to six months, and admission is free. It sits directly above the market floor, with the gallery's original fan windows looking down over the vendor stalls rather than out to the harbour they were built to face in the 19th century. It's an easy stop to fold into a Saturday morning that already includes breakfast and a farm produce haul, and one that most visitors walk right past on their way to the food stalls.
Later in the year, Market Street outside the buildings turns into the outdoor Winter Market, a free seasonal event that has run in recent years with live music, a rotating lineup of attractions, and a spot on the Santa Claus Parade route as its final stop. It's become enough of a fixture that checking the market's own event calendar closer to November is worth doing before assuming last year's schedule repeats exactly.
What actually changed
None of this is a story about a market getting discovered. St. Lawrence Market has been a fixture since before Canada existed as a country. What changed is more specific: after a decade of operating out of a tent, the market's oldest ritual is finally happening inside a building designed around it, in a neighborhood that used the same stretch of years to add a new dining room, a new speakeasy, and a new café within a few blocks of the market doors. The market didn't need saving. It needed its building back, and it got it, along with a legal bill that's still being sorted out in the background.
If you're weighing what a home near this stretch of Old Town is actually worth once you look past a single number on a listing sheet, that's a conversation Penthouse Queen is glad to have. Penthouse Queen works this kind of neighborhood detail into how we price and present properties near St. Lawrence Market and across Toronto's core. Reach out when you're ready to talk specifics.
