The Toronto Islands were not always islands. An April storm in 1858 breached the sandbar peninsula east of the city, opened the Eastern Gap, and left a chain of low islands sitting offshore. The accident gave Toronto a sheltered basin roughly five kilometres wide. Ferries have crossed to those islands since 1833, the longest-running passenger ferry service in North America. Every Boat Cruise Toronto Dinner sailing now moves inside that accidental harbour, between a working port and a residential archipelago. The shoreline itself is younger than the water it borders. After the Toronto Harbour Commission was created in 1911, decades of lakefilling pushed the waterfront several hundred metres south of its original 1793 position. The Western Gap was dredged and realigned in the same era to give freighters a second entrance. Queens Quay was laid across the infill. Grain elevators, coal docks and freight sheds followed. The Redpath sugar refinery, opened in 1959, still receives raw cane by ship at its dock east of the ferry terminal — the last heavy industry on a promenade otherwise given to condominiums, theatres and dockside terraces. Conversion began in 1974, when the federal government turned a strip of that industrial land into what became Harbourfront Centre. Warehouses became galleries. Slips became marinas. The address at 207 Queens Quay West sits inside that transformation, a few hundred metres from the base of the CN Tower, finished in 1976 at 553.3 metres and still the fixed reference point of the skyline. Boat Cruise Toronto Dinner tours trade almost entirely on that silhouette after dark, when the tower's LED wash, the bank towers behind it and the Rogers Centre roof read as a single lit wall from the water. The route west and south collects the rest of the city's lakefront record. Ontario Place's Cinesphere, the world's first permanent IMAX theatre, opened in 1971 on three artificial islands. Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport has operated from Hanlan's Point since 1939; its runway threshold lies a few hundred metres across the gap. The island cottage colonies at Ward's and Algonquin date to the 1880s. Few Toronto waterfront landmarks are legible from the street, where towers interrupt one another at every block. Holders of Boat Cruise Toronto Dinner tickets see them in sequence from a glass-enclosed deck, with Lake Ontario opening to the south — a dining room with a moving view, built on a harbour that a single storm invented.