The Toronto Harbour Commission Building, finished in 1917, once stood at the water's edge; later landfill left it several blocks inland. That single displaced building explains the harbour better than any map. Toronto's waterfront has been rebuilt, extended and re-imagined for more than a century, and the vessels running boat cruise toronto today tours trace the shifting line between city and lake. The shelter those boats rely on is accidental. Sand carried west from the Scarborough Bluffs built a long peninsula across the bay, and a storm in 1858 cut through it, opening the Eastern Gap and turning the peninsula into the Toronto Islands. Before the cut, travellers reached the sandbar by carriage from the east. The Gibraltar Point Lighthouse, raised in 1808 on the southwest shore, is the oldest surviving lighthouse on the Great Lakes and still marks the approach. Schooners, grain elevators and coal docks followed. Hotels, cholera sheds and an amusement park at Hanlan's Point came and went. The Harbour Commission dredged, filled and straightened the shoreline until Queens Quay ran where open water had been. What remains is a working inner harbour measured in minutes rather than miles. A Toronto Harbour sightseeing tour passes Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport on Hanlan's Point, where turboprops lift off over the water; the Redpath Sugar refinery, unloading raw cane at its own dock since 1958; and the Jack Layton Ferry Terminal, where Islands ferries cross on a schedule older than the skyline above them. That skyline is the harbour's other collection. The CN Tower, topped out in 1975 at 553.3 metres, reads differently from the lagoons than from street level, its concrete shaft set against the glass of the financial district. Queen's Quay Terminal, built in 1927 as a cold-storage warehouse, now holds apartments and shops behind its original cream brick. Between them sit the Toronto Music Garden, the Harbourfront slips and the low green line of Ward's Island cottages. Visitors read it as a single view; it is in fact four eras stacked at the same latitude. Seen from the channel, those layers hold still long enough to be read, which is why boat cruise toronto today tickets remain the plainest way to meet Toronto landmarks from the lake side.