Until the autumn of 1858, the Toronto Islands were not islands. A violent September storm tore through the sandbar at the eastern end of the peninsula, opening the Eastern Gap and severing a curved spit that had grown from Scarborough Bluffs sediment over millennia. The breach gave Toronto Harbour its second entrance and its enclosed, lake-fed basin. Evening Toronto Boat Tours Dinner tours now trace the inside edge of that accident. The basin was engineered rather than admired for most of its history. The Toronto Harbour Commission, created in 1911, published a waterfront plan the following year that filled roughly 400 hectares of shallow water to build piers, slips and rail sidings. Grain elevators rose along the quay. Lake freighters unloaded coal where excursion boats now idle. The Redpath refinery, opened in 1959, still processes raw sugar on the eastern waterfront, a reminder that this was a working port long before it became a view. The shift came in 1974, when the federal government assembled a strip of industrial land into what became Harbourfront Centre. Queen's Quay was widened, warehouses were converted, and the slips at the foot of York and Yonge Streets were given over to passenger vessels. The 1980s and 1990s brought condominium towers to the north side of the quay, pressing the city's residential edge to within metres of the water. Departures from 207 Queen's Quay West now sit inside a dense cluster of Toronto waterfront landmarks: the Jack Layton Ferry Terminal, Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport on the island shore, the Gardiner Expressway's concrete ribbon, and the CN Tower, completed in 1976 at 553.3 metres. The vessels themselves are products of harbour constraints. Low bridges and a shallow Western Gap favour broad-beamed hulls of modest draught, with glass-enclosed lower decks and open upper decks — a form that lets a harbour dinner cruise tour serve a seated meal while the skyline rotates in the windows. Climate-controlled dining rooms extend the sailing season well past Labour Day. Newer hulls carry bow thrusters for tight turns inside the slips. Galleys are compact, menus fixed, service timed to the circuit: out past the Toronto Islands, along Hanlan's Point, back through the gap as the city lights come up. Each Toronto Boat Tours Dinner tour is, in effect, a slow orbit of 150 years of landfill, read from the water.