Well, after what seems like an eternity (Here, here and here), a picture of the E. W. Gillett Mill and Elevator exists!!! Look, there it is, an actual picture with more than enough detail to actually start figuring out how to model it, not another aerial from miles up!!
It was real!!! You’d think there would be more pictures out there of a building that existed until 2004, but until today, my search was without results! (Image courtesy Toronto Archives via City of Toronto Staff Report to Council)
So where did I find this? It was after all that time, in the Toronto Archives holdings, but in non-scanned materials, which to be perfectly honest, I hadn’t gotten around to going through as you can only request so many files/folders in advance for weekend visits when they were open to researchers pre-covid, and I couldn’t spend every weekend requesting five boxes and taking hours to sift through the archives. So how did I get it you ask? Through a City of Toronto Staff Report on designating the property as a Heritage Building under Ontario’s Heritage Act going to Council in November. The report has all kinds of materials in it that are not available to the general public, like 100 year old Building Permit plans. Sure, the reproductions in the report are not great, and unfortunately, as general public I can’t just go and request them, but every little bit helps! A sampling of the plans from the report is below.
The link to the full report on the E.W. Gillett site is below:
http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2020/te/bgrd/backgroundfile-157650.pdf
So with that, a periodic reminder that if you are researching old buildings, a great resource is your local Planning Department, as they should be posting their reports to Council online for you to find!
Musings on my Model Railroading Addiction 
And you didn’t have to build a model based on a guess to make it turn up, either!
No, its some kind of minor miracle that even though this building isn’t close to my “to start” list, that a good picture showed up before it got there. I’m not going to complain though!
Stephen
What a terrific find. Moving a building toward preservation sometimes creates so much extra data to discover, all of which would be a wonderful find for the modeller. Congratulations!