How can closely reading the history of ownership, materiality, and economic deployment of a site and its material history reveal the forces that have shaped the city? My thesis started with the simple mandate of studying brick, especially post-industrial brick, in Toronto, followed by a study of the dynamic nature and material flows that shape our cities. My research responds to the call of Andrea Kahn and Carol Burns to apply contextual, situated conceptions of site to architectural histories. By historically engaging with the pasts and presents of a specific site—204 King Street East, in Toronto—I complicate architectural-historical thinking with concerns of site, using it as a means to tell a particular history of a city. In many ways 204 King Street East is exemplary of general trends in Toronto’s material history; however, the unique agents of control who have acted on the site tell a distinct story. I use what Kahn and Burns call “site thinking” to re-nature and de-mythologize the architectural site, primarily through a critical application and expansion of their definition of site as three areas—area of control, area of influence, and area of effect—inflecting these definitions with economic critique and conceptions of material flow. I hope such urban histories of site can provide tools for understanding the forces of urban construction – finding the potential to change these forces for the better and making them work for broader publics in acknowledgement of the agreements, labour, and capital that construct our cities.