USA Network · nine seasons · created by Aaron Korsh
Where was Suits filmed?
In August 2016, while Suits was shooting its sixth season, Paul Taunton wrote in the National Post that it might be the most Toronto show ever made. He had been watching the edges of the frame. For street scenes the crew parked a yellow cab at the curb, and sometimes two Beck taxis would then go by in a row, followed by a city bus. Streetcars turned up so often, he wrote, that the westbound 504 ought to be in the credits. And when Jessica Pearson turns up unannounced on Edward Darby during a business trip and he asks what brings her to Toronto, Taunton had the answer for the whole city: the elevator.
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places on the route
Downtown Toronto first, then Scarborough — switch with the buttons above. Click a point to jump to its entry.
Where was Suits filmed? In Toronto, for all nine seasons. Only the pilot and the outdoor shots for the title sequence were made in New York, the city the show is set in. The building that plays the law firm, Pearson Hardman and every name the firm took after it, is Bay Adelaide West, a 51-storey glass tower on Bay Street in the Financial District. Pearson Hardman's offices were not upstairs. They were sets in a studio in Downsview, in the north of the city, with New York printed on a backdrop outside the windows, and only now and then, at a weekend, did the show get inside a real law firm. The move north was about money: Canada's tax credits made the show cheaper to shoot. Outside the studio, Suits was shot all over downtown Toronto, and it went as far as the University of Toronto's campus in Scarborough, 21 kilometres north-east.
Was Suits filmed in New York?
Only at the start. The pilot was shot in New York, and so were the exteriors for the title sequence; then the production moved across the border. By April 2011 it had set up at Downsview Park in Toronto, two months before the first season went on air, and it stayed in Toronto until the show ended in 2019.
Why was Suits filmed in Toronto? For the tax credits. Gabriel Macht, who plays Harvey Specter, told The Hollywood Reporter in November 2011 that he understood the reason, since Canada was cheaper, but would rather have been in New York and hoped to shoot a season there one day. He had only praise for the Toronto crew. The crew could put checker cabs and hot-dog stands on the streets, but walking in New York, he said, the people around you, extras included, had a different sensibility. One of the producers had warned him that Toronto was running short of streets that could pass for New York. That was after one season. There were eight more.
Which New York streets and offices the pilot used, nobody who made the show has said. A writer from Poptimal, a pop-culture site, toured the show's sets in 2011 and reported that they had been built as copies of the New York law offices in the pilot. Harvey's office had shelves of vinyl beside a turntable, and signed basketballs lined the windowsill.
What building was Suits filmed in?
Bay Adelaide West, the 51-storey first tower of the Bay Adelaide Centre. It is the law firm's building from the outside, and its lobby was filmed as well.
Bay Adelaide Centre, Pearson Hardman's tower
Bay Adelaide West from its plaza on 8 September 2017: the glass tower above young trees, a strip of lawn and stone benches.
333 Bay Street, on the north-east corner of Bay and Adelaide Street West, in the Financial District. An office complex; the lobby and the shops underground are open.
The tower stands in for the firm's Manhattan address in the outdoor shots, and its lobby is one of the two that the show's production designer, Clive Thomasson, counted as his favourite skyscraper lobbies in Toronto. It was new when Suits arrived, finished in July 2009.
The office floors are for the people who work in them. You can walk into the lobby of the Bay Adelaide Centre to see Straight Flush, a light installation by James Turrell, and the shops and food counters on the underground level connect to the PATH tunnels.
Was Suits filmed in a real office?
Mostly not. Most of the show was filmed in a studio in Downsview, and the sixth season was being shot at Downsview Park Studios in 2016. The production designer went out into the city for locations only when a script took the story outside the firm.
GameSpot was shown round the sets while the crew was shooting the last episode of the fifth season, the one built around Mike's arrest. They stood in a suburban warehouse outside the city centre that had belonged to Canada's defence department during the Cold War. It had concrete ceilings and felt like a bomb shelter. Inside were the law offices, with diplomas on the walls and lines of dialogue written on notepads, and next to them a high-end restaurant and several of the characters' apartments.
The windows were where New York came in. Murals and backdrops of the skyline lined them, and in a set tour filmed in 2016 Sarah Rafferty, who plays Donna, showed one up close: New York City, she said, was a gigantic shower curtain. The copy room, where Mike and Rachel go to be alone, had no windows at all.
In 2022, when a private penthouse in the King West area went up for sale, the Toronto Star reported that it had been used as Harvey's condo, and that on screen the city outside its windows had been edited into New York, with the CN Tower taken out.
Now and then the crew did get into a real law firm. In the fifth season it shot a few scenes over a weekend inside the offices of Fasken Martineau DuMoulin, whose Toronto office is in Bay Adelaide West today. Weekends were the only time on offer. "Law firms don't really want us filming in there Monday to Friday," Thomasson said, "because they're usually working from 7 to 9."
Where was Suits filmed in Toronto?
Outside the studio, Thomasson's job was to find places in Toronto's Financial District that would pass for New York, and several of them were on Bay Street, close to the firm's tower.
The National Club and Mercatto, Bay Street
The National Club on Bay Street on 24 April 2019: columns, a short flight of steps between iron railings, and Canadian flags.
The National Club, 303 Bay Street, about 90 m south of Bay Adelaide West; Mercatto, 330 Bay Street. A private club, with its steps on the street.
"We also film on the stairs outside the National Club on Bay Street," Thomasson told Precedent, a magazine for lawyers, in 2016. "It looks like the entrance to a New York apartment." The club was founded in 1874 and admits its members and their guests. The steps are on the pavement for anyone to see, between the columns and the iron railings.
For lunch and dinner scenes Thomasson used Mercatto, at 330 Bay, and brought in fancy tablecloths of his own to make the room look more expensive.
Richmond-Adelaide Centre
Richmond-Adelaide Centre in December 2021, rising above a courtyard of hedges and string lights.
120 Adelaide Street West and 111 Richmond Street West, about 270 m west of Bay Adelaide. Office towers.
The other lobby Thomasson named as a favourite, a short walk west along Adelaide Street from the firm's tower. It is a working office complex, with buildings on both Richmond Street and Adelaide Street.
Hotels, restaurants and a concert hall
Legal paperwork does not film well, Taunton noticed, so the lawyers on Suits do their business in person: they catch people before lunch and throw a folder at them. By 2016, he reckoned, most of the bistros downtown had been on screen.
Fairmont Royal York
The lobby of the Fairmont Royal York on 10 September 2008: a coffered wooden ceiling, chandeliers and a four-faced clock over a brass railing.
100 Front Street West, across from Union Station, about 500 m south of Bay Adelaide. A working hotel; the lobby is open.
In Inside Track, the third episode of the first season, the board meeting with McKernon Motors, the racing-car maker, takes place in this lobby. The hotel was built by the Canadian Pacific Railway and opened in 1929.
The Ritz-Carlton, Toronto
The covered drive-up entrance of The Ritz-Carlton, Toronto, on 28 September 2016, with the hotel's name over the driveway.
181 Wellington Street West, about 150 m south of Roy Thomson Hall. A working hotel; the lobby and the restaurant are open.
The hotel opened in February 2011, four months before Suits went on air, and it is in the first season: a lobby scene in Play the Man, the seventh episode, was shot in it. Its restaurant has been on screen too.
Luma and Bymark
TIFF Bell Lightbox on King Street West on 18 August 2012, with Luma's orange sign above the second-floor terrace.
Luma: TIFF Lightbox, 350 King Street West, second floor. A working restaurant. Bymark: in the Financial District, about 700 m east of Luma.
Luma is the restaurant on the second floor of TIFF Lightbox, the film festival's building on King Street West, and it has played a restaurant in a number of scenes. The characters have also eaten out at Bymark.
Roy Thomson Hall
Roy Thomson Hall on 25 August 2025: the sloping glass-and-steel roof, with downtown towers behind.
60 Simcoe Street, in the Entertainment District. A concert hall; the plaza outside is open.
Suits came back to the hall more than once. One visit was for a car show, where the car on display was a yellow XOF1, solar-powered and legal on the road in every Canadian province except Ontario, the one it was being filmed in. The hall was designed by Arthur Erickson and opened in 1982, its walls a sloping skin of glass.
Out to Scarborough
Andrews Building, University of Toronto Scarborough
The Science Wing of the Andrews Building on 7 September 2015: board-formed concrete towers, with the university's crest high on the wall.
1265 Military Trail, Scarborough, about 21 km north-east of Bay Adelaide. A university campus, open to walk round.
Suits also filmed on the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus. For the college's first few years the Andrews Building was its only building: a Brutalist block by the architect John Andrews, finished in 1964, in board-formed concrete that still carries the grain of the wooden moulds it was poured into.
Rachel and Mike's wedding
The Omni King Edward Hotel
The King Edward Hotel on its street corner in 2025, brick and stone above streetcar tracks.
37 King Street East, about 380 m east of Bay Adelaide. A working hotel; the lobby is open.
Rachel Zane and Mike Ross marry at the end of the seventh season. According to HELLO!, the wedding was filmed overnight at the King Edward in November 2017: the crew arrived in the middle of the afternoon and started shooting a few hours later, and Meghan Markle is said to have worn Rachel's Anne Barge gown from the first wedding, the one called off in the fifth season. A guest at the hotel tweeted that Suits was filming there, the Daily Mail reported.
The wedding came at the end of Markle's time on the show, after what she called seven Canadian winters. The King Edward opened in 1903.
Bay and Adelaide now
For fifteen years before Suits, the corner held a ruin. A 57-storey tower was begun on the site in 1990 and abandoned in the recession after more than $500 million had gone into it, and from 1991 the only thing above ground was a few storeys of concrete service shaft. Locals called it the stump, or the bunker. It carried advertising for years and was taken down in 2006, and when Suits began, Bay Adelaide West was the only tower of the new complex.
The corner went on changing while the show was on air. A second tower, the 44-storey Bay Adelaide East, went up beside the first and was finished in October 2016, while the sixth season was being shot. A third, Scotiabank's head office, opened in 2022, three years after the last episode. Of the three, Pearson Hardman's is the one on the corner itself, the tower that was there first.
