Sultan Mehmed II — the conqueror of Constantinople — ordered the first foundry built here sometime between 1451 and 1481, on the waterfront below Galata, where ships could be loaded directly. The cannon was Mehmed's weapon of choice: he had used enormous Hungarian-cast bombards to breach the Theodosian Walls in 1453, and he understood better than any ruler of his age what artillery could do. The foundry at Tophane produced not just cannon but cannonballs, and the district that grew around it carried the name Tophane — literally, House of Cannon — ever after. The original structure was rebuilt under Suleiman the Magnificent and then again in 1803 under Sultan Selim III. That 1803 building partly survives, its facade still marked with small carved cannon reliefs. The foundry site itself was built over the ruins of two lost Byzantine churches, St. Claire and Aya Photini — earlier history absorbed into the Ottoman industrial enterprise.

The foundry complex was never the only thing in Tophane. The neighborhood accumulated monuments the way Istanbul districts do — by accumulation across centuries, each ruler adding something. The Kılıç Ali Pasha Complex, commissioned by the Ottoman admiral Kılıç Ali Pasha and designed by Mimar Sinan, was built between 1578 and 1587: a mosque, a medrese, a hamam, a türbe, and a sebil, still standing in good condition. The Tophane Fountain, a large ornate free-standing structure commissioned by Mahmud I and built in 1732, stands between the Kılıç Ali Pasha Mosque and the Nusretiye Mosque — on the site of the old military parade ground. The Nusretiye, or Victory Mosque, was built for Sultan Mahmud II between 1823 and 1826 in the baroque style. Its name commemorates the Auspicious Incident of 1826, when Mahmud II dissolved the Janissary corps. The small clock tower — one of Istanbul's first — was added in 1848-49 and now serves as the focal point of a new square within the Galataport development.

Tophane runs downhill from Galata toward the Bosphorus shore, joining Karaköy to the southwest and Fındıklı to the northeast. For most of Ottoman history it was a working neighborhood: dockyard workers, foundry workers, soldiers. Its population shifted dramatically in the early twentieth century. Greek, Armenian, and Jewish communities that had long lived here were replaced by migrants from the eastern Anatolian provinces of Siirt, Bitlis, Erzincan, and Erzurum, who came to work in the docks and factories. The neighborhood remained distinctly working-class and conservative — a character at odds with what was happening to its western neighbor, Galata, which gentrified steadily from the 1990s onward. That tension has occasionally been sharp: in 2010 a street confrontation over art gallery openings in Tophane drew international attention to the neighborhood's contested identity.

In 2021 the Galataport cruise terminal opened at the point where Tophane meets the Bosphorus shore — a large-scale development that has already reshaped the waterfront and is accelerating change in the surrounding streets. The old foundry building now houses the Tophane-i Amire Culture and Art Center, part of the Sabancı Vakfı, which organizes temporary exhibitions. The Istanbul Modern, a contemporary art museum established in 2004, has been incorporated into the Galataport area. The Tophane Pavilion, designed by the British architect William James Smith in 1852 as a base from which the sultan could inspect his troops, was undergoing renovation as of 2022. The weapons district is becoming an arts district — a transformation that Tophane's long history suggests is neither the first nor likely the last reinvention of this particular stretch of shore.