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Arrested Development
Harry Stinson is Toronto’s answer to Donald Trump—big talk, big stakes, big ego. He built one of the city’s most dazzling condo towers, right at King and Yonge. He wants his next project—the Sapphire—to be the tallest residential skyscraper in the country, but city hall won’t approve it and the bankers haven’t backed it. Vision is a tough sell By Gerald Hannon
He has the face of an aging falcon, something of that raptor’s quick, intense, scrutinizing gaze, quite a bit of its ferocious independence and, lately, a great deal of its passion for cloud grazing. You sense, too, that real estate developer Harry Stinson seems almost personally affronted by the law of gravity, by bureaucracy (gravity’s social vector), by people who merely stroll through life as if the journey, not the arrival, actually mattered. Ask him for something—a coffee, perhaps—that isn’t at hand in his tiny, doorless office off the lobby of 1 King West (that ingratiating, city-enhancing sliver of a condominium hotel he conceived and developed). He won’t send an assistant to get it. He’ll go to the coffee bar himself. And he won’t even walk there. He’ll run. It’s a shock, the first time you see him do that. You don’t expect 53-year-old developers of high-end properties to shed their professional gravitas and suddenly morph into a Speedy Gonzalez cartoon, but ask for that coffee and one moment Harry Stinson is right beside you and the next he’s halfway across the marble-drenched, leather-club-chair-festooned lobby. No one seems startled. It is, presumably, a daily occurrence. It doesn’t even seem showy—he more or less speed-walks when he’s taking you on a tour of the building, and every day he runs up the stairs of 1 King West twice (he takes the elevator down). That’s 102 storeys in total, and he does it in 20 minutes.
He has done the same thing at the Sears Tower in Chicago, and at New York City’s Empire State Building and World Trade Center (when it was still there). He is pencil thin. He is usually impatient. “Ask me questions,†he says, within seconds of our having met, all the while nursing a Diet Dr. Pepper and keeping tabs on incoming phone calls. No time for mundane niceties. Not when you’re trying to salvage your vision of what 1 King West might be, not when you’re mano-a-mano with city hall about your plans for a project you’re calling the Sapphire Tower (conceived to be the city’s highest, till council got its dream-killing hands on the plans), not when you’re completing what could be one of the most environmentally responsible condos in the country—High Park Lofts, which will utilize geothermal bore holes for some of its heating and cooling, and feature an indoor garden.
Harry Stinson wants to lead the pack. Harry Stinson speaks obsessively, rants in fact, about his vision for his buildings and his city. Harry Stinson wants to soar. But there are times—when he is in a fit of frustration with project managers and financiers and incompetent workmen and city hall bureaucrats, when he sees his dreams being watered down—when he has to concede that most of his development projects have never come to fruition; there are times when that tiny office begins to feel like a cage, when the falcon metaphor falters, when you wonder if you are dealing with the budgie of 1 King West, there for amusement value for the bankers and financiers, the men with real money; because, after all, he is a very hard-working little budgie indeed.
Harry Stinson was adopted, at the age of eight months, by Jean and Fred Stinson (he does not know who his birth parents are and has no interest in meeting them). They would adopt another child, his sister Martha (now employed by TD Canada Trust), and go on to have three children of their own (Tom, who died of a brain tumour at 13; Elizabeth, who works in the food service industry; and the youngest, Keith, who took over his father’s advertising firm after his death in 2003). They had a house on Lytton Boulevard, off Avenue Road. Jean Stinson lives today in a spacious condo near Wellesley and Bay, and remembers her son as a well-behaved and imaginative boy with a strong sense of propriety. She recounts how, at the age of nine, he told her he had thrown her pack of cigarettes into the garbage. “I only smoked two or three a day anyway,†she says, “but he was right. I never smoked again after that.†She also remembers him telling her, when he reached high school, that “some of the boys in my class are hoods, but I don’t think I want to be one.†Jean Stinson has a strong social conscience, and for the last 10 years has volunteered with the Metropolitan United Church’s Out of the Cold food program. She helps cook and serve meals to the homeless. “That’s what I believe in,†she says, “that sense of duty to your neighbours. My father strongly believed in taxes, in the common good. That was a background I hoped to convey to my children.â€
Harry Stinson was briefly a member of the Stop the Spadina Expressway movement when he was in high school, but what lingers more from his mother’s memories of his childhood is the slight taint of puritanism—the boy who wouldn’t be a hood, the boy who was always too busy to have a girlfriend. Even today, he doesn’t drink, has never smoked, looks incredulous at the idea of taking a vacation, says he is not a natural schmoozer, not a people person. He has, however, built a relationship with a woman named Linda Panning, a one-time figure-skating coach, and they have a five-year- old daughter, Rebecca, who likes to draw buildings with lots of windows. What he does most of all is work (beginning, usually, early afternoon and continuing till one or two in the morning). If he has an indulgence, it is antique automobiles. He owns three Cadillacs, two Mercedes, one Lincoln and four Rolls-Royces (some bought on eBay), though he rarely drives them. He keeps them at 1 King West, as perks for guests who might want to be ferried somewhere in style. Even his pleasures serve a purpose.
As a child, he was fascinated by architecture. His mother remembers him going downtown several times on his own to see the new city hall, a building that entranced him. He was a smart boy, passing the difficult entrance exams that got him into the prestigious University of Toronto Schools. In 1971, when Harry was in Grade 13, he caught the attention of journalist Jack Batten, who was preparing an article on the institution for the long-defunct Globe Magazine. Batten found him “pleasantly persuasive without any aggression in his style. You mark him for a successful politician in another dozen years,†and noted that the boy was president of the Public Affairs Club and the United Nations Club, that he was an editor of the school newspaper, a member of the Film Club and a founding member of Le Société Gastronomique de UTS, the school’s cooking club. Batten quotes Harry as saying that he likes the school partly because “there are more individuals, more weirdos among the students…and I’ve found all kinds of activities to be involved in—or activities to start, which is even better.â€
“Weirdo†might be a slightly unkind but not inaccurate description of Stinson today, and that adolescent passion for start-ups and trail-blazing has become his most enduring characteristic. Although he entered York University in a general arts course, he was not happy. He found the campus a suburban wasteland, the courses (except for one on urban politics) intensely boring, the professors ivory towerish. “The real world,†he says, “is messy and politically incorrect and affected by instincts, and by leaders who are movers and shakers. Not by theorists.†He would last only a year, part of which was devoted to the dream of opening a restaurant. After all, he’d started that cooking club in high school. He liked eating. He liked the theatrics of the business (though is quick to point out that, “not being a people person,†he had no interest in the hosting). He didn’t return to university. On May 4, 1972, the Groaning Board opened its doors on the second floor of an old house on Cumberland Street in Yorkville. It belonged to him, and he was 18 years old.
He’d borrowed some money from his grandmother. He drew the whole family into helping run the place. “It was difficult at first,†remembers his mother, who was involved, often as cook, for much of its 15-year life. The place was also an oddity, and very, very much ahead of its time. It specialized in simple, hearty, healthy food (and became best known for its soups, though it also featured salads and sandwiches). He added musicians to the mix and, one evening when a band failed to appear, turned in desperation to his father’s reel of prizewinning commercials from Cannes (if you’re of a certain age and remember the Groaning Board, the novelty of watching commercials as entertainment is probably the reason). More curiously still, he banned smoking from the premises—this at a time when one could smoke practically anywhere. But, as he says today, “I may have been limited to just part of the market, but I was also the only option in town for them when they wanted to go to a restaurant.†Stinson had taken the first step in a career that has been characterized as being either comically quixotic or near visionary in terms of his view of shifting urban residential patterns.
That he has a public profile at all is one of the more remarkable things about him. After all, he’s a real estate developer, generally the domain of faceless corporations and quiet men with serious money. None of that self-effacement for Harry Stinson. He has made himself the Mel Lastman, the Marty Millionaire of real estate developers. Can’t sleep? You can bring Harry into your bedroom with his late-night Condo Show on ShopTV. He is often the subject of profiles in the business press. The Globe and Mail recently made him the subject of a sartorial make-over. The media love the guy. He’s that rare combination—smart enough to quote while remaining unpretentious and engagingly goofy.
He has also changed Toronto’s skyline, and plans to change it more. One King West, so far his only completed development project, is 51 storeys high and, at 29 feet wide, one of the thinnest residential skyscrapers in the country. It is also that strange hybrid—a condo hotel. You can own a unit, live in it, work in it, have it rented out as a hotel room, or some combination of the above. It was designed by architect Stanford Downey, though Stinson says he was involved enough in that process to be “a pain in the ass.†James Rasor, the firm’s job captain, says he enjoyed the collaboration: “The neat thing about working with Harry is that he’s not just out there to make a buck. He’s there to leave a legacy. He doesn’t just build it and leave it. He builds it and runs it and keeps on tweaking it.†The skyscraper is tucked up against a historic property—the 15-storey 1914 Dominion Bank building, which houses on its second floor the original great banking hall, now Stinson’s Dominion Club. Membership, for the moment, is $5,000—likely within the means of the hoped-for demographic, “the entrepreneur, the professional who likes and appreciates life downtown.†The room is splendid, in the glorious tradition of early-20th-century “we are a bank so please be intimidated†magnificence.
If you are speed-walking through the room, and you will be with Harry Stinson, you will be captive audience to a running commentary on the perfidy of project managers who dictate false economies and choose cheap fixtures and furnishings and cover skylights with acoustic tile, and then he will be suddenly down on his knees pointing out how any sensible person would have matched the colour of the hall baseboards to a particular colour of thread in the carpet, but oh no, not this guy, and the harangues begin anew. You will eventually be harangued all the way to the penthouse apartment—4,500 square feet spread over three floors, double-prowed like some great airship, a 17-foot ceiling in the master bedroom, Toronto and Lake Ontario at your feet, yours for just $6 million (at the time of writing it was being rented as a glam space to house contestants in the 2006 MuchMusic VJ Search, and had the feel of a palatial group home for surly, irresponsible teenagers). You will see many other suites, some of them just 500 square feet, cleverly designed to make good use of space and bright with windows but, let’s face it, small, small, small. Many have fake fireplaces. He wanted real ones—but oh, those heartless cost-cutters! Cue harangue. There is a special rant reserved for your visit to what will become his home (for the moment he and his wife and daughter share a small one-bedroom in a building nearby)—4,500 square feet on the 14th and 15th floors, currently an unfinished shell because, well, it’s not really clear, except that it seems to have to do with punishments visited on Harry Stinson for being, more or less, the perfectionist, micromanaging, quality-obsessed visionary that he is. At the end of the tour, you will be exhausted—and not just from speed-walking.
All this care, all this obsession, and he doesn’t even own the entire place. The development was largely financed by art collector and theatre impresario David Mirvish and project-managed by Peter Kofman of Projectcore Inc. (a real estate development service company), the whole set-up a complicated tangle of money and responsibilities from which Stinson resigned as director (at the insistence, he says, of the Mirvish team), though he stuck around anyway, claiming his continuing role in the project was “to make sure that it gets done right.†Mirvish, sensibly, is careful, refusing to comment on the financial arrangements, praising Stinson’s vision of preserving a historic property and creating more residential space in the heart of downtown, declining to get into a discussion of Stinson’s character. Kofman, sensibly, enlarges on the difficulties of dealing with a large number of stakeholders (not just Mirvish and Stinson, but the many individuals and companies buying units in the building). Stinson, recklessly but refreshingly, is voluble and virtually non-stop on the subject of his erstwhile partners, praising Mirvish’s integrity and commitment, but bemoaning how the man fell under the influence of “the suits,†Stinson’s way of characterizing the army of lawyers, consultants, advisors and bankers, real or imagined, who would have urged Mirvish to be careful, to not risk losing his investment by allowing “crazy Stinson†free rein. Kofman, in this narrative, is the man who goes for cheap and tacky when the Stinson vision dictated quality and luxe (though, as Mirvish put it, “Peter Kofman had to say no about some things. It’s simply part of his jobâ€). When the dust settled in mid-March, Stinson became the owner of the commercial space in the building, the Dominion Club, and the management contract. As he put it, “It will finally be clear who’s in charge of the building. There will be only one person driving the bus.â€
Apt metaphor—he is more likely to be mistaken for a bus driver than a developer. Few articles about Harry Stinson fail to mention his sartorial solecisms (a seemingly endless supply of tan pants and dark turtlenecks under beige shirts), and he retains the get-your-hands-dirty approach of the common working man. I was in his office one afternoon when a young woman, an employee, came in and asked if Harry had a crowbar; it seemed someone had accidentally locked himself into a storage room off the main lobby. Of course Harry had a crowbar. Harry had an entire filing cabinet drawer full of tools. Within moments, he had decided that a long screwdriver was a more appropriate tool for the job, had run (of course) across the lobby, done a number on the door and released the rather embarrassed doorman. I asked him why he filled a filing cabinet drawer with tools. “I like doing things,†he said simply. “I like building things.†He also wants the residents of 1 King West to see Harry Stinson, one of the building’s principals, as infinitely available, as concerned about the building’s value as they are. It’s easy to talk to Harry. He’s almost always there. There isn’t even a door on his office. You can see him from the lobby. You can watch him take meetings with suppliers, even hang around and listen if you want to. He once spoke to me for a good half hour, phone to his ear, kept on hold by the attorney general of Ontario (interested in arranging an event on the premises).
He’s always had that almost maniacal stick-to-it-iveness. As a boy, he was chubby, and says he was mocked in high school by his gym teacher. In his final year, he began to train on his own as a long-distance runner, stuck with it, fat kid churning miserably along the road, and the results are now a favourite family story: Harry Stinson not only lost weight, he won the school’s long run, a result so unexpected that the evil gym teacher simply assumed Harry was the last to cross the line from a group who had set out earlier. Only when the rest of his class straggled in behind was it revealed that Harry was the winner. The gym teacher asked Harry to be on the team. Harry was happy to say no.
He is very eager to be the only person driving the bus. And if the bus is heading into uncharted territory, even better. Harry Stinson was still managing the Groaning Board when he launched into his next venture, the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, a restaurant on Eglinton West catering to children. He says he’d been in the restaurant business long enough to understand that family dinners were no fun for anybody. The children were sullen or noisy, almost always messy, the parents stressed, the other patrons irritated and the tips small. The Stinsonian solution? Get rid of the parents. Focus on birthdays. Let the kids have food fights (whipped cream was extra), pillow fights, play games, play dress-up—a kid’s fantasy birthday. He ran it for some 15 years, and finally sold it in 1990. “I enjoyed the kids at first,†he says, “but it changed. They became more spoiled, the parents litigious, the insurance companies difficult. It became nasty and not fun anymore.â€
He may have been breaking new ground in the restaurant world, but it wasn’t making him rich (“It’s a business that sucks it up as fast as you make itâ€). He noticed real estate agents worked similarly long hours but made better money, so he got his real estate licence in the early ’80s and started selling commercial properties. That didn’t last long. “Commercial real estate is an old boys’ club,†he says. “It’s a closed circle, not keen on new guys coming around,†and—even worse for the non-people-person Stinson—“you had to play golf and eat in steak houses.†He switched to residential. He did well. He decided to specialize in condos.
It’s hard to believe, when every new building rising these days seems to be yet another condominium development, that there was a time when owning an apartment rather than a house was a novel and rather scary proposition in this town. To Harry Stinson, though, it smelled like the future. “This was 25 years ago,†he says, “but I felt that condos were what Torontonians would be migrating to. There’s no more room to build houses downtown, so there had to be multi-unit dwellings. And I thought people would still prefer owning to renting.†He’d bought a condo himself near Jarvis and Carlton, and discovered that “the brokers were ignorant, the lawyers were winging it. There was no infrastructure…so I thought if I became the most knowledgeable guy, that would be my advantage.†He went about the process in his thorough way, becoming an expert on the subject, putting on seminars to explain this brave new world to prospective buyers, working hard to fit individuals to the right product. “It took a couple of years,†he says, “but I built a reputation as one of the top condo guys working at RE/MAX.†By the late ’80s he’d left RE/MAX and started Stinson Realty Corporation, specializing in condos.
That’s when he met Brad J. Lamb. Lamb has his own agency now (he’s the guy whose signs feature a chimera—a lamb’s body with Lamb’s bald head), but back then he was a real estate investor with a condo he wanted to sell quickly. “I was looking for an agent,†he remembers, “and I found this ad in the Globe, this incredibly long, verbose ad, 30 or 40 lines, hundreds of words, but the guy was claiming to specialize in condos, so I called him up. It was Harry, and he arrived wearing a track suit and those large, waffle training shoes and carrying an early cellphone, one of those suitcase phones. And he pulled up in a red limo. I thought, The guy’s kinda weird. But he did know a lot about the market, so I decided, Why not? The proof was in the pudding. He sold my property in a few days, at a nice profit.â€
It was clear to Lamb that, tacky or weird, Stinson was onto something, something sufficiently appealing that he asked to work for him. They would eventually become partners, and were together until 1995. The agency grew quickly, says Lamb, and they had some 30 agents working for them by the early ’90s. “When I left,†he adds, “we were the top real estate team in Toronto. When the market was on its knees, we cleaned up.†He characterizes Stinson as “extremely motivated, intelligent, well spoken, fair and honest. A good, solid guy. I left to become his competitor, but he let me stay in his office and sell until I moved. He was that fair.â€
One of Lamb’s reasons for leaving (other than not being “the second banana typeâ€) was that Stinson’s interests and priorities were shifting from real estate sales to real estate development (“I was disappointed in the product I had to sell,†Stinson says. “My agenda was to create an interesting product that people would want to buyâ€). That meant Stinson had less time for the business he was ostensibly in, and as a subsequent partner pointed out, he shouldn’t be using so much of the agency profits to fund development. “A valid point,†says Stinson, and he would eventually sell the agency. “It was a hard decision. It would have been easier to stick with my knitting, and I was afraid I’d crash and burn, but I knew if I stayed I’d never succeed at the development business.â€
And he almost didn’t. Every early attempt at imaginative condo development failed. He tried with the building at 42 Charles Street East (now owned by the YMCA), ran into problems with a bellicose neighbour and the Ontario Municipal Board, eventually lost the financing, and had to give up (he calls the experience “a very expensive educationâ€). He tried with the King Edward Hotel, which has three empty floors and a derelict ballroom, dreaming he could condo-ize that space, but for various complicated reasons, that dream has gone nowhere. Then, in 1995, came the Candy Factory.
It was supposed to be the one that worked, the ahead-of-its-time idea that would lift Harry Stinson out of the failed dreamer category and into the world of men whose dreams come true, who saw the future and made it happen. He would take an old factory building, once the Ce De Candy Company, on a then not very savoury stretch of Queen West (a little too near the mental hospital), and convert it into that new and tantalizingly Manhattan-esque thing called loft space. There was interest from the buying public. He pre-sold more than 80 per cent of the units. Then it was time to go to the banks for financing. The banks said no—he couldn’t provide the financial guarantees they wanted. Cue very lengthy harangue, even today, about the Canadian financing establishment, about how dreamers are stymied by men who work with spreadsheets, men who couldn’t build a back porch on their own (etc., etc., etc., until you tune out).
The Candy Factory did finally come to life, though not under Stinson’s stewardship (the Metrontario Group, a more established real estate developer, owns the building) and not to his exacting specifications. Though the loss pains him still, he says he is proud of his accomplishments in pioneering the rezoning of commercial properties into residential lofts and “the explosion of development in the west end that I think I had something to do with.†He did end up with a financial settlement from the Candy Factory’s owners, though it took years to collect, and for a period he was broke. He lost his condominium apartment to the bank. “I lost practically everything,†he says.
He did, in that period, gain a partner (of the amorous kind). After spending some time with Harry Stinson, I found it hard to imagine him in a relationship. He is too proudly solitary, too driven, too obsessed and too apparently humourless—except for the occasional wry observation on the general iniquities of the world (as visited upon Harry Stinson). But there you go—Linda Panning is vivacious, loves to laugh, knows how to dress, is not much, in other words, like her husband. They met, she says, “because he kept trying to sell me a condo.†They talked a lot on the telephone (she was in Guelph, working on a master’s in animal behaviour—Harry, she jokes, “is at least two standard deviations from the meanâ€), and though she says “there was no specific moment when things transitioned,†there was no doubt they were becoming a couple. “I like his intellect,†she says. “And he looked a lot more like a university prof than a real estate agent. My dad is a bit eccentric and a prof at U of T, so I’ve been exposed to a lot of academics, who tend to be a little different.†She feels, as does he, that “there is a growing move for families with kids to live downtown, and not flee to the suburbs. But downtown there are huge apartments and units too small for a family. The medium-size apartments they’ll need are not available.â€
Providing that kind of space was one of the inspirations for the Sapphire Tower, the planned development at Bay and Richmond, conceived as an 81-storey dazzler, the highest residential skyscraper in Canada. In one of its earlier incarnations, it was a blue glass cylinder, topped at some 300 metres by an enormous blue sphere (decorative, for sure, but also practical, in that it was designed to help prevent the building from swaying in the wind). Globe and Mail columnist John Bentley Mays characterized the project as “a glitzy, got-rocks kind of dame, and a welcome addition to the urban mix†(contrasting it with a proposed tower by American gargoyle Donald Trump, which he called a “ho-hum stack of glass boxesâ€). Problem is, it doesn’t look like that anymore—city hall didn’t like, among other things, the fact that the building would cast a shadow on Nathan Phillips Square (according to Stinson, the shadow would cross the square in 17 minutes and, for much of the year, wouldn’t touch the square at all). Harry, of course, is scathing about the process, waxing eloquent on how city hall, “that small-minded crew,†had to show who was boss, had to put the developer in his place (he occasionally refers to himself in the third person), had to grind everything down to a bland compromise. His office walls, back in March, were often papered with new architectural drawings that might pacify city hall. The one most likely to fly, by architecture firm Turner Fleischer, showed a gleaming blue-green edifice rising 73 storeys, regular in shape until, at the summit, it appears to have been eaten away by Ms. Pac-Man, revealing a rice paddy cascade of terraces and balconies. That, of course, may change.
Conceptually, though, he’s committed to providing downtown homes for families. Though the lower floors will be a mix of retail and commercial space, and part of the edifice will function as a hotel, floors 10 through 50 will feature large, three- and four-bedroom apartments. You could raise a family, if you were rich enough, in the heart of Toronto’s financial district (two bedrooms might start at half a million; three bedrooms at a million).
That is a civic-minded vision. If American cities have taught us anything, it’s that a vibrant metropolis is always a pullulating mix of office, retail and residential space, and that a downtown without people is a downtown that is both dangerous and dead. But civic responsibility is not the only—or perhaps even the most powerful—motivator for Harry Stinson. Ego gratification is there, in his obsession with the monumental and in his inability to see projects from any perspective other than his own. (I joked with David Mirvish that Stinson sees himself as Toronto’s Baron Haussmann, the man who levelled much of medieval Paris for Napoleon III, and gave us the Paris we know today. Mirvish joked back that perhaps Baron Munchhausen, that weaver of fantastical tales, was a more apt comparison.) Money doesn’t seem that important to the man—by his own admission, he’s made a lot of it and lost almost as much (in that regard, he is far from your typical developers, invisible men who, as Brad Lamb put it, “crank out shit purely for the moneyâ€). Stinson says that what drives him is the fact that real estate development “is a creative process. You’re building something tangible, leaving something behind. I can’t imagine punching a clock and reaching retirement age with a pension. I like to create things. I like seeing it done, seeing it there. And the whole thing is like a giant choreographed play, intensely complex.â€
That can take its toll. For all his physical activity and daily runs up the stairs of 1 King West, Stinson looks, much of the time, like a sick, exhausted man. His colour is not good. He appears to survive on coffee and Diet Dr. Pepper. Sometimes, during interviews, he will cover his face with his hands in a paroxysm of weariness. He can seem, then, caged. But the fat kid who dreamed his way to athletic triumph is now dreaming cloud-capped towers that thread family life through the heart of downtown, is dreaming housing that weaves a respect for nature into its very fabric. I wouldn’t bet against him. I wouldn’t want to over-praise him, either. Like most eccentrics, he is in equal parts (well, maybe not exactly equal) entrancing and irritating, and I suspect the drive to deliver what inson wants weighs as much as the drive to deliver what the city needs.
I asked him, once, if he was happy. He seemed startled. “I’m frustrated,†he said. He paused. “No, I’m not happy. But I don’t have a victim mentality and I don’t get depressed. My projects may have been eccentric but they were unprecedented. Even now I run into this condescending attitude from people in the financial community, that I’m this crazy guy, that I’m not realistic.†At the time he said those things, it wasn’t clear that the deal he wanted for running 1 King West would close (it later did.) It wasn’t clear what version of the Sapphire Tower would ever get beyond the concept stage—it had been sent back to the drawing board by city hall twice. Nothing was living up to the Stinson vision. He very much seemed the budgie of 1 King West then, cage-cramped and miserable, but in the energetic, endless flow of the man you could still sense the falcon biding its time, rustling its feathers, hoping to soar.
By Gerald Hannon
Harry Stinson is Toronto’s answer to Donald Trump—big talk, big stakes, big ego. He built one of the city’s most dazzling condo towers, right at King and Yonge. He wants his next project—the Sapphire—to be the tallest residential skyscraper in the country, but city hall won’t approve it and the bankers haven’t backed it. Vision is a tough sell By Gerald Hannon
He has the face of an aging falcon, something of that raptor’s quick, intense, scrutinizing gaze, quite a bit of its ferocious independence and, lately, a great deal of its passion for cloud grazing. You sense, too, that real estate developer Harry Stinson seems almost personally affronted by the law of gravity, by bureaucracy (gravity’s social vector), by people who merely stroll through life as if the journey, not the arrival, actually mattered. Ask him for something—a coffee, perhaps—that isn’t at hand in his tiny, doorless office off the lobby of 1 King West (that ingratiating, city-enhancing sliver of a condominium hotel he conceived and developed). He won’t send an assistant to get it. He’ll go to the coffee bar himself. And he won’t even walk there. He’ll run. It’s a shock, the first time you see him do that. You don’t expect 53-year-old developers of high-end properties to shed their professional gravitas and suddenly morph into a Speedy Gonzalez cartoon, but ask for that coffee and one moment Harry Stinson is right beside you and the next he’s halfway across the marble-drenched, leather-club-chair-festooned lobby. No one seems startled. It is, presumably, a daily occurrence. It doesn’t even seem showy—he more or less speed-walks when he’s taking you on a tour of the building, and every day he runs up the stairs of 1 King West twice (he takes the elevator down). That’s 102 storeys in total, and he does it in 20 minutes.
He has done the same thing at the Sears Tower in Chicago, and at New York City’s Empire State Building and World Trade Center (when it was still there). He is pencil thin. He is usually impatient. “Ask me questions,†he says, within seconds of our having met, all the while nursing a Diet Dr. Pepper and keeping tabs on incoming phone calls. No time for mundane niceties. Not when you’re trying to salvage your vision of what 1 King West might be, not when you’re mano-a-mano with city hall about your plans for a project you’re calling the Sapphire Tower (conceived to be the city’s highest, till council got its dream-killing hands on the plans), not when you’re completing what could be one of the most environmentally responsible condos in the country—High Park Lofts, which will utilize geothermal bore holes for some of its heating and cooling, and feature an indoor garden.
Harry Stinson wants to lead the pack. Harry Stinson speaks obsessively, rants in fact, about his vision for his buildings and his city. Harry Stinson wants to soar. But there are times—when he is in a fit of frustration with project managers and financiers and incompetent workmen and city hall bureaucrats, when he sees his dreams being watered down—when he has to concede that most of his development projects have never come to fruition; there are times when that tiny office begins to feel like a cage, when the falcon metaphor falters, when you wonder if you are dealing with the budgie of 1 King West, there for amusement value for the bankers and financiers, the men with real money; because, after all, he is a very hard-working little budgie indeed.
Harry Stinson was adopted, at the age of eight months, by Jean and Fred Stinson (he does not know who his birth parents are and has no interest in meeting them). They would adopt another child, his sister Martha (now employed by TD Canada Trust), and go on to have three children of their own (Tom, who died of a brain tumour at 13; Elizabeth, who works in the food service industry; and the youngest, Keith, who took over his father’s advertising firm after his death in 2003). They had a house on Lytton Boulevard, off Avenue Road. Jean Stinson lives today in a spacious condo near Wellesley and Bay, and remembers her son as a well-behaved and imaginative boy with a strong sense of propriety. She recounts how, at the age of nine, he told her he had thrown her pack of cigarettes into the garbage. “I only smoked two or three a day anyway,†she says, “but he was right. I never smoked again after that.†She also remembers him telling her, when he reached high school, that “some of the boys in my class are hoods, but I don’t think I want to be one.†Jean Stinson has a strong social conscience, and for the last 10 years has volunteered with the Metropolitan United Church’s Out of the Cold food program. She helps cook and serve meals to the homeless. “That’s what I believe in,†she says, “that sense of duty to your neighbours. My father strongly believed in taxes, in the common good. That was a background I hoped to convey to my children.â€
Harry Stinson was briefly a member of the Stop the Spadina Expressway movement when he was in high school, but what lingers more from his mother’s memories of his childhood is the slight taint of puritanism—the boy who wouldn’t be a hood, the boy who was always too busy to have a girlfriend. Even today, he doesn’t drink, has never smoked, looks incredulous at the idea of taking a vacation, says he is not a natural schmoozer, not a people person. He has, however, built a relationship with a woman named Linda Panning, a one-time figure-skating coach, and they have a five-year- old daughter, Rebecca, who likes to draw buildings with lots of windows. What he does most of all is work (beginning, usually, early afternoon and continuing till one or two in the morning). If he has an indulgence, it is antique automobiles. He owns three Cadillacs, two Mercedes, one Lincoln and four Rolls-Royces (some bought on eBay), though he rarely drives them. He keeps them at 1 King West, as perks for guests who might want to be ferried somewhere in style. Even his pleasures serve a purpose.
As a child, he was fascinated by architecture. His mother remembers him going downtown several times on his own to see the new city hall, a building that entranced him. He was a smart boy, passing the difficult entrance exams that got him into the prestigious University of Toronto Schools. In 1971, when Harry was in Grade 13, he caught the attention of journalist Jack Batten, who was preparing an article on the institution for the long-defunct Globe Magazine. Batten found him “pleasantly persuasive without any aggression in his style. You mark him for a successful politician in another dozen years,†and noted that the boy was president of the Public Affairs Club and the United Nations Club, that he was an editor of the school newspaper, a member of the Film Club and a founding member of Le Société Gastronomique de UTS, the school’s cooking club. Batten quotes Harry as saying that he likes the school partly because “there are more individuals, more weirdos among the students…and I’ve found all kinds of activities to be involved in—or activities to start, which is even better.â€
“Weirdo†might be a slightly unkind but not inaccurate description of Stinson today, and that adolescent passion for start-ups and trail-blazing has become his most enduring characteristic. Although he entered York University in a general arts course, he was not happy. He found the campus a suburban wasteland, the courses (except for one on urban politics) intensely boring, the professors ivory towerish. “The real world,†he says, “is messy and politically incorrect and affected by instincts, and by leaders who are movers and shakers. Not by theorists.†He would last only a year, part of which was devoted to the dream of opening a restaurant. After all, he’d started that cooking club in high school. He liked eating. He liked the theatrics of the business (though is quick to point out that, “not being a people person,†he had no interest in the hosting). He didn’t return to university. On May 4, 1972, the Groaning Board opened its doors on the second floor of an old house on Cumberland Street in Yorkville. It belonged to him, and he was 18 years old.
He’d borrowed some money from his grandmother. He drew the whole family into helping run the place. “It was difficult at first,†remembers his mother, who was involved, often as cook, for much of its 15-year life. The place was also an oddity, and very, very much ahead of its time. It specialized in simple, hearty, healthy food (and became best known for its soups, though it also featured salads and sandwiches). He added musicians to the mix and, one evening when a band failed to appear, turned in desperation to his father’s reel of prizewinning commercials from Cannes (if you’re of a certain age and remember the Groaning Board, the novelty of watching commercials as entertainment is probably the reason). More curiously still, he banned smoking from the premises—this at a time when one could smoke practically anywhere. But, as he says today, “I may have been limited to just part of the market, but I was also the only option in town for them when they wanted to go to a restaurant.†Stinson had taken the first step in a career that has been characterized as being either comically quixotic or near visionary in terms of his view of shifting urban residential patterns.
That he has a public profile at all is one of the more remarkable things about him. After all, he’s a real estate developer, generally the domain of faceless corporations and quiet men with serious money. None of that self-effacement for Harry Stinson. He has made himself the Mel Lastman, the Marty Millionaire of real estate developers. Can’t sleep? You can bring Harry into your bedroom with his late-night Condo Show on ShopTV. He is often the subject of profiles in the business press. The Globe and Mail recently made him the subject of a sartorial make-over. The media love the guy. He’s that rare combination—smart enough to quote while remaining unpretentious and engagingly goofy.
He has also changed Toronto’s skyline, and plans to change it more. One King West, so far his only completed development project, is 51 storeys high and, at 29 feet wide, one of the thinnest residential skyscrapers in the country. It is also that strange hybrid—a condo hotel. You can own a unit, live in it, work in it, have it rented out as a hotel room, or some combination of the above. It was designed by architect Stanford Downey, though Stinson says he was involved enough in that process to be “a pain in the ass.†James Rasor, the firm’s job captain, says he enjoyed the collaboration: “The neat thing about working with Harry is that he’s not just out there to make a buck. He’s there to leave a legacy. He doesn’t just build it and leave it. He builds it and runs it and keeps on tweaking it.†The skyscraper is tucked up against a historic property—the 15-storey 1914 Dominion Bank building, which houses on its second floor the original great banking hall, now Stinson’s Dominion Club. Membership, for the moment, is $5,000—likely within the means of the hoped-for demographic, “the entrepreneur, the professional who likes and appreciates life downtown.†The room is splendid, in the glorious tradition of early-20th-century “we are a bank so please be intimidated†magnificence.
If you are speed-walking through the room, and you will be with Harry Stinson, you will be captive audience to a running commentary on the perfidy of project managers who dictate false economies and choose cheap fixtures and furnishings and cover skylights with acoustic tile, and then he will be suddenly down on his knees pointing out how any sensible person would have matched the colour of the hall baseboards to a particular colour of thread in the carpet, but oh no, not this guy, and the harangues begin anew. You will eventually be harangued all the way to the penthouse apartment—4,500 square feet spread over three floors, double-prowed like some great airship, a 17-foot ceiling in the master bedroom, Toronto and Lake Ontario at your feet, yours for just $6 million (at the time of writing it was being rented as a glam space to house contestants in the 2006 MuchMusic VJ Search, and had the feel of a palatial group home for surly, irresponsible teenagers). You will see many other suites, some of them just 500 square feet, cleverly designed to make good use of space and bright with windows but, let’s face it, small, small, small. Many have fake fireplaces. He wanted real ones—but oh, those heartless cost-cutters! Cue harangue. There is a special rant reserved for your visit to what will become his home (for the moment he and his wife and daughter share a small one-bedroom in a building nearby)—4,500 square feet on the 14th and 15th floors, currently an unfinished shell because, well, it’s not really clear, except that it seems to have to do with punishments visited on Harry Stinson for being, more or less, the perfectionist, micromanaging, quality-obsessed visionary that he is. At the end of the tour, you will be exhausted—and not just from speed-walking.
All this care, all this obsession, and he doesn’t even own the entire place. The development was largely financed by art collector and theatre impresario David Mirvish and project-managed by Peter Kofman of Projectcore Inc. (a real estate development service company), the whole set-up a complicated tangle of money and responsibilities from which Stinson resigned as director (at the insistence, he says, of the Mirvish team), though he stuck around anyway, claiming his continuing role in the project was “to make sure that it gets done right.†Mirvish, sensibly, is careful, refusing to comment on the financial arrangements, praising Stinson’s vision of preserving a historic property and creating more residential space in the heart of downtown, declining to get into a discussion of Stinson’s character. Kofman, sensibly, enlarges on the difficulties of dealing with a large number of stakeholders (not just Mirvish and Stinson, but the many individuals and companies buying units in the building). Stinson, recklessly but refreshingly, is voluble and virtually non-stop on the subject of his erstwhile partners, praising Mirvish’s integrity and commitment, but bemoaning how the man fell under the influence of “the suits,†Stinson’s way of characterizing the army of lawyers, consultants, advisors and bankers, real or imagined, who would have urged Mirvish to be careful, to not risk losing his investment by allowing “crazy Stinson†free rein. Kofman, in this narrative, is the man who goes for cheap and tacky when the Stinson vision dictated quality and luxe (though, as Mirvish put it, “Peter Kofman had to say no about some things. It’s simply part of his jobâ€). When the dust settled in mid-March, Stinson became the owner of the commercial space in the building, the Dominion Club, and the management contract. As he put it, “It will finally be clear who’s in charge of the building. There will be only one person driving the bus.â€
Apt metaphor—he is more likely to be mistaken for a bus driver than a developer. Few articles about Harry Stinson fail to mention his sartorial solecisms (a seemingly endless supply of tan pants and dark turtlenecks under beige shirts), and he retains the get-your-hands-dirty approach of the common working man. I was in his office one afternoon when a young woman, an employee, came in and asked if Harry had a crowbar; it seemed someone had accidentally locked himself into a storage room off the main lobby. Of course Harry had a crowbar. Harry had an entire filing cabinet drawer full of tools. Within moments, he had decided that a long screwdriver was a more appropriate tool for the job, had run (of course) across the lobby, done a number on the door and released the rather embarrassed doorman. I asked him why he filled a filing cabinet drawer with tools. “I like doing things,†he said simply. “I like building things.†He also wants the residents of 1 King West to see Harry Stinson, one of the building’s principals, as infinitely available, as concerned about the building’s value as they are. It’s easy to talk to Harry. He’s almost always there. There isn’t even a door on his office. You can see him from the lobby. You can watch him take meetings with suppliers, even hang around and listen if you want to. He once spoke to me for a good half hour, phone to his ear, kept on hold by the attorney general of Ontario (interested in arranging an event on the premises).
He’s always had that almost maniacal stick-to-it-iveness. As a boy, he was chubby, and says he was mocked in high school by his gym teacher. In his final year, he began to train on his own as a long-distance runner, stuck with it, fat kid churning miserably along the road, and the results are now a favourite family story: Harry Stinson not only lost weight, he won the school’s long run, a result so unexpected that the evil gym teacher simply assumed Harry was the last to cross the line from a group who had set out earlier. Only when the rest of his class straggled in behind was it revealed that Harry was the winner. The gym teacher asked Harry to be on the team. Harry was happy to say no.
He is very eager to be the only person driving the bus. And if the bus is heading into uncharted territory, even better. Harry Stinson was still managing the Groaning Board when he launched into his next venture, the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, a restaurant on Eglinton West catering to children. He says he’d been in the restaurant business long enough to understand that family dinners were no fun for anybody. The children were sullen or noisy, almost always messy, the parents stressed, the other patrons irritated and the tips small. The Stinsonian solution? Get rid of the parents. Focus on birthdays. Let the kids have food fights (whipped cream was extra), pillow fights, play games, play dress-up—a kid’s fantasy birthday. He ran it for some 15 years, and finally sold it in 1990. “I enjoyed the kids at first,†he says, “but it changed. They became more spoiled, the parents litigious, the insurance companies difficult. It became nasty and not fun anymore.â€
He may have been breaking new ground in the restaurant world, but it wasn’t making him rich (“It’s a business that sucks it up as fast as you make itâ€). He noticed real estate agents worked similarly long hours but made better money, so he got his real estate licence in the early ’80s and started selling commercial properties. That didn’t last long. “Commercial real estate is an old boys’ club,†he says. “It’s a closed circle, not keen on new guys coming around,†and—even worse for the non-people-person Stinson—“you had to play golf and eat in steak houses.†He switched to residential. He did well. He decided to specialize in condos.
It’s hard to believe, when every new building rising these days seems to be yet another condominium development, that there was a time when owning an apartment rather than a house was a novel and rather scary proposition in this town. To Harry Stinson, though, it smelled like the future. “This was 25 years ago,†he says, “but I felt that condos were what Torontonians would be migrating to. There’s no more room to build houses downtown, so there had to be multi-unit dwellings. And I thought people would still prefer owning to renting.†He’d bought a condo himself near Jarvis and Carlton, and discovered that “the brokers were ignorant, the lawyers were winging it. There was no infrastructure…so I thought if I became the most knowledgeable guy, that would be my advantage.†He went about the process in his thorough way, becoming an expert on the subject, putting on seminars to explain this brave new world to prospective buyers, working hard to fit individuals to the right product. “It took a couple of years,†he says, “but I built a reputation as one of the top condo guys working at RE/MAX.†By the late ’80s he’d left RE/MAX and started Stinson Realty Corporation, specializing in condos.
That’s when he met Brad J. Lamb. Lamb has his own agency now (he’s the guy whose signs feature a chimera—a lamb’s body with Lamb’s bald head), but back then he was a real estate investor with a condo he wanted to sell quickly. “I was looking for an agent,†he remembers, “and I found this ad in the Globe, this incredibly long, verbose ad, 30 or 40 lines, hundreds of words, but the guy was claiming to specialize in condos, so I called him up. It was Harry, and he arrived wearing a track suit and those large, waffle training shoes and carrying an early cellphone, one of those suitcase phones. And he pulled up in a red limo. I thought, The guy’s kinda weird. But he did know a lot about the market, so I decided, Why not? The proof was in the pudding. He sold my property in a few days, at a nice profit.â€
It was clear to Lamb that, tacky or weird, Stinson was onto something, something sufficiently appealing that he asked to work for him. They would eventually become partners, and were together until 1995. The agency grew quickly, says Lamb, and they had some 30 agents working for them by the early ’90s. “When I left,†he adds, “we were the top real estate team in Toronto. When the market was on its knees, we cleaned up.†He characterizes Stinson as “extremely motivated, intelligent, well spoken, fair and honest. A good, solid guy. I left to become his competitor, but he let me stay in his office and sell until I moved. He was that fair.â€
One of Lamb’s reasons for leaving (other than not being “the second banana typeâ€) was that Stinson’s interests and priorities were shifting from real estate sales to real estate development (“I was disappointed in the product I had to sell,†Stinson says. “My agenda was to create an interesting product that people would want to buyâ€). That meant Stinson had less time for the business he was ostensibly in, and as a subsequent partner pointed out, he shouldn’t be using so much of the agency profits to fund development. “A valid point,†says Stinson, and he would eventually sell the agency. “It was a hard decision. It would have been easier to stick with my knitting, and I was afraid I’d crash and burn, but I knew if I stayed I’d never succeed at the development business.â€
And he almost didn’t. Every early attempt at imaginative condo development failed. He tried with the building at 42 Charles Street East (now owned by the YMCA), ran into problems with a bellicose neighbour and the Ontario Municipal Board, eventually lost the financing, and had to give up (he calls the experience “a very expensive educationâ€). He tried with the King Edward Hotel, which has three empty floors and a derelict ballroom, dreaming he could condo-ize that space, but for various complicated reasons, that dream has gone nowhere. Then, in 1995, came the Candy Factory.
It was supposed to be the one that worked, the ahead-of-its-time idea that would lift Harry Stinson out of the failed dreamer category and into the world of men whose dreams come true, who saw the future and made it happen. He would take an old factory building, once the Ce De Candy Company, on a then not very savoury stretch of Queen West (a little too near the mental hospital), and convert it into that new and tantalizingly Manhattan-esque thing called loft space. There was interest from the buying public. He pre-sold more than 80 per cent of the units. Then it was time to go to the banks for financing. The banks said no—he couldn’t provide the financial guarantees they wanted. Cue very lengthy harangue, even today, about the Canadian financing establishment, about how dreamers are stymied by men who work with spreadsheets, men who couldn’t build a back porch on their own (etc., etc., etc., until you tune out).
The Candy Factory did finally come to life, though not under Stinson’s stewardship (the Metrontario Group, a more established real estate developer, owns the building) and not to his exacting specifications. Though the loss pains him still, he says he is proud of his accomplishments in pioneering the rezoning of commercial properties into residential lofts and “the explosion of development in the west end that I think I had something to do with.†He did end up with a financial settlement from the Candy Factory’s owners, though it took years to collect, and for a period he was broke. He lost his condominium apartment to the bank. “I lost practically everything,†he says.
He did, in that period, gain a partner (of the amorous kind). After spending some time with Harry Stinson, I found it hard to imagine him in a relationship. He is too proudly solitary, too driven, too obsessed and too apparently humourless—except for the occasional wry observation on the general iniquities of the world (as visited upon Harry Stinson). But there you go—Linda Panning is vivacious, loves to laugh, knows how to dress, is not much, in other words, like her husband. They met, she says, “because he kept trying to sell me a condo.†They talked a lot on the telephone (she was in Guelph, working on a master’s in animal behaviour—Harry, she jokes, “is at least two standard deviations from the meanâ€), and though she says “there was no specific moment when things transitioned,†there was no doubt they were becoming a couple. “I like his intellect,†she says. “And he looked a lot more like a university prof than a real estate agent. My dad is a bit eccentric and a prof at U of T, so I’ve been exposed to a lot of academics, who tend to be a little different.†She feels, as does he, that “there is a growing move for families with kids to live downtown, and not flee to the suburbs. But downtown there are huge apartments and units too small for a family. The medium-size apartments they’ll need are not available.â€
Providing that kind of space was one of the inspirations for the Sapphire Tower, the planned development at Bay and Richmond, conceived as an 81-storey dazzler, the highest residential skyscraper in Canada. In one of its earlier incarnations, it was a blue glass cylinder, topped at some 300 metres by an enormous blue sphere (decorative, for sure, but also practical, in that it was designed to help prevent the building from swaying in the wind). Globe and Mail columnist John Bentley Mays characterized the project as “a glitzy, got-rocks kind of dame, and a welcome addition to the urban mix†(contrasting it with a proposed tower by American gargoyle Donald Trump, which he called a “ho-hum stack of glass boxesâ€). Problem is, it doesn’t look like that anymore—city hall didn’t like, among other things, the fact that the building would cast a shadow on Nathan Phillips Square (according to Stinson, the shadow would cross the square in 17 minutes and, for much of the year, wouldn’t touch the square at all). Harry, of course, is scathing about the process, waxing eloquent on how city hall, “that small-minded crew,†had to show who was boss, had to put the developer in his place (he occasionally refers to himself in the third person), had to grind everything down to a bland compromise. His office walls, back in March, were often papered with new architectural drawings that might pacify city hall. The one most likely to fly, by architecture firm Turner Fleischer, showed a gleaming blue-green edifice rising 73 storeys, regular in shape until, at the summit, it appears to have been eaten away by Ms. Pac-Man, revealing a rice paddy cascade of terraces and balconies. That, of course, may change.
Conceptually, though, he’s committed to providing downtown homes for families. Though the lower floors will be a mix of retail and commercial space, and part of the edifice will function as a hotel, floors 10 through 50 will feature large, three- and four-bedroom apartments. You could raise a family, if you were rich enough, in the heart of Toronto’s financial district (two bedrooms might start at half a million; three bedrooms at a million).
That is a civic-minded vision. If American cities have taught us anything, it’s that a vibrant metropolis is always a pullulating mix of office, retail and residential space, and that a downtown without people is a downtown that is both dangerous and dead. But civic responsibility is not the only—or perhaps even the most powerful—motivator for Harry Stinson. Ego gratification is there, in his obsession with the monumental and in his inability to see projects from any perspective other than his own. (I joked with David Mirvish that Stinson sees himself as Toronto’s Baron Haussmann, the man who levelled much of medieval Paris for Napoleon III, and gave us the Paris we know today. Mirvish joked back that perhaps Baron Munchhausen, that weaver of fantastical tales, was a more apt comparison.) Money doesn’t seem that important to the man—by his own admission, he’s made a lot of it and lost almost as much (in that regard, he is far from your typical developers, invisible men who, as Brad Lamb put it, “crank out shit purely for the moneyâ€). Stinson says that what drives him is the fact that real estate development “is a creative process. You’re building something tangible, leaving something behind. I can’t imagine punching a clock and reaching retirement age with a pension. I like to create things. I like seeing it done, seeing it there. And the whole thing is like a giant choreographed play, intensely complex.â€
That can take its toll. For all his physical activity and daily runs up the stairs of 1 King West, Stinson looks, much of the time, like a sick, exhausted man. His colour is not good. He appears to survive on coffee and Diet Dr. Pepper. Sometimes, during interviews, he will cover his face with his hands in a paroxysm of weariness. He can seem, then, caged. But the fat kid who dreamed his way to athletic triumph is now dreaming cloud-capped towers that thread family life through the heart of downtown, is dreaming housing that weaves a respect for nature into its very fabric. I wouldn’t bet against him. I wouldn’t want to over-praise him, either. Like most eccentrics, he is in equal parts (well, maybe not exactly equal) entrancing and irritating, and I suspect the drive to deliver what inson wants weighs as much as the drive to deliver what the city needs.
I asked him, once, if he was happy. He seemed startled. “I’m frustrated,†he said. He paused. “No, I’m not happy. But I don’t have a victim mentality and I don’t get depressed. My projects may have been eccentric but they were unprecedented. Even now I run into this condescending attitude from people in the financial community, that I’m this crazy guy, that I’m not realistic.†At the time he said those things, it wasn’t clear that the deal he wanted for running 1 King West would close (it later did.) It wasn’t clear what version of the Sapphire Tower would ever get beyond the concept stage—it had been sent back to the drawing board by city hall twice. Nothing was living up to the Stinson vision. He very much seemed the budgie of 1 King West then, cage-cramped and miserable, but in the energetic, endless flow of the man you could still sense the falcon biding its time, rustling its feathers, hoping to soar.
By Gerald Hannon
