allabootmatt
Senior Member
No one seems to have posted this no good, very very bad, error-riddled story from the Spring 'T' travel mag in the Times. Anyway, here goes. Prepare your vitriol:
The Inn Crowd
By JODY ROSEN
22 March 2009
The New York Times
It is a chilly Thursday evening in Toronto, and the habitues of the city's Parkdale neighborhood are, as usual, spoiled for choice. A former manufacturing district west of downtown, Parkdale is the city's prime destination for the young, the bohemian, the studiously shaggy -- the epicenter of an art and indie-music boom that has prompted locals to nickname their town Torontopia.
Tonight, Parkdale is a hive of artsy industry. In a basement club, a man who calls himself Alphabot is alternately crooning, strumming a guitar and layering violin ostinatos over an electronic beat. Nearby, there is an art opening in a storefront gallery while next door a gay karaoke party is in full swing with a muscle-bound man in a platinum blond wig belting out a version of ''Like a Virgin.''
Similar scenes play out nightly in other bastions of hipness like Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Silver Lake in Los Angeles, but in Toronto there's a catch: all of this activity is taking place under two roofs, at the Drake and the Gladstone, two former flophouses turned boutique hotels, separated by a couple of blocks on Queens Street West, Parkdale's main drag.
The resident D.J. and the art concierge may have become standard conceptual gambits at boutique operations from here to South Beach, but the Drake and the Gladstone are onto something a bit different. They have established themselves as clubhouses for Toronto's creatives -- abuzz at all hours with locals attending readings and opining in discussions on topics like ''Is There a Toronto Aesthetic?'' To take a room at either hotel is, essentially, to go native. Carl Wilson, a critic whose blog Zoilus is a hub of the Toronto arts community, explains, ''The Drake and the Gladstone solidified the idea that this is the cultural zone of the city.''
The transformation began back in 2001, when Jeff Stober, a former dot-com executive, bought the dilapidated Drake. ''We wanted to create a place that could feel like a community center on one night and a fancy house party with waiters on the next,'' Stober says.
When the Drake officially opened for business in 2004, its multimillion-dollar renovation gave off a high-end gleam -- a rooftop bar, rooms stocked with flat-screen televisions and designer bath products. But the hotel's arts programming emphasized the quirky and outre. Wilson curated a ''live genre-mashup'' series at the hotel, throwing together such disparate types as rappers freestyling over atonal music and a folk-jazz group covering Dr. Seuss songs. More provocative still was the agitprop performance art commissioned by the Drake, which sometimes took aim at the hotel itself and its role as a neighborhood gentrifier. In one piece, the artist Maria Legault lampooned deluxe hotel service, infiltrating the rooftop bar with assistants who massaged patrons while feeding them pink pudding.
''The Drake is the nerve center of the Toronto arts world,'' says the award-winning filmmaker Guy Maddin, who projected a series of shorts from the Drake's windows during last fall's Toronto Film Festival.
Others locate that nerve center a couple of hundred yards west, in a squat Romanesque Revival building where the Gladstone, Toronto's oldest continuously operating hotel (it was built in 1889), was reborn after a lengthy restoration in 2005.
Today the Gladstone has several performance and exhibition spaces, artists' studios available for short-term rental and an aura of endearing eccentricity. (The elevator operator wears a 10-gallon Stetson and answers to the name Gladstone Cowboy.) Like the Drake's, the Gladstone's events schedule runs the veritable gamut: life drawing classes, neo-burlesque cabaret and theater, including ''Gladstone Variations,'' four simultaneously performed plays that used the hotel as a giant stage set.
Then there are the 37 guest rooms, each designed by a different local artist, often with playful touches. The Teen Queen Room is plastered with Tiger Beat posters of the young Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon and other circa-1982 pinups. Look closely at the wallpaper in the Chinoiserie Room and you notice, amid the Orientalist motifs, an Asian peasant wearing a bamboo hat topped by Toronto's CN Tower.
The Gladstone's most curious room -- or, rather, rooms -- belong to its artist-in-residence of five years and lone full-time lodger, Bruno Billio. Billio, 38, is a rangy, mustachioed sculptor and installation artist who greets a visitor at his door wearing an ascot. His apartment is a cabinet of curiosities, crammed with his artworks, stacks of old hard-bound books, lacquered cigar boxes and animal figurines. ''It's romantic, living in a hotel,'' he says. ''But it's also great for my work. There's a constant momentum here, ideas floating around. The Gladstone is a kind of town hall.''
At least it is the town hall of Torontopia, a description dreamed up by the local indie-rock community partly as a joke: a cheeky ''embrace of the architecturally and socially unglamorous city in its ugly specificity,'' according to Carl Wilson. But beneath the irony, there was an earnest attempt to counter the city's dowdy reputation, embodied in its old blue-laws-era nickname, Toronto the Good.
''Toronto famously has an elsewhere syndrome,'' Wilson says. ''We assume that what happens here is a second-rate version of what is going on somewhere else.''
In the rock scene -- energized by breakout artists like Broken Social Scene, Feist and Final Fantasy -- young Torontonians saw something distinctly home-grown, and distinctly first-rate. The term Torontopia became a buzzword, and in 2005, Coach House Books, the city's leading small press, created the uTOpia anthologies, in which local writers celebrated the progression from Toronto the Good to Toronto the Can-Do. Wilson remembers one book party, which was held -- where else? -- at the Gladstone. ''Everyone felt this sense of moment,'' he recalls. And with the arrival of the Gladstone, ''there was suddenly a place.''
Today the Gladstone remains Torontopia's de facto home base. In some corners of Toronto's arts community, Gladstone partisanship is expressed as animosity toward the Drake, with its jet-setting clientele and unembarrassed marketing of hipster allure. (The Drake's sexed-up slogan is ''Hot Bed for Culture.'') ''The Gladstone is cultivating and encouraging community,'' says Scott Miller Berry, the director of the city's Images Festival and a Gladstone regular. ''The Drake is kind of buying and selling it.''
Such gripes are, among other things, a sign of a healthy bohemia -- what is an arts scene without its internecine battles and betes noires? Still, the Drake can play against type. One of its signature weekly events is Elvis Mondays, a punk- and indie-music showcase that was held at the Drake back in the early '90s, when the hotel was still an S.R.O. with a dingy Polish bar. Many Torontonians begin their evenings at the Gladstone and end them at the Drake, or vice versa, and to an out-of-towner the places offer different but complementary vantage points at one of the city's most colorful corners. Even the Gladstone's own artist-in-residence sees no reason to choose sides. ''The Drake is great,'' Billio says. ''It's more international, more Eurotrash. It's an arts place, but it's also a party place. What's wrong with that?''
Meanwhile, Billio, a Toronto native, hasn't shaken his own elsewhere syndrome: he plans eventually to relocate to London or New York. But Billio hopes to keep his Gladstone apartment as a pied-a-terre, and who can blame him? The cultural life in London and New York is richer, but the energy here is concentrated in a way that it can never be in bigger cities. For Billio, the action is literally outside his door. ''You step out of your room and you never know what you'll find,'' Billio says. ''A reception. Or an art show. Or a film. Or a wedding. Or a wake.'' JODY ROSEN
The Drake Hotel, 1150 Queens Street West; (416) 531-5042; thedrakehotel.ca; doubles from $189. The Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queens Street West; (416) 531-4635; gladstonehotel.com; doubles from $185.
The Inn Crowd
By JODY ROSEN
22 March 2009
The New York Times
It is a chilly Thursday evening in Toronto, and the habitues of the city's Parkdale neighborhood are, as usual, spoiled for choice. A former manufacturing district west of downtown, Parkdale is the city's prime destination for the young, the bohemian, the studiously shaggy -- the epicenter of an art and indie-music boom that has prompted locals to nickname their town Torontopia.
Tonight, Parkdale is a hive of artsy industry. In a basement club, a man who calls himself Alphabot is alternately crooning, strumming a guitar and layering violin ostinatos over an electronic beat. Nearby, there is an art opening in a storefront gallery while next door a gay karaoke party is in full swing with a muscle-bound man in a platinum blond wig belting out a version of ''Like a Virgin.''
Similar scenes play out nightly in other bastions of hipness like Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Silver Lake in Los Angeles, but in Toronto there's a catch: all of this activity is taking place under two roofs, at the Drake and the Gladstone, two former flophouses turned boutique hotels, separated by a couple of blocks on Queens Street West, Parkdale's main drag.
The resident D.J. and the art concierge may have become standard conceptual gambits at boutique operations from here to South Beach, but the Drake and the Gladstone are onto something a bit different. They have established themselves as clubhouses for Toronto's creatives -- abuzz at all hours with locals attending readings and opining in discussions on topics like ''Is There a Toronto Aesthetic?'' To take a room at either hotel is, essentially, to go native. Carl Wilson, a critic whose blog Zoilus is a hub of the Toronto arts community, explains, ''The Drake and the Gladstone solidified the idea that this is the cultural zone of the city.''
The transformation began back in 2001, when Jeff Stober, a former dot-com executive, bought the dilapidated Drake. ''We wanted to create a place that could feel like a community center on one night and a fancy house party with waiters on the next,'' Stober says.
When the Drake officially opened for business in 2004, its multimillion-dollar renovation gave off a high-end gleam -- a rooftop bar, rooms stocked with flat-screen televisions and designer bath products. But the hotel's arts programming emphasized the quirky and outre. Wilson curated a ''live genre-mashup'' series at the hotel, throwing together such disparate types as rappers freestyling over atonal music and a folk-jazz group covering Dr. Seuss songs. More provocative still was the agitprop performance art commissioned by the Drake, which sometimes took aim at the hotel itself and its role as a neighborhood gentrifier. In one piece, the artist Maria Legault lampooned deluxe hotel service, infiltrating the rooftop bar with assistants who massaged patrons while feeding them pink pudding.
''The Drake is the nerve center of the Toronto arts world,'' says the award-winning filmmaker Guy Maddin, who projected a series of shorts from the Drake's windows during last fall's Toronto Film Festival.
Others locate that nerve center a couple of hundred yards west, in a squat Romanesque Revival building where the Gladstone, Toronto's oldest continuously operating hotel (it was built in 1889), was reborn after a lengthy restoration in 2005.
Today the Gladstone has several performance and exhibition spaces, artists' studios available for short-term rental and an aura of endearing eccentricity. (The elevator operator wears a 10-gallon Stetson and answers to the name Gladstone Cowboy.) Like the Drake's, the Gladstone's events schedule runs the veritable gamut: life drawing classes, neo-burlesque cabaret and theater, including ''Gladstone Variations,'' four simultaneously performed plays that used the hotel as a giant stage set.
Then there are the 37 guest rooms, each designed by a different local artist, often with playful touches. The Teen Queen Room is plastered with Tiger Beat posters of the young Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon and other circa-1982 pinups. Look closely at the wallpaper in the Chinoiserie Room and you notice, amid the Orientalist motifs, an Asian peasant wearing a bamboo hat topped by Toronto's CN Tower.
The Gladstone's most curious room -- or, rather, rooms -- belong to its artist-in-residence of five years and lone full-time lodger, Bruno Billio. Billio, 38, is a rangy, mustachioed sculptor and installation artist who greets a visitor at his door wearing an ascot. His apartment is a cabinet of curiosities, crammed with his artworks, stacks of old hard-bound books, lacquered cigar boxes and animal figurines. ''It's romantic, living in a hotel,'' he says. ''But it's also great for my work. There's a constant momentum here, ideas floating around. The Gladstone is a kind of town hall.''
At least it is the town hall of Torontopia, a description dreamed up by the local indie-rock community partly as a joke: a cheeky ''embrace of the architecturally and socially unglamorous city in its ugly specificity,'' according to Carl Wilson. But beneath the irony, there was an earnest attempt to counter the city's dowdy reputation, embodied in its old blue-laws-era nickname, Toronto the Good.
''Toronto famously has an elsewhere syndrome,'' Wilson says. ''We assume that what happens here is a second-rate version of what is going on somewhere else.''
In the rock scene -- energized by breakout artists like Broken Social Scene, Feist and Final Fantasy -- young Torontonians saw something distinctly home-grown, and distinctly first-rate. The term Torontopia became a buzzword, and in 2005, Coach House Books, the city's leading small press, created the uTOpia anthologies, in which local writers celebrated the progression from Toronto the Good to Toronto the Can-Do. Wilson remembers one book party, which was held -- where else? -- at the Gladstone. ''Everyone felt this sense of moment,'' he recalls. And with the arrival of the Gladstone, ''there was suddenly a place.''
Today the Gladstone remains Torontopia's de facto home base. In some corners of Toronto's arts community, Gladstone partisanship is expressed as animosity toward the Drake, with its jet-setting clientele and unembarrassed marketing of hipster allure. (The Drake's sexed-up slogan is ''Hot Bed for Culture.'') ''The Gladstone is cultivating and encouraging community,'' says Scott Miller Berry, the director of the city's Images Festival and a Gladstone regular. ''The Drake is kind of buying and selling it.''
Such gripes are, among other things, a sign of a healthy bohemia -- what is an arts scene without its internecine battles and betes noires? Still, the Drake can play against type. One of its signature weekly events is Elvis Mondays, a punk- and indie-music showcase that was held at the Drake back in the early '90s, when the hotel was still an S.R.O. with a dingy Polish bar. Many Torontonians begin their evenings at the Gladstone and end them at the Drake, or vice versa, and to an out-of-towner the places offer different but complementary vantage points at one of the city's most colorful corners. Even the Gladstone's own artist-in-residence sees no reason to choose sides. ''The Drake is great,'' Billio says. ''It's more international, more Eurotrash. It's an arts place, but it's also a party place. What's wrong with that?''
Meanwhile, Billio, a Toronto native, hasn't shaken his own elsewhere syndrome: he plans eventually to relocate to London or New York. But Billio hopes to keep his Gladstone apartment as a pied-a-terre, and who can blame him? The cultural life in London and New York is richer, but the energy here is concentrated in a way that it can never be in bigger cities. For Billio, the action is literally outside his door. ''You step out of your room and you never know what you'll find,'' Billio says. ''A reception. Or an art show. Or a film. Or a wedding. Or a wake.'' JODY ROSEN
The Drake Hotel, 1150 Queens Street West; (416) 531-5042; thedrakehotel.ca; doubles from $189. The Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queens Street West; (416) 531-4635; gladstonehotel.com; doubles from $185.
