AlbertC

AlbertC

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www.thestar.com

Toronto’s beloved Matador sold to private buyer: ‘It feels like losing a family member’

After years of trying to get city permits, announcing it will be opening and then facing another setback, it’s officially the end for the Matador ball...
www.thestar.com www.thestar.com

Toronto’s beloved Matador sold to condo developers: ‘It feels like losing a family member’

By Temur Durrani Staff Reporter
Sun., May 12, 2019

The building, at College St. and Dovercourt Rd., was sold earlier in May, owner Paul McCaughey confirmed to the Star late Sunday. The property is now owned by TAS DesignBuild, a real estate company that specializes in condo development.
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LOL. Despite the former owner warning the city about this potentially undesirable outcome for about a decade, they put roadblocks in his path every step of the way.

So Toronto.
 
I don't think a venue like the Matador would even be buildable with today's zoning and code laws, not to mention the even more powerful community groups and NIMBYs.

We shouldn't take for granted what organic city growth made possible. You cannot zone your way to an automatically dynamic and vibrant neighborhood.

Regardless, I think TAS will be under some pressure to retain some venue space, though they can pretty much do what they like since they own the space now.
 
I got a chance to tour the space when it was for sale. It had some interesting bones, but crazy challenges to use the space for other uses.
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jje1000 said:
I don't think a venue like the Matador would even be buildable with today's zoning and code laws, not to mention the even more powerful community groups and NIMBYs.
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Toronto would look like Vaughan with today's reality.
 
Edward Skira said:
Toronto would look like Vaughan with today's reality.
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It's not unlike how most of New York's historic midrise urban fabric would be problematic according to today's zoning and building code.

Modern zoning is really designed around the careful compartmentalization and separation of uses, all scaled and standardized to fit vehicular transportation and large-parcel development (privileging the beautiful 'ideal' architectural rendering). This produces Battery Park Cities, Hudson Yards, Canary Districts and CityPlaces- all designed to be birthed and to remain 'forever' in that idealized state.
 
Listen, I spent the odd night at the matador in my day but this “loss of soul music City is dying” story arc is a sustained PR move by the owner. He pulled a dubious bait-and-switch on the City and community in order to ram in a totally inappropriate venue on a residential street. Local NIMBY residents are breathing a sigh of relief that this thing is finally dead. Bring on the condo.
 
TrickyRicky said:
Listen, I spent the odd night at the matador in my day but this “loss of soul music City is dying” story arc is a sustained PR move by the owner. He pulled a dubious bait-and-switch on the City and community in order to ram in a totally inappropriate venue on a residential street. Local NIMBY residents are breathing a sigh of relief that this thing is finally dead. Bring on the condo.
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Yes, along with a vibrant, culture-building nail salon/dry cleaner/convenience store. Sounds awesome.
 
TrickyRicky said:
Listen, I spent the odd night at the matador in my day but this “loss of soul music City is dying” story arc is a sustained PR move by the owner. He pulled a dubious bait-and-switch on the City and community in order to ram in a totally inappropriate venue on a residential street. Local NIMBY residents are breathing a sigh of relief that this thing is finally dead. Bring on the condo.
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What if instead we replace the whole residential street (which we have an endless supply of, street after street) with a whole street of venues and cultural spaces (which we have hardly any of and which are being forced out of everywhere they once were)?

This isn't a serious suggestion — I am exaggerating — but I am increasingly frustrated by how much of this city is taken up by streets designated for million-dollar homes that can't be touched or adapted to different uses while the rest of the city withers under unaffordability.
 
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The Matador dies and Toronto takes another step toward generic sameness
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But here’s the other thing, about the whole time since, when it survived not as a venue but as a marquee sign and a hope: it is as good an illustration of any that Toronto will not allow any more of the kind of interesting and unique places that have, in the past, made this a city worth living in.
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But even that proved too much. As he adapted his proposals, politicians who claimed to support the place also said it must “fit in with the neighbourhood” — a catch-all phrase the city’s government uses to stomp out any use that threatens to be mildly interesting. It reads especially ironic in this case since the Matador was a neighbourhood fixture for a century.
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And that is, in a nutshell, how a city whose officials claim to want and value certain things fails to allow them to exist. Even in cases where the something we all seem to want has existed before, in the same exact spot, and is considered a landmark.

It’s not about one music venue or location. It’s about a city that has a little variety in it.
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You look at a neighbourhood like Kensington Market — side streets full of ramshackle improvised shops. Many consider it the city’s most beloved area. It would never be allowed today. Yorkville, tightly packed roads and lanes in which Victorian houses have so long been home to restaurants and bars and boutiques. No way you could do that now. As pieces of those very places disappear, they are replaced with buildings and businesses unlike those that made the neighbourhoods treasured and much like those going up everywhere else.
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A million neighbourhood landmarks — corner stores or snack counters on residential streets, shops and venues with back-lane entrances, walk-up apartment buildings in the middle of blocks of houses. Communal artists’ housing above a bar. A whole weird gothic revival castle in an upscale neighbourhood. A neighbourhood of homes in the middle of a public park on the islands. Heck, the standard successful Toronto streetscape of places like Queen West, College, the Danforth, Roncesvalles and virtually every other beloved place, full of tiny storefronts crowded up to the narrow sidewalk with apartments above them: they don’t build ’em like that anymore.
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www.thestar.com

Opinion | The Matador dies and Toronto takes another step toward generic sameness

Many of the most beloved spots in the city would never be allowed to open if they tried to do so in Toronto today, writes Edward Keenan.
www.thestar.com www.thestar.com

Relevant comment:

Those all have some grains of truth, but the bigger reality is much more complicated. It relates to our whole, modern understanding of cities and development. For about 100 years, cities all over the world have implemented an entirely new ideology that runs counter to how cities developed more naturally for centuries. This stark change was made on-purpose, based in thinking of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that was responding to the shockwaves of industrialization. Part of that approach was the adoption of a model that commerce should be separated from residences, and part of it is a larger idea that cities and economies can and should be controlled from centralized agencies that are professionally managed. The latter sounds very common-sensical to us today, but it’s important to understand how radical of a shift that was, and what the actual results have been on the ground. Every choice or approach has consequences, and we tend to overlook the negative consequences to how we manage cities today.
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While planners, designers and critics rightly focus on the design theories and what they’ve done to cities, we often overlook how the shift in management of cities also had an enormous impact. The city planning movement of the same era (20th C) ultimately is responsible for creating citizen review boards, planning commissions, and layers and layers of zoning and development regulations. As time passed, regulations and review processes got more and more complex. Look at your city’s original zoning code and compare it to today’s. The former is probably a small booklet with simple prescriptions, while the latter is often a multiple-binder document of hundreds of pages, mostly illegible to laypeople.
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Toronto’s Disappearing Main Streets: Buildings and Businesses

They had a few streetcars running on that route near the end of February.
urbantoronto.ca urbantoronto.ca
 
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TrickyRicky said:
Listen, I spent the odd night at the matador in my day but this “loss of soul music City is dying” story arc is a sustained PR move by the owner. He pulled a dubious bait-and-switch on the City and community in order to ram in a totally inappropriate venue on a residential street. Local NIMBY residents are breathing a sigh of relief that this thing is finally dead. Bring on the condo.
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Well I used to live kitty-corner across from it immediately north and beside the present social services building some thirty five years ago. Used to drop in for the occasional drink and blast of what it was then, a Country and Western venue. The only problem the neighbourhood had with it was the parking. (edit: And the occasional punch-up) Even back then, the presence of something alive and entertaining was considered a plus by any of the neighbours I knew and spoke to. I'm sure it got up some people's noses, but that's because they sniffed around for agro, and found it. I used to host jams in my middle room across the street, but of course, by invite only. And it wasn't C&W...

It wasn't until years later that the history of the Matador became apparent to me, and it wasn't the El Mocambo, but in that genre, and any attempt to retain that and make it whole again was to be applauded.

Toronto the sterile, where only the 'right germs' are allowed to flourish.
 
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