I found this a very interesting read as I have, and still have the same sentiment of the Airport area. Taken from the National Post. (was not sure exactly where to post this)
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/...environs-become-an-entertainment-hotspot.aspx
T.O. A to Z: Could Pearson and environs become an entertainment hotspot?
By Mark Medley, National Post
When Peter Mettler was a child growing up in Etobicoke, the future filmmaker’s father took him for drives along the airport strip. He was especially enthralled by the Regal Constellation, the 800-room modernist jewel on Dixon Road, just east of the airport, which was crowned by a posh nightclub called the Magic Carpet Lounge.
“I recall, quite clearly, driving with my father and looking up at these Jetson-type windows that you see at the top of the Constellation hotel, and imagining what was going on in there,†Mettler says. “It just seemed so fantastic.â€
It wasn’t until decades later that Mettler set foot inside the now-abandoned hotel, sneaking in while filming his 2002 documentary Gambling, Gods and LSD, in which he refers to the club as “a fantastic fantasy room of the past.†Though Etobicoke is in his past, too — Mettler no longer lives near the airport — as a frequent flyer he is intimately familiar with the present airport strip, the “wasteland†one must pass through in order to escape the city, and which greets passengers arriving in Toronto.
“I’ve had that thought often on returning to Toronto: This is what you’re introduced to,†he says. “These cloverleafs of Highway 401 and 427, and especially in the winter, this incredibly grey and dirty landscape. I’m intrigued by something that’s so superficially horrible, to see what life is underneath it.â€
Last year, more than 32 million passengers passed through Toronto Pearson International Airport, Canada’s busiest. The five runways welcome an average of 1,180 flights each day. The airport employs approximately 30,000 people. It is a funnel, moving tens of thousands of people every single day, many of them grabbing baggage off the luggage carousels and heading into Toronto and surrounding communities.
“It’s this transition station,†Mettler says, “the whole neighbourhood.â€
A borderless, transient grey zone, it is wedged between several municipalities: Head west, there’s Brampton; downtown Mississauga lies to the south; Toronto lies to the east. To the north is Malton, the airport’s original namesake.
Recently, I spent two days walking around most of the airport’s perimeter (the 401, which hugs Pearson to the south, does not encourage foot traffic). It is a tapestry of hotels, parking lots, storage facilities, chain restaurants, industrial parks, convention centres, gas stations and rental car outlets. I logged close to 30 kilometres, trying to understand an area that takes up a large geographic footprint — Pearson covers 4,400 acres — but lacks the equivalent imprint on our civic consciousness.
The security guard standing outside Terminal 1 seems a bit puzzled when I enquire how one leaves Pearson on foot. He points off in the distance and offers directions. Navigating the roller coaster’s worth of twisting ramps is easier than anticipated, quickly leading to streets with aviation-themed names, Jetliner Road and Silver Dart Drive. There are few people on the sidewalk but a wealth of taxis and shuttle buses ferry hotel guests to and from the terminals. There is no sidewalk on either side of the road along much of the boundary, and I pass fewer than 30 pedestrians over the course of two days.
Heading east on Dixon Road, down the spine of the airport strip, one encounters a swarm of hotels: the Radisson, Marriott, Holiday Inn, Hilton, the Westin, Renaissance, Crown Plaza. They house tourists, conventioneers and act as the city’s refugee camp, the place for those stranded by storms. There are 13,000 rooms in the region, according to the Greater Toronto Hotel Association.
“So many people come to Toronto but they stay at a hotel by the airport. So, for many travellers, Toronto is the part around the airport. Somewhere in the shimmering distance, maybe, they get a glimpse of the CN Tower,†says Toronto’s unofficial flâneur Shawn Micallef, senior editor of Spacing magazine and the author of the forthcoming book Stroll: A Psychogeographic Walk through Toronto, which will be published next spring. He still looks back fondly on the time, in 1985, when his family missed a flight to Nova Scotia en route from Windsor and were put up in the Hilton: “I thought it was so wonderful that we got stuck in Toronto and we got to stay in a hotel near the airport.â€
At the corner of Dixon and Carlingview Drive is the Regal Constellation. It is being torn down to make way for a new Hilton. Behind the chain-link fence and construction barriers a lone security guard takes shade under a backhoe. Curtains still hang in many windows. The Regal Constellation, built in 1962, once boasted the most convention space of any hotel in Canada. One of the Constellation’s best clients is found a few blocks away.
For a number of years, the Toronto Airport Christian Fel lowship, located at 272 Attwell Dr., just north of Dixon, was the largest occupier of hotel rooms in the area. Senior Pastor Steve Long recalls that in their heyday “we would have up to 1,000 hotel rooms a night for people visiting our church,†including a standing block of 500 rooms at the Constellation. “People still visit us, but not in the same numbers that they used to,†says Long, almost wistfully.
Who still visits the airport strip? Much of the area feels like an industrial desert, and the planes fly overhead like buzzards scavenging for carrion. Even the street names — Dixon, Derry, Dixie — reflect the monotony of the area. Bars sport handles like the Hangar and the Pilot while commercial centres have adopted names such as Skyport and Airways Centre. There are sprawling parking lots, including those of Park ’N Fly, where manager Brent Ford says they have yet to see a spate of abandoned cars like the 3,000 recently claimed to have been left near the airport in Dubai. At a storage facility called Self-Stor, manager Krystle Shannon admits they see occasional “runaways†among their 688 units. Massive convention centres like the Toronto Congress Centre, sport one million square feet of space and parking for 6,000 cars. Most of all, there are the endless blocks of faceless factories and warehouses.
“Who knows what goes on behind those doors?†Micallef wonders. “There’s kind of this air of something sinister going on behind all those import/export places. Probably it’s all much more boring than anything you could [imagine]. But it has that air that you don’t really feel that much in Toronto. ... All these places exist in the dark shadow behind the gleaming airport.â€
Walking along Britannia Road, I come across a tiny cemetery. Trinity Wesleyan Methodist, established in 1842, contains 63 plots. The Heritage Mississauga website says the cemetery is one of the last reminders of the hamlet of Hanlan, a farming community that existed before the planes. The Etobicoke Creek runs through airport land; it was next to this stream that Air France Flight 358 crashed in 2005. One of the largest swaths of green space here belongs to the Royal Woodbine Golf Club; and, yes, the idea of a tranquil golf course next to a noisy airport should strike you as odd, though head pro Ryan Wilson says teeing up with “tons of metal flying just over top of you†is part of the appeal.
Further east on Dixon is one of Pearson’s closest residential areas. At Kipling Avenue, you come to the heart of Toronto’s Somalian community. In a recent Toronto Life profile, rapper K’Naan said that before he moved to Canada the only thing he knew about the country was “there was a place called Dixon, Little Mogadishu, the only place that people in Somalia know.â€
On a recent Tuesday morning, I walk down Kelfield Street and take a left on Stoffel Drive, down a pathway that twists under transformer towers. Planes regularly descend low overhead, heading towards two of the three east/west runways that rest about two kilometres away. There’s a warehouse at the end, with piles of balding tires and discarded go-kart frames rusting outside. The building’s sign says 401 Mini-Indy go-karts. Inside, the high whine of go-karts zipping around a track drowns out the low scream of jet engines. Two men are engaged in a heated lunch-hour race. Along with local strip clubs, it is one of the few forms of entertainment in the area.
“The area has changed,†general manager Brian Dixon says later. Time was, “the airport strip was the hub for clubs and stuff like that. There wasn’t an Adelaide or a Richmond.†While the airport strip probably never had the same cachet as Circa or similar downtown hot spots, the sentiment isn’t far from the truth. The airport once held romantic appeal, as George Jonas wrote in the National Post last year: “In 1964, I still took a heavy date to the Aeroquay Restaurant on the mezzanine floor at Malton, as Toronto’s old international airport used to be called, for our first date. It was a dashing move, suitably rewarded. Ten years later, only a loser would have suggested it. Today? Who in his right mind would take a heavy date to a restaurant in Toronto’s Lester B. Pearson International Airport. Not even a loser.â€
“As for people [saying], ‘Hey, let’s go to the airport strip and doomething,’ no, I don’t think people are doing that anymore,†Dixon says. “It’s kind of lost in space [in terms] of any sort of planning. ... It would probably need someone to grab it by the horns and say, ‘This is the sort of development we want to do.’ â€
