Maybe the saddest thing about yesterday’s report in the National Post that Honest Ed’s has been “quietly” put up for sale – besides, uh, the news that Honest Ed’s has been quietly put up for sale – was Toronto condo tycoon Brad J. Lamb’s appraisal of the iconic Bloor/Bathurst property as “an eyesore.”
If Honest Ed’s – a building that is, very deliberately and very painstakingly tacky, abounding with, let’s call it “character” – is an eyesore, then one wonders what Brad Lamb’s version of the idealized, non-eye-offending Toronto would look like. Well, it doesn’t take much to wonder.
Over the past 25 years, working first as a real estate agent hawking condos, then as a rapacious developer erecting them, and eventually (and inevitably) as a hairless sub-Trump on the reality show Big City Broker, Lamb has defined the landscape, and skylines, of modern Toronto in line with his own “condo king” celebrity. The Toronto of the future feels, more and more every day, like Brad Lamb’s Toronto. (In case Brad Lamb is thinking of using that line as a pull-quote on the packed-out “media archives” section of his website, I’ll clarify that it’s not meant as a compliment.)
It’s important to take a measured approach to this. While plenty of people find the kinds of condos Brad J. Lamb Reality Inc. develops and sells – places with names like Parc and Gläs [pointless umlaut sic] – garish and ugly and just bad (you might even call them “eyesores,” if you were being kind) thinking of other solutions for urban development can be a bit trickier. Of course we’d all probably prefer to live in some tastefully appointed New York-style brownstone or Chicago low-rise like the kind John Cusack lives in in High Fidelity or some gutted factory loft. But the reality is that Toronto just doesn’t have the history to support this. Especially if you’re buying.
So enter Brad Lamb with his cutesy, mock-self-deprecating billboards and flashy cars and media mugging and six-five frame, alopecia bald like The Judge in Blood Meridian, to hew up an urban environment of glass and steel, bringing Toronto closer and closer to looking like the goddamn Jetsons. Enter cranes and condos and falling glass and NIMBY-ism and everything else.
Less grating than Lamb’s vision of Toronto’s future – in which we’ll all be living in towers of pure, shimmering light – is his seeming disrespect for what history Toronto, still in its relative infancy compared to other North American metropolises, does possess. Granted, you can’t just build a stylishly half-ramshackle 100-year-old heritage property from scratch for people to live and work in. So Toronto will likely always seems like New Toronto, in a perpetual state of modernizing – at least until the bubble bursts and all those cheapo condos turn into dystopic slumtowers. But places like Honest Ed’s – and Mirvish Village writ large – and Kensington, and Saint Lawrence Market (also the site of a recent development disaster) are reasons why people like Toronto. And it seems like these places are getting fewer and further between.
It’s not just a matter of wistful nostalgia, though sure there’s a bit of that. It’s that people like old things. Oldness, and history, makes us feel connected with the past. They make us feel like we’re living as part of some grander, more meaningful, continuity of existence – let’s call it “civilization” – and not just puttering around glass towers in carefully laid-out micro-communities in our complicated shoes, hauling around our yappy small dogs, until we die, interred to the earth in a brushed mahogany condo-coffin.
The problem with Brad Lamb, and people like Brad Lamb (but especially Brad Lamb), is that they don’t seem to care about preserving any of this. Sure, Honest Ed’s isn’t the Acropolis or something. But in its blatant ostentation, with its hand-painted pun signs and rows of flickering bulbs lighting up the corner, it embodies something of the cornball showmanship of its namesake, the late Ed Mirvish.
Places like Honest Ed’s, and the remaining bars and peepshow holes-in-the-wall on Yonge Street, or a spot like Jilly’s (seemingly the last holdout for full-on Queen East gentrification) aren’t bastions of high culture or necessarily rich with historical significance in and of themselves. Rather, they provide a sense of Toronto’s past-ness, when history was accruing on the city like nicotine stains on the wallpaper.
Barring some Logan’s Run scenario in which we’re all forced into some enormous megadome to wait out the end of civilization – thank god Toronto already has a megadome, just in case – it’s reasonable to think that citizens of Toronto, or any city, would want to live in something like harmony with their city’s history, with its past. Lamb has no apparent respect (or interest, or feeling) toward any of this.
Beside the Honest Ed’s thing, Brad Lamb was also recently in the news speaking on the subject of condo dwellers wrinkling their noses at the smell of the Quality Meat Packers plant near King and Bathurst. Basically, new condo dwellers who moved to the neighbourhood in the winter are starting to realize that living near an 80-year-old abattoir can be stinky business come warmer weather. “We shouldn’t be smelling that in what is really now a residential area,” Lamb told the Star, revealing so much of his narrow arrogance.
You can’t develop residential land around an industrial site and then complain about the day-to-day operations of the industrial site, a place where people work and make their livings slaughtering pigs that feed people – even people that live in condos. Your monopolistic purchase over the future of Neo-New-Toronto doesn’t vest you with the power to steamroll its past.
johns@nowtoronto.com | @johnsemley3000
