Condo-bashing is a popular pastime in Toronto. The bashers say the scores of glass towers that have sprouted all over the city are a blight on the cityscape. Who would want to live in a box in the sky anyway?
Quite a few people, in fact. The condo boom has provided housing for tens of thousands of people who might otherwise never have found an affordable, central place to live. The arrival of all those thousands has brought new life to the centre of the city. Toronto’s downtown has an around-the-clock buzz that is the envy of many other North American cities.
And there’s another thing, too: The condo boom has given a big boost to the arts. In several corners of the city, developers are forging partnerships with arts groups, often making space for dance studios, theatres or music labs. It’s a plus for both sides. Artists get the room they crave; developers get the kind of bohemian cachet that helps them sell units.
It’s a good thing for the city and a surprising turn of events. In the past, artists often looked on developers as the bad guys. Artists would move into a rundown part of the city, setting up studios in old warehouses or living above shops. The neighbourhood would acquire an artsy feel. Property values would rise. So would rents. Developers would come in to knock down the old buildings or make them over for brick-and-beam offices. The artists would have to move on. It has happened from New York to London to Toronto’s Queen Street West.
Somewhere along the line, though, developers started realizing that driving all the artists away was bad for business. Far smarter to keep them around. One development on King Street West combined a condo tower with a new home for the Toronto International Film Festival: the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Another on Dundas Street East incorporated a theatre and studio space. In the Queen West Triangle, artists got a 38,000-square-foot media arts centre as part of a big redevelopment of the rising area.
The latest arts hub that developers helped make possible is down on the waterfront. The east side of the city’s long-dormant water’s edge is booming these days, with buildings rising left and right and many more to come. The Daniels Waterfront – City of the Arts complex sits on the site of the old Guvernment nightclub at the intersection of Jarvis Street and Queens Quay East. It’s the new headquarters of the citywide group Artscape, which opened its Artscape Daniels Launchpad there last fall. The Launchpad boasts a digital media lab, a woodworking shop, a textile-making shop, a performance space and all the latest equipment. Several other arts organizations have moved into the complex, including the design programs of George Brown College, a waterfront campus for OCAD University and the Remix Project, a group that helps disadvantaged youth break into the creative industries. Even pop star the Weeknd is involved. A creative incubator he helped start, Hxouse, has taken up residence.
Mitchell Cohen, president of the Daniels Corporation, says the idea is to create an intersection of business and the arts. “Artists,” he says, “are great at art and really bad at business.”
Many of the occupants own rather than rent their space, giving them the security that itinerant arts organizations often lack. Traditionally, he says, artists complain: “We’ve been here adding value in the neighbourhood, the neighbourhood is gentrifying all around us and we get kicked out.” It’s an age-old story. This project is an attempt to change it, turning developers and artists into partners instead of adversaries.
Some artists may still get a queasy feeling about being tied up with a wealthy development group. Many Torontonians may still feel that the condo boom is ruining the city. They should come down to the waterfront some day and look at how the arts are flourishing in the heart of a big condo project. It might give them second thoughts.
Marcus Gee