What a Drake it is getting older

by: Kate Carraway

February 11, 2009 1:18 PM

Comments: (3)

In 2005, some audacious and prophetic graffiti artist scrawled “Drake you ho this is all your fault” on the beige exterior of a new Starbucks at Queen and Dovercourt. It was a year after the opening of the Drake Hotel, a ballsy, multi-pronged enterprise created by a rich, curious man named Jeff Stober. Purchased in 2001 in its previous incarnation, as one of the ubiquitous run-down booze joints-cum-hotels that dot the poor neighbourhoods of major cities, Stober sunk millions into the building itself and in buying up nearby property, effectively reconstructing the block and Toronto's underground Zeitgeist. What the Drake Hotel has done to help Toronto and to hurt Toronto since its controversial opening five years ago this month has never ceased to be contentious.

It wasn't only the erection of another Starbucks on what remains a tenuous slip of Queen Street that inspired the graf writer's representational ire. It was around then that 48 Abell, a long-time artists' community down a side street by the Drake, was slated for condominium development. The impending transition toward pricey boutique life and the condo-buyers who want it has been and continues to be a heavy, insidious force hanging over the roofs of unreno-ed galleries, rundown coffee shops, and once-affordable row houses. While Stober was called “Queen Street West's cultural czar and emerging power broker” by the Globe and Mail in 2005, he was vilified as a thoughtless, grasping outsider as ferocious Drake-related gentrification buzz took hold of the city's give-a-shit classes. The commercial-vomit fate of the eastern stretch of Queen West (where the GAP rests easy) and Yorkville before it, were and are enough to inform and inspire the sentiments of protective locals, some politicians, vaguely interested outsiders, and the have-not residents and owners of buildings poised for big-money takeovers.

Around the same time, the neighbourhood was already undergoing the kind of inevitable, steady redevelopment that takes hold of low-rent areas of growing cities. Just a year after the Drake buy, Christina Zeidler took over the 1889-built Gladstone Hotel on Queen West and Gladstone Avenue, a short stumble west of the Drake. Daughters of architect Eb Zeidler, Christina's sister Margie was responsible for the overhaul of arts centre 401 Richmond, and the family was friends with Jane Jacobs: the Zeidler pedigree is one significantly less likely to alienate the denizens of Queen West than Stober's.

While the inferred promises of the Drake read like the worst attempts at cultivated faux-bohemia, the Gladstone's stated focus on art and artists, on involving the existing, important community in the project, sounded inclusive, slower, more considered. Both, of course, worked in their own ways to establish this block of Queen Street as something different than before, something not all that unalike.

The Drake's totality is a confusion of culture. Its existence as an upper-crust, celeb-baiting party spot and hotel proper is informed by the luxury cues of sleek design and expensive appetizers. Much of the time, the Drake is populated by crowds of people considered unsavoury by anyone who hung out on Queen West before it. The exotic, slummy appeal of Queen West approaching Parkdale to Toronto's club0district habituates was apparently profound enough to make the Drake the epicentre of see-and-be-seen nightlife.

Then, as now, the Drake is one of relatively few high-end establishments in the storied neighbourhood, and still speaks to some as a transgressive party experience. And, as it goes with It spots, the Drake has experienced the expected vacillation of cool: Leah McLaren declared the Drake “over” years ago. Still, most nights of the week the Drake is hosting something, or a few somethings, that draw a true variety of people from around the city, the willing and begrudging both.

The importance of art here was hardly lip service to the community. The Drake's artist-in-residence program has hosted a variety of usually shit-on artists and creators (including EYE WEEKLY's Love & Sex Guide cover model/filmmaker, Henry Fletcher; our former art director/artist Tyler Clark Burke; and current contributor/comedian Nick Flanagan). Likewise, the focus on film and visual art in the Drake has been more than worthwhile: a huge variety of emerging and established artists have shown in the Drake's lobby, a successful attempt to maintain the explicitly artistic ethos of the neighbourhood that informed so much of the Drake hate-on.

Since its establishment five years ago, the artist-displacement factor has been undermined further as more storefront galleries between Gladstone and Dovercourt have opened, and nearby Ossington Avenue has quickly become the kind of art and culture thrill-ride that a typical Drake dissenter relies on. Though the Drake Underground is hardly the greatest place to see a show, it's also emerged as a reliable venue for local bands and themed events from rap showcases to literary roundtables.

While the Drake's aim of becoming an inclusive social nexus is almost for real, the psychological hurdle it presents to long-time locals and lo-fi cultural consumers is tremendous, when an unfamiliar bouncer is looking you over en route to a show in the Underground or an around-the-corner nightcap, or when walking into the joint (on the weekend, at least) necessitates navigating around an infestation of drunk, nattering Others tripping over their Bay Street ties and 905 high heels.

Days after the Drake opened, EYE WEEKLY visited the bar and said “We have a difficult time drawing lessons about hotel bars from it, mostly because it seems to be taking so many lessons from everyone else. Still, all agree that if we didn't know its back story — if we happened to be guests from out of town ‚ we'd be impressed.” Indeed, the design ideas and scope of the lounge, the cafe, the rooms, the basement club, the rooftop patio and the general store are impressive. The Drake has achieved the high-minded style that is frequently compelling for Torontonians to bitch about in the never-ending complaint festival about our provincial, small-time fate.

Not all of the redevelopment will look this good. The most viscerally offensive element of the Drake effect is roundly considered to be the Bohemian Embassy condominiums across the street, a nuance-free attempt to cash in on the labours and loves of neighbourhood residents by “redefin[ing] the way this city's hipsters live.” If the Bohemian Embassy is indicative of the next stages of transition, there's little hope of the neighbourhood retaining any of its crucial ghosts. Drake, you ho, this is all your fault.

The clash of what the Drake is and wants to be with what the Drake is and wants to be under the purview of Queen West lifers, struggling artists, Leah McLaren and her friends, indie-rock undergrads, Jeff Stober, and brosephs from 'Sauga, is non-negotiable. However, so far, it seems that there's room enough for everyone.

Update: Jeff Stober responds to this article
Update: The Drake 5.0 party report

THE WEST QUEEN WEST TIMELINE
Whether you love or loathe the Drake, it’s helpful to have a bit of perspective on just how its Queen West hood has changed over the past 15-or-so years. Galleries and artist-friendly spaces were popping up long before Jeff Stober moved in, adding their respective trendiness to the already up-and-coming area. Despite the woes of gentrification, and sometimes even because of them, artists still find ways to define the strip. Who knows, they may one day even get to de-gentrify the neighbourhood as part of a large-scale installation. CHRIS BILTON

1994: Stephen Bulger gallery opens
1998: Katherine Mulherin opens BUSgallery at 1237 Queen West
1999: Mulherin expands galleries to locations at 1040, 1082 and 1086 Queen W
1999: Toronto Fashion Incubator moves into Queen and Dovercourt
2001: Jeff Stober buys some sketchy hotel at 1150 Queen W called The Drake
2002: The Zeidler family buys the Gladstone Hotel
Feb 2004: The Drake Hotel opens
Dec 2005: The Gladstone Hotel re-opens
Nov 2005: 48 Abell slated to be redeveloped as condos
Nov 2005: Starbucks at Queen and Dovercourt emerges and is quickly tagged with “Drake you ho this is all your fault”
May 2006: Bohemian Embassy advertisement erected
Aug 2006: Bohemian Embarrassment art installation graces the Fly Gallery window
June 2007: Fashion Incubator ousted to make way for condos

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What a Drake it is getting older

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