24 April 2005

— the king eddy —

Andrew has a crush on Toronto again, and I can see where he’s coming from. After a winter of pining for Montreal, we are both inspired. In the winter we said things like, Toronto has these skyscrapers, great, but Montreal has better churches, and fire escapes, and those restaurants where you can bring your own wine. Montreal has some of our closest friends and girls who wear scarves all year round, and we want to be near our friends, and I want to be one of those scarf girls. But then we visited over Easter weekend, and it was still so goddamned cold, definitely colder than Toronto, and we realized that over the past few months what we really had been lusting for was Montreal in the summer, and that Montreal in the winter was not such a sexy, romantic thing. And then we remembered that we had these commitments in Toronto, these obligations, so we started eyeing the city again.

Andrew has been taking pictures, mostly of abandoned things. I had no idea there were so many abandoned things in Toronto. Not just houses, but entire factories, refineries, schools, grocery stores, theatres. I go with him to these places sometimes, and they are incredible in their quiet, majestic decay. On King Street there is the King Edward Hotel. This is a fancy hotel, and I was there once for a work event – it’s kind of stodgy and formal like that. But it has a secret, and the secret is that on the 18th floor there is an abandoned ballroom. The only hard part in getting to the ballroom is looking like you belong in the hotel. We went one afternoon, me wearing my grey skirt and Andrew holding his tripod like a cane. We walked to the elevator, took it to the 16th floor where we emerged, and ran for the stairs, walking the final two flights because we thought it looked less suspicious.

There’s a door, but it’s not locked. Once you push past the signs warning you about trespassing and asbestos and DANGER, a wave of quietness hits you. You notice things: dust motes in the air, the whir and crunch of elevator pulleys, and, among all the elegant, abandoned beauty, a spray-painted penis on one of the walls.

Andrew says, “Fucking kids.”

But it’s not just a ballroom. It’s a ballroom and a stage, and what used to be a kitchen, and a bathroom, and a green room. It is an entire floor of a grand hotel. There is more graffiti, but not too much, and stray ropes hanging from the ceiling. But the ballroom is the best. It is spectacularly empty except for one chair, a broken table, peeling tiles. There are windows lining the walls, stretching up towards the high ceiling.

And from these windows, one can become smitten with Toronto again, one can wrap oneself in the splendour of this view and the knowledge that secret places in the city still exist.

Teri Vlassopoulos lives in Toronto, but her crush on the city is not big enough to stop her from moving to Montreal in the fall.

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