Photo by John Packman.

Michael Kimber may be a lot of things—eccentric, awkward, passionate—but bashful he is not. Several times during our interview with him we glance about the busy Yorkville coffee shop to determine whether any of its patrons can hear the gems escaping from his mouth (“I’m in a sword fight with my penis” and “If you’re unemployed and you sit on the couch all day like jerking off to terrible porn, you’re not going to be happy.”) Kimber has a voice that rises above the rest, even when he’s discussing intensely personal issues. He doesn’t give a whit that everyone around us knows he suffers from severe anxiety, or that a little over a year ago he had a nervous breakdown—an event that has shaped his life in odd and fantastic ways. That’s kind of the point. Michael Kimber is open and honest about his struggles with mental illness because he wants others to be too.

“I’m trying to kick mental illness in the balls!” he says. According to Kimber, two-thirds of people with mental illness don’t get the help they need due to the stigmas that still surround it. He’s created the Come Out Campaign to encourage individuals to break the cycle of shame by telling friends and family about their mental illness.

“You’re never so lost as when you don’t know where you’re going…and I had no idea where I was going,” Kimber tells us. He’s referring to the fact that this time last year he was recovering from the nervous breakdown he suffered in November 2009. Having recently finished university, Kimber was confronted with the prospect of stepping out into the world as an adult, something he was not ready for. Add to this that he was “desperately, crazily in love” and he found himself in the midst of a perfect storm of uncertainty, anxiety, and depression.
Kimber tried everything he could think of to steer himself off this path but, he says, “It got significantly worse when I started trying to fight myself.” Quitting all of his vices—weed, caffeine, and junk food—in the same week, he sent his body into a tailspin.
“I’ve always been the stable one,” Kimber admits, with a hint of irony. “Or, at least, that’s how I imagined myself. Everybody falls and you can never predict when that’s going to happen. I never would have assumed that this would be me.”
Desperate to turn his life around, Kimber began searching for a cure. “Anything you can do, I did,” he says. But nothing seemed to work. “I went to hot yoga and a girl farted in my mouth. I was immune to sleeping pills.” Kimber even tried a self-help technique called Quantum Jumping in which, he says, “you meditate and you go into an alternate reality where you visualize that you meet yourself. This visualization of yourself has the things that you want and tells you how to get them.” That didn’t work either.
Kimber finally started to recover when he decided that there was no quick fix or permanent cure and that he had to learn how to live with his mental illness. Kimber created a blog, Colony of Losers, to work through the frustration that built up during his breakdown. “I had this gigantic desire to be something more and I needed to write [about] it,” he says. Much to Kimber’s surprise, his deeply personal ramblings touched a nerve with many readers, and before he knew it he was getting ten thousand hits per week.
Kimber admits that the blog has created a weird life for him. “Last Wednesday, I had three people I’d never met get in touch with me and tell me that they wanted to die.” Though he accepted the role with some reluctance, his illness and subsequent experiences have made him an advocate for mental health.
“This is a gigantic problem that’s getting worse and worse and can’t be addressed because so few people want to be labelled as part of this group. Nobody wants to fight for [mental illness] because if you fight for it you’re admitting you’re suffering from it.”
Kimber passionately believes that people with mental illness need to make themselves heard, and that Toronto is the perfect place to start shouting. “Being in Toronto offers a world of opportunity to push this campaign one step further,” he says. “If I talk on CBC radio in Toronto I could be talking to a million people. You can only change the opinions of people who are put in a position where they are able to listen to you. Toronto is the gateway to the rest of Canada.”
Kimber hopes the Come Out Campaign will help people realize that mental illness affects many members of our communities, especially in a city like Toronto, which Kimber claims is “bursting at the seams with loneliness.” As with all large, dense urban areas, feeling isolated and disconnected is common. Kimber hopes that the Come Out Campaign will create a national community of support for people with mental illness, starting in Toronto.
“We need to [come out] for each other,” he says. “When you come out, you encourage other people to come out. Hopefully it’s a chain reaction of happy dominoes.”

For more on the stigmas surrounding mental health, Toronto writer Emma Woolley has some suggested reading in this month’s issue of Aggregation.

Full page of advertorials on the Park Plaza Hotel from the Globe, July 10, 1936.

On July 10, 1936, a full page of articles and ads in the Toronto Globe celebrated the opening of the Park Plaza Hotel (now the Park Hyatt South) at the corner of Bloor West and Avenue, which contained a mix of hotel rooms, apartments, and thirty thousand square feet of office space accessible by a separate elevator. Decorated by the world-famous W. and J. Sloane Company, the tasteful interior design self-consciously sought to emulate the “well-bred atmosphere of sophisticated New York.” The furniture was ultra-modern. Service promised to be second-to-none because general manager Charles V. Delahunt demanded rigid qualifications from prospective staff, many of whom were drawn from fine hotels across North America and Europe.
Retail and a moderately priced luncheonette at street level would draw in the neighourhood lunch crowd, but the richly furnished main dining room promised exclusivity and sophistication. Enreco Del Greco’s in-house orchestra encouraged dancing here or under the stars in the rooftop garden restaurant. Originally reserved solely for guests and residents—but advertised to the general public by the next year—the rooftop garden offered an unrivalled view of the city. Peter Gzowski would later write: “From the roof of my favourite hotel, with the bright lights blinking, and the traffic’s hum, and the pretty girls and the bright young men behind the glassed-in bar, it’s a pleasant place to contemplate.” One of the only towers on the fringe of the city core, the Park Plaza emphasized its location away from the dust and noise of the city. “Even from the lower floors,” a July 10, 1936, advertorial in the Globe proclaimed, “one may gaze out upon a charming panorama of broad streets and residential blocks studded with trees. Quite a bit more restful than the picture of grey office buildings, parking lots and stores that greets the eye of the guest at a window of most modern hotels.”
“Designed for a discriminating patronage, the Park Plaza…incorporated in its comfortable, livable” apartments and guest rooms—which started at three dollars per night—both elegant design and cutting edge technology. Some of the nearly two hundred apartments, available as studios or with two, three, or more bedrooms, were furnished; others were not. Each came equipped with a metal kitchenette outfitted with an electric fridge and—as one advertisement specified—General Electric’s “Hotpoint Automatic Hi-Speed Range.” The hotel was fully air conditioned throughout its dining rooms and public common areas.
Such an emphasis on luxury and newness seemed out of place in the Depression, as if the hotel’s publicity department was over-compensating to hide the fact that the building had been a ghost on the skyline. From 1929 to 1936, it had stood vacant, unfinished, and without windows.

Photo of the Hyatt Park South by -Astin- from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

With fourteen skyscrapers erected between 1922 and 1928, the Toronto skyline was being transformed in the 1920s. And the downtown core crept steadily northward with insurance buildings sprouting up in midtown on Bloor Street East, the new Ontario Hydro headquarters at College and University (now Princess Margaret Hospital), and the Whitney Block on Queen’s Park Crescent. Of the aspirations of this era in Toronto, historian James Lemon wrote: “Expansion upward, though modest at first, was soon running neck-and-neck with the mania for speculative stock gains.”
At the corner of Bloor West and Avenue, another hopeful symbol of the era’s aspirations took shape as the steel work for the Queen’s Park Plaza Hotel was completed in 1928. One hundred workmen of the J.W. Butler Company of Canada had used 1,490 tons of steel to stretch the grand hotel seventeen storeys into the sky, according to architect Hugh G. Holman’s design.
Holman had trained as an architect in his hometown of Stratford before heading west to Manitoba in 1900, where he worked with a variety of firms and the provincial government before setting up an individual practice. He designed houses, warehouses, and churches in Winnipeg and rural Manitoba until serving overseas in the Great War. After a stint in Stratford, he established a practice in Toronto in 1922 to design schools and some small-scale commercial buildings. Being hired for the Queen’s Park Plaza Hotel—as the project was originally named—was the most important commission of his career. According to Robert G. Hill in the Dictionary of Architects in Canada, Holman originally envisioned the hotel as “as a flamboyant high rise chateau with a mansard roof.” With a stone front up to the third floor, the rest of the facade was to be buff-faced brick—with the exceptions being the stone fronting of the twelfth floor and stone detailing.

Queen’s Park Crescent, looking north to Bloor, with the Royal Ontario Museum and Park Plaza Hotel in view, circa 1933. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 7360.

With work progressing at a steady clip, the building was expected to be ready by February 1929. But the Depression hit. For lack of money, the work site was abandoned in the early summer of 1929. Although the exterior was largely completed, little had been done on the interior, which still awaited the heavy-duty work of plastering, hooking up the plumbing and heating systems, installing marble trim, ornamental grill-work, and interior detailing, as well as completing the marble lobby.
June 1930 meetings of the bondholders fuelled optimistic speculation that the building’s completion might be financed as an office tower, rather than a hotel. But by December 1930, the property was in receivership, under the oversight of the London and Western Trust Company. The idle hotel project would play a part, according to a December 28, 1934, Star article, in the bankruptcy of not only the Queen’s Park Plaza Company and the J.W. Butler construction firm, but also the United Bond Company and the U.S. Mortgage Bond Company, two companies that tried to raise additional capital through the issuing of real-estate mortgage bonds.

United Bond Company advertisement from The Globe, February 14, 1929.

Based solely on newspaper coverage of the day, it’s difficult to come to a complete picture of precisely what happened with the Park Plaza. But the hotel’s failure had ripple effects felt across the city’s construction industry. In the 1920s, a great number of North American large commercial or multiple-unit dwelling developments were financed through the sale of real estate mortgage bonds. Therefore the Queen’s Park Plaza Company engaged the United Bond Company to sell 6.5% first mortgage bonds to raise the capital required for the hotel’s construction.
For the buying public—who had grown accustomed to the safe return on bonds during the Great War—real estate mortgage bonds became an increasingly popular investment. Writing in the Canadian Banker in October 1927, W.M. Langton noted that real-estate mortgage bonds were “really only a large mortgage cut into strips,” but they appeared to offer the small-time investor the appearance of comparatively high annual interest yield. Furthermore these securities appeared to be a sound investment because bond-selling houses usually guaranteed the annual interest and promised to buy bonds back from the original bondholders at any time. Such guarantees meant little, Langton noted, since “it [was] impossible for the average man to obtain very clear information as to the security behind the obligation.” Some of them, Langton argued, relied on “reckless appraisals” of overvalued property or contemplated buildings.
The United Bond Company’s 1929 newspaper advertisements emphasized the Queen’s Park Plaza’s “sound, high, income-earning possibilities” and called it “a safe, dependable investment, well recommended.” The first issue of bonds had a total value of $875,000; but, of this, the company only sold $810,000 worth. By late December 1930, the United Bond Company was at Osgoode Hall before its creditors—including the Queen’s Park Plaza Company, with a claim of $93,000 owed, and the Royal Bank. The company’s statement of affairs, the Star reported on December 23, 1930, showed “it had liabilities of $175,046 against assets of $45,930 or a deficiency of $129,115 and [that] contingent liabilities might make it worse.”

Park Plaza Hotel advertisement from The Globe, August 5, 1936.

Out of funds, the construction of the Queen’s Park Plaza was abandoned. Suppliers and subcontractors went unpaid and some filed liens—a passive right to secure payment of outstanding debts from a property or building (but not the right to sell it). By late 1931, the Queen’s Park Plaza was the subject of a protracted courtroom dispute that pitted first mortgage holders—the bondholders trying to secure some return on their investment—and lienholders seeking payment for work commenced or material supplied to the project.
In a decision that ran counter to common practice, on November 23, 1931, the appeals court gave preference to certain mechanics’ liens over the mortgage that had secured a bond issue. Previously, in common practice, mortgage companies would give loans with periodic advances, the last of which would come upon completion. Developers therefore commonly relied on credit with some suppliers and sub-contractors until outstanding invoices were settled upon the building’s completion. “It was generally understood by the profession,” a leading lawyer told the Star on December 4, 1931, “that provided the first mortgage holder searched the registry office at regular intervals and assured himself that no liens had been filed on the property nor had he been served with written notice by the lien claimant, he was…protected on his loan to the full value of the property and improvements.”
By greatly weakening the security of first mortgage holders, the president of the Toronto Home Builders Association, W.E. Maybee, argued that the court decision made it more difficult for builders to obtain a loan and worried that it would impact the employment situation.
Within weeks, a crisis erupted in the construction industry. Loan companies turned off the tap of building loans for fear such loans were jeopardized by unknown but outstanding liens. They withheld advancing mortgage payments to builders except where the thirty-day window for filing a lien had passed, the builder could demonstrate that all outstanding bills had been settled, or waivers were obtained from suppliers attesting that no liens would be filed. In just seven working days, however, 101 mechanics liens were filed with the city registry office—three times the normal rate—according to the Star on December 18, 1931.
Emergency meetings of the Toronto Home Builders Association and the Lumbermen’s Credit Bureau, attended by developers and representatives of the builders supply trades, members of the Toronto Real Estate Board, city councillors, and loan company officials called for provincial government intervention to solve the impasse. The County of York Law Association also called upon the legislature to amend the Mechanics’ Lien Act.

Park Plaza Hotel advertisement from the Toronto Star, May 20, 1936.

As the legislature debated measures to rectify the situation, the bondholders of the Queen’s Park Plaza sought ways to reboot their project. Starting in February 1932, the London and Western Trusts Company sought tenders for the purchase of the Queen’s Park Plaza Company and entertained tentative negotiations with several parties without coming to any definitive conclusion on the building’s sale of the financing of its completion. Meanwhile, a group of bondholders—the Queen’s Park Plaza bondholders’ association, led by president I.E. Weldon—were acting independently to try and raise a hundred thousand dollars to secure title to the building from the trustee, so that the bondholders themselves might find a better offer on its sale and a better return on their initial investment.
In mid-January, six years since work had stopped, newspaper rumours finally came to fruition. The London and Western Trusts Company sold the building to the Park Plaza Company, a group of investors including Harry Rotenberg of Yolles and Rotenberg, a development firm that had built some of the city’s prominent skyscrapers. Rotenberg had secured half a million dollars in backing for the transaction on a recent trip to England. He told the Star on August 23, 1935: “Before we came to a decision to embark on this extensive undertaking [to put the building into useful operation] we made a most careful survey of the building and found that despite the years it has been standing in an unfinished state it is in first-class condition and can be proceeded with immediately without any special attention due to the effects of either wind or weather.”
Architect Morrow Oxley of Chapman and Oxley was brought in to finish the building, now renamed simply the Park Plaza Hotel. He made some interior modifications to the original design, including subdividing Holman’s enormous main dining and ballroom into a number of smaller and more secluded dining rooms. Starting in August 1935, workmen toiled on through the winter until the hotel’s official opening at noon on July 11, 1936.
The posh hotel quickly ingratiated itself with the city’s socialites, becoming known as a “sedate” and “very exclusive,” in the words of the Globe‘s social columnist, Roly Young. Prime ministers were frequent guests. And its elegant restaurants were popular venues for business dealings or meetings with international visitors. “[I]t has always seemed to me to have great dignity,” Gzowski wrote. “Ladies with blue hair live here, sometimes with their maids, and men with colonel’s moustaches and two-hundred-dollar overcoats stride purposefully through its lobbies.”

View from the top of the Hyatt Park South by Danielle Scott from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

As Yorkville’s demography changed in the 1960s and 1970s, the Park Plaza rooftop patio became a popular gathering place for the neighbourhood’s literary types, including June Callwood, Peter Gzowski, and Margaret Atwood. Atwood included the rooftop patio as a setting in her novels The Edible Woman (1969) and Cat’s Eye (1989). “We sit on the outside patio,” Elaine, the main character of Cat’s Eye, narrates, “drinking Manhattans and looking over the stone balustrade….This is one of the tallest buildings around. Below us Toronto festers in the evening heat, the trees spreading like worn moss, the lake zinc in the distance.”
Although the Park Plaza was never the city’s oldest, grandest, or most expensive hotel, Peter Gzowski, who was born in the neighbourhood at about the same time it was under construction, always considered it his favourite of the city’s hotels, and he presented it as a microcosm of the city’s mid-century transformation. “After the second war when Toronto began again to swirl with prosperity,” he wrote of the Park Plaza, “it survived on the carriage trade and in the 1950s, with Toronto one of the fastest-growing cities in the world, it added a sweeping new wing with displays for boutiques, a new intimate cocktail bar and a new grand restaurant. It has come of age with the city.” An additional tower, designed by architect Peter Dickinson, was added to the north, an early example of modernist architecture in Toronto.
Gzowski concluded: “My hotel is like Toronto, you see. It is dignified and calm and pleasant. But it is also changing, becoming alive, sometimes scandalous, and the people who are changing it are part of a whole new breed.”
Additional sources consulted: Peter Gzowski, “Growing Up With Toronto,” in William Kilbourn, ed., The Toronto Book (Macmillan, 1976);
James Lemon, Toronto Since 1918: An Illustrated History (James Lorimer & Company, 1985); and Guylaine Spencer, “The Allure of Atwood’s Toronto,” in Americas (Vol 57, Issue 6) November/December 2005.