From vacationing tourists to Hollywood elites, the Sutton Place Hotel at Bay and Wellesley has catered to downtown visitors since Canada’s centennial year. This week, new owner Lanterra Developments announced plans to close the 45-year-old hotel and retrofit it as a condo with nine additional storeys. After renovation, the building may still devote rooms to [...]

First as a modest wooden-frame structure—two-storeys and painted white—and later as a handsome red-brick building, the Shakespeare Hotel graced the northeast corner of King and York Streets for more than 100 years, playing host to countless visitors and serving as backdrop to drama. It would prove to be an enduringly prosperous location for a hotel [...]

“It’s not pretty,” wrote Thom Counsellor in a requiem for the Ford Hotel in the Sun following the announcement that the low-end landmark at the northeast corner of Bay and Dundas would close its doors in October 1973. “It smells of must and tears and desperation, In short, the kind of place every city needs. [...]

When the Lord Simcoe Hotel permanently closed its doors in October 1979, a carpenter on the crew hired to dismantle the building reflected on why it had failed after operating for just 22 years: “No one thought ahead for the future when it was built.” While its original owners prided themselves on going from sod-turning to ribbon-cutting within 17 months, they might have thought more carefully about how the business would survive in the long term. Mistakes like overpricing its luxurious eateries and not including amenities expected of modern hotels like central air, combined with increasing competition and land worth more than the building atop it, shortened the life of a hotel that promised to provide its first guests modern accommodations with old-world charm.

Source: the Financial Post Magazine, November 8, 1980. While the Hilton Harbour Castle marketed its fine views and lakefront location to businessmen and average travellers, we imagine there may have been the odd guest who wanted to book a room just because Keith Richards was busted there a few years earlier. Metropolitan Toronto was in [...]

Every Saturday at noon, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters—good and bad—that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today. 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 [...]

Ah, Yonge and Dundas: bright lights, shopping, entertainment, a scramble intersection, and the towering presence of the Delta Chelsea Downtown Toronto—or at least that’s the impression that Delta wants to convey through an apparently manipulated image that it’s given to numerous travel websites and used in an advertisement in this year’s issue of Harvest Ontario [...]

Hotel on Queen under construction. Photo by Brenda Petroff/Torontoist. The Queen Street West Heritage Conservation District came into force back in September 2007, preserving a 1.5 kilometre stretch of Queen Street between University Avenue and Bathurst Street. According to a study conducted for the City’s Heritage Preservation Services, the proposal was not intended to restrict [...]

Every Saturday morning, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters—good and bad—that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today. Close up of 1108. Queen’s Hotel (site of Royal York Hotel), October 21, 1915. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1231, Item 1108a For over a century-and-a-half, the northeast corner of Front and [...]

Today’s ad offers an ideal 1970s entertainment lineup for upper middle class patrons on business, vacation, or a wild night in the suburbs. The Royal Box offered dinner theatre twice a night. The “merely posh” Le Continental filled the decade’s appetite for romantic meals loaded with soft jazz and slabs of meat (chateaubriand for two, [...]

Your reaction to snow depends on the circumstances. The frequency of dumps the city has received so far this year has caused grumbling about blocked streets, dirty mounds higher than the average citizen and many a wish for spring to speed up its arrival. Conversely, as long as the roads outside the city are passable, [...]

Celebrating its fifth anniversary, the Toronto Japanese Short Film Festival opens its doors tonight and runs until Sunday at the Innis Town Hall (2 Sussex Avenue). The theme of this year’s festival is “Life is short, work hard!” and is explored throughout the festival’s programming, beginning tonight at 6.30 p.m. with the Momo (Japanese for [...]