2004-05-29 - 12:10 a.m.
I spent the first half of the day in a foul foul mood because in some unknown way I managed to bend my fabulous new glasses before I had even finished paying for them. The lovely dutch girl at the optician's managed to bend them more or less back into shape, but one arm-hinge doesn't work quite properly any more, and this makes me feel tantrummy and wretched like a little kid. There's something uniquely upsetting about the first insult or injury to something that's still shiny and new. Or possibly I just get over-attached to the inanimate objects in my life.
Then I tried to cheer myself up by going to some of the Doors Open Toronto sites. Saw the newly renovated Drake Hotel, which I found attitudey and hipsterish in an annoying way - the ultra-fashionable pseudo-zen updated interiors will look dated in an eye-blink. Also? I would bet you money that the staircase is *not* the original 1890 staircase, as they claimed it to be - wrong materials, wrong style. Saw the also-updated Gladstone Hotel, which I liked much more - it's clear that not nearly as much money has been sunk into the project, and there is at times an indefinable frightening smell that I fear speaks to its dark years as a flop-house, but it seems to me much more interesting and much more honest to the history of the building, both the Victorian grandeur of it's original incarnation and the complex history it's had since. And I like the parts of the old ballroom where they've torn down old walls and not replaced them - where you can still see parts of the lathe and plaster and the brick. I don't know if they'll be replacing it in future, but I like that the space continues to be in use while it slowly morphs into its new incarnation. I also like that they didn't evict all the old tenants.
I also went to a Buddhist Temple out in the junction that I didn't know existed - you walk inside this dark brick Old-Toronto-looking building and find yourself in a room just singing with colour, with various buddhist sculptures and hangings, as well as info about the original temple in Tibet, where 100,000 statues that had taken 800 years to create were destroyed by the chinese government. They're hoping to eventually recreate 90 of them here, and the Rinpoche brought some scultors from Bhutan to Toronto with him, once of who was working on once right in the temple. Amazing. Given the extremely mixed feelings I have about religion, it's funny how much I love churches.
Tomorrow I'm off with my Dad to visit the Kind Edward Hotel's crystal ballroom, which hasn't been used since the 1960s, and the newly restored art nouveau mecca, the Carlu, which was boarded up for decades. I love the idea that Toronto is full of all these secret rooms and places. I was hoping to visit the Necropolis as well - just because I love the word Necropolis and the idea that TO has one - but the emergency glasses errand stopped me form getting there today. Maybe tomorrow.
