Michael Murray
SEPTEMBER 27TH, 2011
The Toronto Standard.
Toronto’s iconic Regal Constellation Hotel now languishes in a state of modernist limbo, of suspended demolition. We poke around inside the guts of a Toronto that once was.
Out by the airport, the old Regal Constellation was the sort of hotel from which a black sheep uncle might have sent you a schlocky, likely sexist, postcard. The place had a Las Vegas, 1960’s vibe, as if trying to project some sort of Rat-Pack zing out over Pearson Airport. The rooftop signage had a hastily erected beach-strip quality to it, and it wasn’t hard to imagine would-be wiseguys plotting their tiny empires from a subterranean lair. Now the Regal Constellation, having been in some state of demolition for the last eight years, is but a shell of itself. Built in 1962, it had two 15-storey towers, an ever-optimistic 90,000 square feet of conference space, a 6-storey atrium that suggested a future that would never quite arrive, and of course, a Chinese Restaurant. Named after the Super Constellation aircraft, it was the spot. A beacon for trade shows, weary travelers and curiosity seekers, the Constellation was a product of its time, a suggestion of a modernity and sophistication that would always remain just out of grasp. As the 60s and 70s faded away, the Constellation slowly started to stumble through the ensuing decades, finally giving up the ghost in 2003 with the SARS-aided collapse of the tourist industry. In 2004 the property was to be developed by American investors and transformed into yet another, grander version of itself. But the economy tanked, and when the investors found out all the buried costs involved in removing the asbestos laced throughout the buildings, they walked away leaving unpaid bills and a partially dismantled hotel. It was then purchased by Toronto interests—who will likely turn it into a parking lot in anticipation of flipping it to another developer—and Priestly Demolition was hired on to finish the job of cleaning the site and taking down the building so that all the concrete, safely separated from contaminates, can be recycled. Curious to see what salvageable materials remained in the place I imposed on some contacts to have a look at the site. Standing inside the fenced off property amidst a half dozen clawed bulldozers and a small fleet of red Priestly trucks working away in a riot of deconstruction, the nearby jets still cast off some of the glamour and power of international travel that informed the hotel back in the day. There are heaps of twisted metal on the ground, all wound into crazy organic shapes that wouldn’t look out of place in a museum. The site, having become little more than a dumping ground for the unpaid demolition company that preceded Priestly, is littered with industrial bric-a-brac. The place smells of dirt, oil, hot metal and mould, and the sounds of heavy industry, usually distant, are immediate. Masked workmen hose down the detritus in an attempt to keep dangerous particulates from floating up into the atmosphere, giving it an eerie and entirely ruined feeling. Instead of the cheerfully Arabian-inflected hotel it once was, it now resembles a bombed-out husk. Through broken windows, tarps and scraps of cloth flap in the wind and reinforcing construction bars protrude from the rubble of broken concrete like bones. Shattered glass crunches under foot and with no power the basement and ground level are dark and wet, the graffiti marked corridors now resembling the architecture of a shooting game. Upstairs on the second floor sunlight falls through the broken windows onto the salmon wallpaper that lines the hallways. The windows in each room are distinctive and kind of trapezoidal, like replicated versions of the Bat Signal fanning out across each floor. Back outside on the ground, a now pointless sign for a Taxi Stand sits across from the still standing awning for Okinawa Sushi, a restaurant that at one time must have felt so exotic and international, another part of the seductive allure that emanated from the Constellation. And on a nearby wall, as if a testimony to the fact that the sushi bar helped business men with libertine instincts set aflame by an anonymous life in transit, a piece of graffiti declares: John Coleman is good in bed. On the nearby exterior marble slabs are still attached to the building. The letters that spelled out Regal Constellation have been removed, leaving faded, ghostly traces of each letter. It’s a melancholy sight, like seeing the name of an ancestor on a derelict tombstone. Like some sort of folk art castle rising from found objects, the Constellation now feels like the product of an eccentric and singular imagination. Even if in its final days it bears only a passing resemblance to what it was once meant to be, some developer will see the potential that eludes others. And like all the businesspeople that passed through the place and looked out from their rooms at all the planes taking off and landing, they, too, will see the future and in it the transport to the good life it so clearly promises.