We have never been terribly superstitious, but the Grand Unveiling of the newly renovated and open-for-business Gladstone Hotel was preceded by some fairly amusing, and somewhat portentous omens. First came the appearance of the by-now well documented graffito on the facade of the freshly built Starbucks on the corner of Queen and Dovercourt: “Drake, you ho, this is all your fault,” which was quickly painted over. The taggers would not be silenced, and quickly and surreptitiously responded, “Drake you pimp, this is all your fault.” We would like to add that this latest bit of spray-painted civil disobedience has likewise been painted over, although if you look hard enough, you can still make out a palimpsestual “pimp.”

The second omen came just minutes before we were leaving our cozy domicile to head for the Grand Unveiling itself. Sandwiched between a dizzyingly fluffy interview with some braindead TV star and a brief report on Celine Dion’s latest Vegas venture was a publicity piece on E-Talk Daily, of all shows, on how the Gladstone is set to be, in the words of the tangerine-tanned and bafflingly insipid reporter (and we use that term loosely), “Toronto’s NEWEST [gaudy emphasis hers] hot-spot.”

 

This should have been enough to tip us off. Nevertheless, as we approached the Gladstone to tour their new artist-designed third- and fourth-floor rooms, we were met by a line-up that stretched halfway down the block, about three impatient and incredulous people wide. One woman even tried (unsuccessfully, alas) to diva her way past the line-up, exclaiming that her friend had designed a room, and it was outrageous that she should be forced to wait with the commoners. The unflappably polite (and beefy) security guard was unimpressed, and off she went.

And so it goes: dilapidated flophouse one year, frenzied hot-spot the next. But the Gladstone was meant to be somehow different than the Drake; it was meant to fulfill all the promises of community-oriented artist bohemiana that the Drake never delivered on. From their diligent restoration, care of the Zeidlers, to the maintenance of their Karaoke nights, to their commitment to TAAFI (our opinion on the Drake’s participation in TAAFI is a matter of record), the Gladstone projected a desire to make good on their clever use of the strikeout in their tagline: this was to be a unique hotel, one that would be mindful of history and community. The artist-designed rooms were clearly meant to be the jewel in this crown.

And? Success? Well, yes and no. The successful rooms are such by virtue of the originality of approach by the designer. Obviously, these rooms should be welcoming and comfortable for journeymen of all kinds, so nothing too egregious, if you please. The best of the rooms manage to marry this basic commercial reality with a probative conceptual sensibility, one that reflects on the Gladstone, or, more generally, what a hotel room implies: history, travel, transience, etcetera. To put it simply, the successful rooms function as a kind of cozy installation. For instance, Day Milman’s fourth floor room, wallpapered with a pattern of tiny Delft-blue line-drawings of the Gladstone’s barfly regulars, a pre-restoration view of the hotel itself, and a flotsam of birds. To see other Gladstone barflies dotingly point out their companions memorialized on the walls amidst the flood of opening-night gliterati was a curious juxtaposition, indeed. Rayne Baron’s lush Victorian boudoir room with a faux-fireplace, period furniture, and antique sepia-toned photographs was equally considered, seductively inviting, and utterly gorgeous. Lief Harmsen’s room looked entirely unremarkable until our eyes floated up to the ceiling, to behold a mural composed of flesh-toned pixels, which we are next to certain involve something pornographic. Allyson Mitchell’s wood-and-stone wallpapered room offers a fuzzily cozy utopian paradise with its enormous fun-fur Arcadian Playboy cheesecake mural. Michael Steele’s room is more design-oriented, simple and whip-smart. Irregularly shaped paneling creeps up the wall and spreads out onto the ceiling in the shape of the Toronto downtown street-grid, with a charmingly camp coronation portrait of HRH Liz II marking Queen Street. The room is lined with maps and indexes, ready and waiting for the eager traveller.

And the other rooms? To be perfectly blunt, they’re either furnished via design-by-numbers “trendiness” or involve design choices so bizarre, we pity whoever gets saddled with them. A brief f’r’instance, in this latter category: Heather Dubbeldam and Tania Ursomarzo’s room, with a wooden-beam canopy structure that actually makes the already minuscule room seem smaller, and a lighting scheme that obscures the windows, making the place as about as inviting as an interrogation chamber. There are too many entrants in the former category to bother listing names; designers whose rooms, reflecting nothing more than the current trend for geometric, militaristically clean minimalism, look like they were copied from a layabout issue of Wallpaper (one bland room actually had a cast-off copy of some design digest laying about, like a kind of emblem of unoriginal mediocrity); in short, lifestyle decoration for the decoratively lifeless. The most unfortunate example of this is the two-storey Tower Suite, in the southwestern corner of the building. The view from that room is, for our money, unparalleled in this city: the CN train tracks sweep by eastern, southern and western exposures, and the skyline is laid out like a sleeping giant across the distant horizon. This magnificence is complemented by the gorgeous arching brickwork of the window-frames. Pity that the room itself can’t offer much in competition.

So, now that the restoration is complete, what’s the damage – is this the Drake redux? The Gladstone has, after all, done things the Drake has not: kept the devoted and long-suffering staff of the building, including the elevator operator. The restoration of the actual building is precise and painstaking. And the second floor art-spaces are, for the moment, devoted to photos and documents of the hotel’s past and present, from mimeographed handouts on the necessities of vacuuming to fragments of the original moldings, to photographs of Keith Cole, in all her splendid vulgarity. Not surprisingly, what is glossed over here is the fate of its former residents, the ones who no longer have a place in this boutique unique hotel. Now, we shouldn’t dwell on this point; after all, if the building wasn’t going to be renovated, it surely would have been demolished (and replaced by yet another monolithic grid of condos, Heaven forfend), so someone’s going to be nudged out, either way. Nevertheless, there’s nothing like a gala opening to make one mindful of these details, especially after having lined up in the cold; everybody but heaven knows that try as they might, no diva fit will let those ejected souls back in, especially not now.