A taste of Wall Street
On Suits, returning July 12, the building at Bay and Adelaide Sts. represents the heart of financial power
Unnoticed by passersby and often unmarked by plaques, numerous Toronto addresses with big parts to play in cultural history sit mostly uncelebrated. In our series Local Legends, we tell you about them and put them on your mental map.
Los Angeles-based conceptual artist James Turrell’s Straight Flush in the lobby of the Bay Adelaide Centre is one of Toronto’s most widely viewed pieces of art.
The five rectangular lines of electrified light are on a dancing loop of luminescent pastels that work symbiotically with the busy streetscape through the building’s glass walls.
Turrell’s body of work, at the forefront of the influential California light and space movement, was always deeply contemplative of nature and a response, in some measure, to ultra-urbanism.
“Light should be treasured, like we do silver and gold,” Turrell has said.
So what to make of the art, framed by the creamy marble of the Bay Adelaide Centre, a monument to corporatism in the heart of the financial district of Canada’s largest city?
It’s an irony that only Harvey Specter (Gabriel Macht), the testosterone-filled partner of the fictional law firm Pearson-Specter, could appreciate.
Specter, along with Mike Ross (Patrick Adams) and Rachel Zane (Meghan Markle), spends plenty of time walking through the pristine lobby of the Toronto office building, which doubles for Wall Street in the popular television series Suits, returning to Bravo on July 12 with Season 7.
The show is about the relationships of a New York firm of impossibly overdressed Harvard graduates (and one college dropout) who are dubiously inspiring a new generation of millennials to aspire to be badass, bagel-eating corporate raiders.
In the show, the Bay Adelaide Centre represents the heart of financial power. And it feels that way, too. Even the surrounding buildings act as supporting players, such as the Trump hotel across the street (soon to be rebranded a St. Regis, according to reports), speaking of a kind of brashness that comes with unvarnished, unchecked privilege.
Suits is not the only TV show to use the complex, but it is the longest running and best known. Bay Adelaide has also been used for the ABC legal drama Conviction (starring Hayley Atwell) and the CBS hostage thriller Ransom (starring Luke Roberts), both of which were recently cancelled after one season.
“The building speaks of power and money, the kind of iconic place you would find in mid-Manhattan,” says Warner Strauss, the co-location manager, along with Mark Logan, of Suits.
The street scenes outside the office building include many takes of Specter buying a New York-style bagel at his favourite cart. This is usually while having a heated legal argument with colleagues. Although, once in a while, they forget to take the Toronto Sun newspaper box out of the frame. Harvey eating a bagel has elicited many questions on social media from tourists asking where they can find that elusive hotdog stand. But disappointed fans eventually find there is no such cart in Manhattan — the action is all in Toronto.
“Sometimes we end up becoming inundated with fans,” says Strauss. “They’re sneaking in from outside and, because we have glass walls, you have faces pressed up against the glass, which causes an issue. But we’re always aware that we are guests on site, not on a film studio.”
The pilot for Suits was shot in New York before moving to Toronto. While the exteriors are shot downtown in buildings such as Bay Adelaide, the office scenes are shot in a studio at Downsview Park. Turrell’s Straight Flush, meanwhile, plays a secondary role. Strauss says for copyright reasons it is not normally shown in full relief, but shot indirectly — adding to the drama, but never the show stopper.
This season there have been more paparazzi than normal because of Markle, who was perhaps best known at one time for wearing fitted Zac Posen pencil skirts.
Now her No. 1 fan is a royal — Prince Harry — and suddenly the show has a lot more followers.
“It gets crazy when you do outdoor scenes and the stars are out there. Some days you might have 200 or more fans screaming. And you have to politely ask them to quiet down so we can film,” says Strauss.
One downside to filming in the financial core is finding parking. New condo development, road construction and competition from other shows in a record year for TV shoots means it has become a logistical nightmare for film crews.
An additional irony to all this is that the 51-storey Bay Adelaide Centre was once a symbol of Toronto’s decline.
For decades, only a six-storey elevator stump was on the property. Construction was halted on the building in the early 1990s as “the stump,” as it was known, became emblematic of the recession and real estate crash. It was not till 2009 that the building was finally completed under new owners Brookfield Properties. A second tower opened in 2015.
I remember going to the builder’s topping-off ceremony that day and, with guests and other members of the public, signing a steel girder that would be lifted by crane to the summit, embedding my signature in the structure of Toronto’s newest office tower.
So, for what it’s worth, every time I watch Suits I feel a part of my DNA is in there, too. The only thing that’s missing is a New York bagel cart outside the door so fans can make out like Harvey Specter.