Taylor Gesner

PROGRAM MANAGER

Years: 1997-2001 Units: 108, 105, 303 and 102 Rent: $600-$1,200

“i was a dj at a bar on Church Street when I moved into one of the basement spaces at 888 with a roommate. It was large and beautiful but also raw and super dusty. We put a lot of work into it. My roommate had his father come in and do some plumbing so that we had a decent sink and shower set-up.

During my time there, we didn’t have a lot of parties, but the tenants who lived there before us must have, because people would come and knock on the windows at all hours asking for a guy called Dreads.

Eventually, my girlfriend and I decided to move into another unit in the building. It was smaller, but it had a few more amenities. There was more of a…let’s call it a kitchen. The bathtub was in the living room, and the washroom was more like a water closet. But it was great for two people.

Then, a few months later, we had the opportunity to move into a bigger space, on the third floor. This one had a proper washroom—more or less. To get to the toilet, we had to walk up a few steps. It was truly like a throne. The artist who’d lived there before us had built these oddly shaped pods as the rooms—there was hardly a right angle anywhere in the unit. The floors were square, but then the walls would go off in weird directions.

After our relationship ended, I needed a smaller space to live on my own, so I moved back down to a basement unit. I was below two active textile factories. There were a whole bunch of people, mostly women, in the space working sewing machines. I think they were making those really cheap T-shirts that you used to see at Honest Ed’s—like $2 shirts.

In 2021, I went back for the last party. A couple of electronic musician friends of mine performed, and there was a dance floor. It really felt like something from back in the day, when there were massive warehouse parties in Toronto all the time.”

ARTIST Units: 107, 110 and 112 Years: 2005-2021 Rent: $433 (unit 107), $350 (unit 112)

“i worked at Curry’s art store with Nick Aoki of Team Macho, the artist collective, which is how I found out about 888. I moved in on April 1, 2005, which was both my birthday and the day I graduated from OCAD. I had been to the building a couple of times before, to pick up a key or to go to a party, and it felt like every open door was a different portal—like you were in a very lively, unknowable art organism filled with interesting things being made.

I lived with two of my Curry’s coworkers. We were each paying $433 a month, and to figure out who would pay the extra dollar in rent, we played a threeperson game of Mario Kart at the end of every month. I moved out in 2006 to go to Italy for six months. When I got back to Toronto, Team Macho told me I could move into their unit and sleep under their pingpong table for $50 a month. There was no mattress, so I would have to wait for the last person to go to bed and then drag the futon from the video game couch under the ping-pong table. I did that for four months, then a bedroom opened up in that studio, so I moved into it for $350 a month.

The studio was filled with clutter. We were a bunch of artsy, curious boys in their 20s finding things off the street, bringing them inside, then never taking them outside again. We would leave the window open and lean out of it to smoke cigarettes. We were at street level, so people would jump in and out of the window, using it as a door. People would come stay from out of town or live there for a short amount of time. There were six of us using the space, and we always had someone visiting.

Karl, the owner of the building, was an incredible person. He was a retired mechanic who ended up buying a few buildings in the city with his brother. He wasn’t necessarily a cheerleader for the arts, but he was a pleasant guy who always seemed to want to be accommodating. On one occasion, I swore I’d paid rent in cash, but he had no record of it. In the end he was just like, ‘Okay. I don’t think you’re lying to me.’ I don’t think he raised our rent the whole time we were there.

I can think of two dozen artists who went through that building and are still working as artists in the city. There are probably hundreds more. 888 represents a time that I don’t think we’ll ever have in this city again.”