DIGGING DEEP
Scarborough exhibit shows past and potential of Kingston Road motel strip.
Coming along Kingston Rd. toward Brimley, you can momentarily think you’ve stumbled into a throwback resort town. The signs for the motels beckon from the side of the road, their lights, lettering and angled geometrics seemingly borrowed right out of 1955. The East Side, the Americana, Henry’s, the Hav-aNap, the Royal — they advertise “Color TV” and “Air Cond” and “Weekly & Family Rates.”
It would be easy to wonder if they serve a tourist trade drawn by the majesty of nearby Bluffer’s Park, which is perhaps the most breathtaking natural setting in Toronto, with its lawns and beaches offering views out over Lake Ontario to the south and of the giant chalky jagged geology of the cliff face to the north. But stopping to examine the motels more than momentarily, it becomes clear they don’t do much business with sightseers these days, instead serving customers who rent by the hour or by the month.
Indeed, they have become notorious among locals as problem spots. Some are being torn down and replaced by condos, some adapted. One former motel at the corner of Brimley is now an Islamic centre and prayer room. A former Comfort Inn near Bellamy is scheduled to reopen as a transitional home for formerly homeless seniors this fall. In April, the city is expected to start a process to try to expropriate the East Side Motel in order to tear it down, according to Councillor Gary Crawford’s office. But a handful of others carry on.
The evolution of the motel strip — periodically the subject of political debate — and what it says about its community and city and country is the subject of an art show opening this weekend at the Scarborough Arts Bluffs Gallery at 1859 Kingston Rd. entitled “No Vacancy.”
Once upon a time, Kingston Rd. was the main highway leading into Toronto from the east. “It was ‘Canada’s Gateway to Toronto,’” says show curator Alyssa Fearon. “Anyone travelling across the country would take Kingston Rd., and hotels there would be that place to stop and take a rest.” As car culture arose in the postwar period, the original hotels were replaced by motels — the stopping grounds for day-trippers. Most of those still standing today were built during this period.
But after the 401was completed in the late 1950s, travel patterns into and through Toronto changed dramatically. And so did the motels. “Since around the 1980s, the use shifted again. They’ve been commonly used for another type of transient guest. Those seeking refuge in this country and those who are homeless or underhoused. There’s another common unofficial use. Sex workers use those rooms for their work.”
Exploring and thinking through this history raised “broader questions about migration and displacement,” Fearon says — questions about how to re-imagine these neglected areas to better serve those who use them, she says. “How can we make these spaces more suitable for what people use them for?”
“When you dig deep, you start to understand the implications of these buildings to the community and the city.”
The show displays archival blackand-white photographs of the motels and hotels along Kingston Rd. throughout its history — a dilapidated Half Way House Hotel (now reconstructed at Black Creek Pioneer Village) for instance, and a Toronto Star shot from 1983 that shows some motels much as they are today (bearing an original caption about the use of them as homeless shelters). These are contrasted on the one hand with colour promotional postcards for motels from the 1950s projecting warmth and optimism, and on the other hand by contemporary artworks on themes of displacement and seeking refuge.
Three portraits by Curtia Wright, for instance, contrast the neon colours and images of motel signage with deep blues and purples depicting the unsettled faces of displaced people staring out at the viewer. The show also features video of an interview with a woman with experience of the sex trade in the motels and a map of the evolution.
Fearon says she didn’t want to just do a “then and now” show. Anyone who wants to can go out and see the “now” for themselves by walking east from the building. Instead, she wanted the contemporary part of the show to look at what the change means.
“Back in the 1990s, there were quite a few demonstrations against people seeking refuge in the motels, specifically Roma people,” Fearon says, discussing the tension between the transient uses and the more stable population of the community. “I think that has a lot of relevance in 2017,” Fearon says. “How does our country welcome or accommodate people seeking refuge?”
Just over a year ago, I personally attended a meeting in which local residents objected loudly to the conversion of a motel into a shelter for formerly homeless seniors.
There are these signs on the road that have always welcomed those seeking shelter, a message not always mirrored by the surrounding community. Right there, in the place once known as Canada’s Gateway to the city. Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca. Follow: @thekeenanwire