Toronto Life articles from April 1999

Toronto Life archives from April 1999

Happy Gilmour (profile of author David Gilmour).
April 1, 1999... Serra restaurant on Bloor Street is where David Gilmour, the neighbour, novelist and television personality, dines three times a week. It's his turf, his pick for a rendezvous. Gilmour is a creature of habit, with some strict, self-imposed...

Poet in motion.
April 1, 1999... The dark, smoky Idler Pub is nearly empty when Catherine Jenkins gets onstage. Actually, "stage" is pushing it a little. Raised platform and lone mike lit by clip-on spotlights would be more accurate. But Jenkins is composed and confident. She...

Rail to the chief: as the megacity's top bureaucrat, Mike Garrett oversees a chaotic corporation with 46,000 employees and a $5.6-billion budget.
April 1, 1999... OF A CORPORATE office affords a glimpse into the soul of the executive, then Mike Garrett, Toronto's top bureaucrat, must have an ego so small you could fit it on the head of a pin and still have room left over for angels. The city's chief...

Dead men don't do rewrites: ... The golden ass, ... is a huge, expensive somersault into the unknown.
April 1, 1999... ON THE SUMMER of 1995, an eighty-two-year-old writer and a thirty-five-year-old composer met for the first time to discuss a possible shared project. Over lunch at the august York Club--they discovered that they both liked oysters, a first sign...

Eugene & Nanci: a true story about loud music and old men in cafes.
April 1, 1999... "Successful street neighbourhoods, in short, are not discrete units. They are physical, social and economic continuities." --Jane Jacobs, urban philosopher PEOPLE AT SURROUNDING TABLES HAD NO REASON to interrupt their Saturday night...

Rituals: what is this, the Canadian inquisition?
April 1, 1999... "WHICH TORONTO MAYOR said: `Toronto is the city of the future--and always will be...'?" The question hangs in the smoke-filled air as ten middle-aged urbanites huddle around a clutch of circular mahogany tables, deep in brow-knitting...

Sleepless in Toronto: an after-hours guide.
April 1, 1999... We were tempted to call this "The City That Never Sleeps," but that would be untrue (or, as the politicians say, misleading). In Toronto, most bartenders are sweeping the floor around your feet at an hour when New Yorkers and Parisians are just...

Icons: the temple of tune (Sam the Record Man, Yonge Street, Toronto).
April 1, 1999... IN 1964, when I was eleven, I was judged by my parents old enough to go with a friend to Sam the Record Man's famous Boxing Day sale to buy 12x5, by the Rolling Stones. I don't remember how I'd heard of Sam's, but it was the kind of knowledge...

Plaintiff: Robert McMichael's legal battle against the Kleinburg gallery that bears his name is sending shock waves through the world.
April 1, 1999... ON A NASTY WINTER DAY, I'm driving past the monster houses on Islington, through the soon-to-be-developed space north of the city. Apart from a strip set aside for the Boyd Conservation Area, there is scarcely a block of nature left, until a...

Objects of affection: hooked on collecting, Larry Richards and Frederic Urban turned their Bloor Street condominium into a gallery of curios.
April 1, 1999... DESIGNING THEIR Bloor Street condominium was a busman's holiday for Larry Wayne Richards and Frederic Urban, partners for going on thirty-two years. Both men are up to their eyeballs in architecture. Richards is the newish dean of the longishly...

Mighty Joe young: how boy wonder Joeffer Caoc, the designer behind Misura, met the women of his dreams.
April 1, 1999... JOEFFER CAOC takes a serious drag, grins, exhales--having lit up that first, long-awaited cigarette of the lunch hour the very second we leave his building and connect with the cool air of Spadina and Queen. On a clear winter's day, the...

Wakey, wakey: nothing could be finer than to be in the Senator diner ... in the morning.
April 1, 1999... A BRISK SPRING MORNING, and the city has woken up hungry. At Bagel World, on Wilson Avenue, men of means and influence have been and gone by seven o'clock, crowding the tables for scrambled eggs, jokes and a little dealmaking on the side. Up in...

Albert Britnell book shop: 1893-1999.
April 1, 1999... I REMEMBER the Albert Britnell Book Shop in its prime. In the early 1950s, I was an editor for Macmillan, which made most of its money selling imported books. At the time, an editor seemed a luxury, so I doubled as part-time salesman,...