My earliest hotels - targets for demolition

I’m an Etobicoke girl. I spent my public and high school days in this leafy suburb on the western edge of Toronto, went away for a few years, and then returned to live less than two kilometres from where I grew up.

You can read that there is lots afoot in my area of Etobicoke - mostly in terms of hotels being torn down to make way for condo towers. The first Holiday Inn in Toronto, most recently a Ramada, has sat, boarded up and forlorn for a year or so. That hotel was my high school hangout. My girlfriends and I were their coffee shop’s worst nightmare as we took them up on their bottomless cup of coffee, and sat
there gossiping for hours, exiting with a bill that came to less than a dollar each. I saw the renovations that turned the balconies into extra room space, and watched the retro entrance way be changed to something newer, sleeker and more modern. And lately I eyed those covered windows, wondering what would happen next.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the fate of that hotel would be the fate of just about any underutilized land in this area where infill apartments spring up in every spare space to accommodate my peers, the aging boomers who want to simplify and downsize by buying a condo.

I was more surprised to learn that the same fate may be in store for the Valhalla Inn. In my late teens, I came to know the Mermaid Lounge which featured a huge glass window looking into the swimming pool, so you could watch people’s legs and weird underwater facial expressions as you sipped your Singapore Sling or Brandy Alexander. As a journalist covering the hospitality industry, I witnessed the building of the hotel’s tower (pictured at right). I was invited to help design the then revolutionary "woman friendly" hotel room. My husband and I dined in the Nordic Room, which we swore had the finest Caesar salad in Ontario, prepared tableside with real anchovies.

And just four years ago, The Valhalla Inn, received the North West Commercial Travellers’Association of Canada’s Hospitality Award for Ontario.

There’s a proposal to tear down the Valhalla and build three condo towers there as well. Our local city councillor, Doug Holyday, says it’s because hotels in the 427 corridor just can’t compete with airport hotels. I’m sure that’s just part of the story - the other part is homeowners in these neighbourhoods who are demanding condos so that they can still live in the same part of the city with no snow shovelling or leaf raking.

Finally, The Old Mill is where Steve and I got married, back when its Brulé Room was part of a "new addition". There have been many new additions since then - a hotel, a conference centre and a spa, all of which managed to keep the elegance and historical attraction of the original building designed in the 1920s by Robert Home Smith, and the King’s Mill which dates back to the late 1700s. The Old Mill is in no danger of beings torn down, but its owners are now looking to add something else - you guessed it... condos.

-- Colleen Isherwood, Editor