The Gladstone Hotel, a formidable presence on Toronto’s Queen Street West, has a long history as the oldest continuously operating hotel in the city stretching back to the nineteenth century. The hotel was built in the medieval revivalist Richardson Romanesque style that characterizes many of Toronto’s public buildings of the nineteenth century (including Queen’s Park and Old City Hall). The watering holes of the Gladstone were long a gathering place for the working-class community in surrounding Parkdale and the hotel over years had a mix of long- and short-term residents.

Global media have opened up a multitude of channels for the flow of information and capital across time and space. The circulation of art takes place both through these new circuits and outside them in the material environments of cities. Artists, architects and designers look to the city to bring specificity and sensuality to the ephemeral environments they are creating at the intersections of technology, communication and aesthetics. This connection to everyday life, to a sense of place and history, positions artists as aesthetic innovators and political instigators who use local environments to transcend the borders of cities and create new forms of democratic expression.

Artist and activist Dyan Marie lives and works in the Lansdowne/Dupont area of Toronto, a neighbourhood fractured by issues of poverty, environmental damage, drug abuse, and an active sex trade. It is also broken up by major roads and three railway lines. There is a reduced tree canopy, and existing parks and other public spaces are perceived as undesirable due to criminal activity.