In 2013, Marty, a former crack user, took me on a tour of one of Toronto’s roughest corners. With the filmmaker Hugh Gibson, who was working with Marty on a documentary about harm reduction, we walked south through Moss Park, past the community housing tower and the Salvation Army men’s shelter, to the intersection of Sherbourne and Queen Street East. Here, Marty explained, were the shops where you could score, the places you could go to use. Across the street, on the southwest corner, slouched an abandoned, old brick building covered in flaking grey and white paint. It was the corner’s least noteworthy landmark, inaccessible and therefore of little use to the streetwise.
What I didn’t know about the building at the time was that my great-great-grandfather had built it. George J. Foy commissioned the Kormann House Hotel in the late-nineteenth century, riding high on the wealth he’d accrued selling liquor and cigars to a puritanical city. Completed in June 1897, the building was later submitted for listing on the city’s Heritage Register, where it was described as “a representative example of a late 19th century corner hotel, typical of those found at major intersections in Toronto.”
