misnomer raze at the intersection of riverside drive and devonshire road stands a four storey building that's been there for almost a century. it looks like something that grew up out of the earth and now the earth wants it back. its brick is overrun with vines and ivy that goes from green to red to green again, and in some places where windows were broken by people who find value in breaking things without purpose, the colour has curled its way inside. everyone and their brother and me has been calling this place the old peabody building as long as i can remember. but that isn't what it is. the peabody building stood just to the west of this place, beside the peabody bridge, which was used for shipping and receiving and lasted until the 1990s when the rail lines were removed from the riverfront. the peabody building itself lasted almost as long. it was bombed during the first world war by nazi sympathizers, survived, and went on to become the base of operations for various engineering and pharmaceutical companies before it was demolished by the city in 1985. there's a mystery tied in with this part of the city. in the summer of 1854, fifty seven norwegian immigrants died of cholera after getting here by train, packed into windowless freight cars. they were on their way to detroit, then chicago, but they didn't make it across the border. today our population is well over two hundred thousand. in 1854 it wasn't even eight hundred. there was no hospital, and only one doctor. he did what he could, but he couldn't save those people. the railway promised to pay for coffins and the burial of the immigrants. then they broke their promise and didn't pay for anything. they gave the doctor a gold watch. we didn't have a cemetery or a church then. no one knows what was done with the bodies. none of the names of the dead are on record. some people believe they were buried beneath the peabody bridge before the bridge was there, but no amount of digging has ever turned up anything definitive. the building that still stands — the one we call the peabody building without knowing we're naming a ghost — is the walker power building. some sources claim it was designed in 1911 by three architects whose names read like a law firm. others say it was built in 1923 by albert kahn. i haven't been able to exhume much of any real history here. what i'm left with is my own personal history with the building, and that only stretches from 2001 to 2002, with one little blip four years later that almost doesn't count. but there are some vivid snapshots. first there was recording gord and tyson's metal band. it seemed like half the bands in the city were renting a room at the neon shop when i was just getting out of high school. that was another name people called the walker power building, because on one floor there was a business that sold neon signs. there were stairs, and there was an old freight elevator. you had to pull a rope to close it, and you had to check the floor to make sure it was level before you pressed a button to take you where you were going, because if it wasn't level you were going to get stuck between floors. i trusted that elevator with most of the equipment i had at the time and recorded the only album that metal band ever made over two days in november, in 2001. i monitored with headphones and some tiny powered speakers tyson brought for me to use. i was wearing leather pants and a blue dress shirt. their space was littered with empties and trash. brandon's drum kit was so decrepit the snare drum's top skin was falling off, and he was high on acid. but damned if that kit didn't sound good with a few microphones on it, and damned if he didn't play with all the ferocity and precision the songs demanded. for only getting paid twenty bucks and working in a genre of music i'd never recorded before, i did a pretty solid job. it still surprises me how good the album sounds for what i had to work with. i was used to recording things live off the floor in band situations, but we built the songs up piecemeal for better separation, and those guys were tight enough that we could record the drums first with no one else playing and drop the guitar and bass tracks on top after the fact, and you'd never guess it wasn't done live. tyson overdubbed guitar harmonies for one track while his father grinned with whisky and weed in his eyes and said, "it's like an orchestra!" then there were keg parties i didn't go to. some of them got so out of control the cops showed up. there were punk and metal shows. i saw video footage of one of them. i remember a guy who kept breaking empty forties of olde english over his head until he started bleeding from a cut on the bridge of his nose. then he dipped one of his fingers in the blood and flicked it at the camera. there was the night an adam whose last named rhymed with hustle passed out drunk and pissed himself on tyson's brother rick's couch. they were renting a different room by then. when adam was sober enough to stand they threw him out. somewhere there's a videotape of him demanding to be let back in, screaming, "i'll pull a pesci on you! i'll kill you all!" until rick walks up and punches him in the face to shut him up, and punches him again, and again, and again. "he looked like the elephant man for about a week after that," gord told me not long after it happened. "rick fucked him up good." there was the time i jammed with gord in the new room and he told me to be careful where i sat on the couch, because that was the one, that was the famous couch, and even though it had dried months ago, well, you never can be too sure with piss stains. he had long hair then. he has short hair now. we're still friends. and there was the time i got a call from my friend anna because she knew i was looking for work. she told me she was working on the fourth floor of the neon shop with a few other people, and there was one position still available if i was interested. it was light assembly work. the imagination factory. that was the name of the business. that was may 2002. i went in for an interview that wasn't really an interview. kate was the name of the boss. she had blonde hair that was turning grey and looked like it was grey hair turning blonde. she explained what the job was. it was putting together these kits that would be sold in stores — replicas of some of leonardo da vinci's inventions. we were putting together something for someone else to put together. i liked the loopiness of that. she asked me a few questions, and then she told me i had the job, and then i did the job for as long as the job was there. it was one of the more enjoyable jobs i've had. we listened to WDET, back when WDET still played music. i got to listen to nick drake and jazz and iggy and the stooges while i was making boxes and counting out parts and talking to the other people working there. there was ken. ken had a ponytail. ken told me about steve's music in toronto and talked to me about tony iommi. there was anna. i'd gone to high school with her. there was kate. she was a little testy sometimes, but mostly nice. and there was another woman. i remember her face but not her name. she told me when she was a little older than me she had a brief, doomed romance with someone who looked just like me, only he had blonde hair. he was a heroin addict on methadone, trying to put his life back together after his child had fallen out of the crib and died while he and his girlfriend were high. one day i went outside with anna during our last break. we took the elevator down and sat together in the tall grass. after a while she laid herself down on her back, so i did the same. we lay together there. i thought about kissing her pretty face, didn't think she'd want me to, didn't do it. i wouldn't have known how if i tried. she pulled a leaf out of my hair when we were back inside and smiled at me. she had long hair then. she has short hair now. we're not friends anymore. the job only lasted about a month, because that was all the work there was. but i got a call from kate inviting me and my dad over for a barbecue at her place on the fourth of july that year. anna was there. she was wearing a white bandana. kate's common-law husband was there too. they had a funny dynamic, those two. they would jab and prod at one another, but you could tell they were having fun with it. that was just their way. you could almost see the history of their whole relationship in one of those little spats they had. they were comfortable. they were lived-in. they were them. it was nice. later we watched the fireworks from the roof of the building we'd worked in. a ladder got you up there. it was the perfect place to be. more people came. one of them was jane. i'd worked with her at a different summer job three years before. she was a little older than me. she was wispy, with a deeper voice than you expected when you first met her. she had perfect long brown hair, straight as any i'd ever seen. i had a crush on her but figured i was too young, she was too cool, nothing was ever going to happen there. as she was leaving, she went to kiss me without telling me the kiss was coming. it would have been the first_kiss of my life. it would have been just right, except she was so drunk she could barely walk, so it happened like this. she leaned in to kiss me. i tried to prepare for whatever i was supposed to do. the wind from our leaning blew my hair and her hair in our faces. and that was what we kissed. hair. there were no lips. there was no spit. there was no me into you and you into me, and she was so far gone she couldn't even tell hair was all we got, and i didn't have the guts to tell her. by the next day i knew she would forget all about how we almost kissed, how she'd been the one to almost make us kiss. as missed opportunities go, that one was a real asshole. then there wasn't much of anything, until i dropped in on josh and mark a few years later. i didn't trust the elevator anymore. i took the stairs. gord wasn't there that night, but he was in their band. their jamspace was a lot nicer than the other ones there'd been. neater. nice and spacious. i dropped off some music, hung out for a while, and left. that was the last time i was inside. a few years after that, whoever owned the building got the idea to kill whatever made it what it was and carve it into condos he could sell. when he found out how much money it was going to cost him to get the place up to code with the fire department, to get the zoning he needed, and to get the polychlorinated biphenyls out of the ground, he decided it wasn't worth it and just evicted everyone and walked away. bands were born there. artists had lofts there. small businesses got their start there. there was a vintage bicycle shop. there were print shops. there was a sheet metal fabrication shop. in the early 90s they held raves there. you could do almost anything with that building. it could be a place for artists and small business owners to thrive. just like it was. you want to stimulate a city with an economy that's bottoming out? there's a place to start. but it just sits there, and decays, and goes on becoming more evergreen than brick, and nothing happens inside. no one's there. and if they demolish it one day, it'll be as dead as the building that owned the name we gave this one, that died two years after i was born, and another piece of history will be gone. not just the city's history. my history too. a friend told me if they ever knock the walker power building down she's going to lie in the rubble and cry. i might join her, if it comes to that. 140410 ... epitome of incomprehensibility As I was reading this, the image of the abandoned_lot_taste_test building at the corner of the Valois overpass (where Cardinal turns into Donegani) popped into my mind. It's probably nothing like the place you wrote about, just a rectangular brick and concrete building that used to hold a bar and a laundromat and I think a little store. But I was walking past it last week and saw one of the windows was broken. I peered inside. There was a lot of cardboard-ish garbage piled up, and what looked like a shopping cart. It made me wonder if there were squatters there. Or ghosts. Squatter ghosts? 140411 ... raze now you've got me thinking someone needs to make a reality tv show called "ghost squatters", complete with a rewrite of the "ghostbusters" theme song. 140412 ... e_o_i Now you've got me thinking about ghost rights. If they were proven to exist, should they be able to own property? Also, in my mind I conflated two separate buildings, as I saw from looking at that blathe I linked to (I don't have a photographic memory, but this is kind of pathetic. It's ten minutes away from my house, for goobers' sake.) 140412 ... raze a few people were standing outside of the building the other day. i watched one shake hands with another. then he split off from the group and walked inside. i have no idea what he was doing in there. maybe scouting it as a possible location for some photography. a local band was stealthy enough to shoot a music video inside a few years back. who needs an art director when you've got that kind of built-in atmosphere to work with? abandoned spaces have a lot of stories to tell if you take the time to listen. 140719 ... raze yesterday a woman was taking pictures of a couple standing in front of the huge sleeping structure. 150518 ... raze i had a dream we went there and there were people there, parents of a girl, and while they smiled their proud smiles she rode a beautiful white horse, and she always felt far away but she was never so far away she couldn't be clearly seen. i wonder what it means. 150904 ... raze someone bought it. it's been for sale for years, and now someone actually bought the building. i don't think anyone can believe it. the bad news is they can renovate it in whatever way they want to. they don't have to give its old life back to it. they don't have to make it what it was before. the good news is it's on the city's heritage registry. so they can't tear it down without council approval. this city has done some pretty dumb shit, but i don't think they'd let someone destroy a piece of our history just like that. so it's in limbo for now. sixty thousand square feet of possibility. 160420 ... raze and this is how it ends, with an awful new beginning. they're "renovating" it now. the person in charge is the son of a lawyer who's one of the slimiest, most incompetent fuckholes this city has ever seen, who somehow gets paid a fortune to destroy the lives of the people he's sworn to help, maintaining a reputation as a pillar of our community when in a just world one of his ex-clients would shoot him in the face. there are ideas about putting a starbucks in there. a fucking starbucks. they're not going to restore it to the haven it used to be for artists and small business owners. they're going to sell pieces of its soul to the highest bidders. there's an artist's rendering of what the vision is for the building in its restored state. it's just another faceless structure. that's what they're going to turn it into. and some people will call this a welcome advancement. now i kind of wish they just knocked it down instead. 170328 ... unhinged the same has been happening in seattle at breakneck speed speculative development sucks balls 170328 ... e_o_i Eh, that sucks. Sounds like the type of money-grubbing unimaginative person who'd turn things into boring store places. 170330 ... raze they're still not finished. nothing ever gets done in a timely manner in this city. not when someone is getting paid and they can contrive a way to make more money by stretching out the job far past any sane person's breaking point. but they've done enough. the soul of the place is gone now. i'm glad i got some pictures and made some memories while it still felt like a living thing. 191119 what's it to you? who go blather from