Richmond Street Mural, Toronto, 1988

I wish I could tell you more about this wonderful mural that graced the side of an old building on the north side of Toronto’s Queen Street West, between Bathurst and Portland.

Thanks to an astute reader, I can report the correct location of this scene: the mural graced the east side of the Garnet Press Gallery, 580 Richmond Street West, on the north side just west of Portland Street. The mural was created in the late-Spring of 1985 by John Abrams, the partner of Carla Garnet.

The artist, 26-years-old at the time, seems to have had something to say about the impetus that was driving development in the city, thirty years ago. 

A host of lesser architectural suiters pay homage to an odalisque CN Tower as a jet-headed angel oils a machine spitting what appear to be photos of the modest building in question. Apparently, Abrams originally painted the reclining figure “undraped,” to the dismay of City Hall prudes.

Again, thanks to the aforementioned reader, I can include the Toronto Star column by Christopher Hume, who deemed the work-in-progress better than “some of the stuff that currently clutters Hogtown.”

The photo that accompanies the Star story was made prior to the addition of the lubricating angel, though Hume reports that Abrams imagined the addition, at the risk of getting “too out of line.”

He needn’t have worried about heavenly messengers; it was the representation of female nudity that would attract the censors.

“The New Bohemia,” as the neighbourhood was dubbed by someone with powers to dub, was certainly in the throes of gentrification to an extent. Watch out for the artists! First they invade, followed by the developers, chasing cachet.

In the same manner as my Eighties Vancouver project, abandoned to seek my fortune in Toronto, documented that city’s pursuit of “world class” status,  I was drawn to the contrast between the ramshackle, human scale anarchy of the old house with its whimsical painting and the austerity of the new office tower rising behind, at 555 Richmond Street.

Whatever meaning the artist intended for his work, it endures for me (if only in the photograph) as a kind of icon of the time — a very short time for me — in the restless city.

The empty lot where I stood to shoot this scene is now the location of a modern retail building, and the old house is long gone. The Streetview embedded here reveals a peek of the office tower through a remaining empty lot. Navigate left to the corner of Portland and Queen.

What do you think the artist intended to impart through his mural? Better yet, do you know anything more of its history?

Prints available from the shop, in the Toronto Collection.