Lottery Ticket Buildings

I have not been on James St North nearly as long as most people. I got 150 five years ago. It used to be Excellence Beauty Salon. I can still vividly remember scraping the vinyl lettering off the outside of the window on a snowy February on my tippy toes atop a overturned dry wall bucket. At that moment there was a distinct feeling of isolation. However, I had found a building for a decent price with everything that I needed to get the gallery going. As many are aware, there popped up a bunch of art spaces supporting a few existing spaces and expanded at a nice pace. This of coarse is the initial signs of what I will now dub the “Queen West Syndrome”.  A few years in I made this observation of some of its symptoms in August of 2006:

I just wanted to say that I love the godamninja show and it is hilariously fun and everyone involved is awesome. If you haven’t seen it your missing a moment in history. Secondly, if anyone wants to redo my site, I will pay you well. You can consider this a tender for this project. Keys to success: make it sleek and cool (less like a bordello for vampire plumbers), make it user friendly for me to update all the cool stuff I have. Do these things and I will sing your praises to everyone. Don’t under estimate the influence I don’t have. Thirdly, go see Gary Buttrum DJ … anywhere. He’s really good. He plays most of my openings. Fourthly, since when did real estate agents consult star charts or look at chicken bones when dreaming up property prices on James North. If anyone can explain this phenomenon that’d be super. Fifthly, whoever is robbing people I know, stop. We don’t have shit worth stealing. Go west dear sir, go west.

Upon reflection ninjas and the people who love them are still awesome, I think that this version of the website works better at least (though I may have lost my vampire plumber audience) and Gary still occasionally  DJs. The pesky “Queen West Syndrome”, while dormant for a bit, has come back in light of many real estate moves. Understandably, folks in this neighbourhood want some coin for the building they own but lets be reasonable and realistic. Art on James North is in its infancy, trying to assert its identity in an existing cultural community. There are not hundreds of artists here. Not to diminish artistic peoples influence on James North but its a small community. My own head scratching culminates in Leon Furs and its $380, ooo dollar price tag that comes with a little asbestos clean-up. Whipee!  A person once remark that in it takes interesting eccentric and cheap people to make a street interesting. It seems James North may avoid that pesky problem entirely. All hail proactive, dysfunctional gentrification.