Saving Banksy

Here’s my first article for the Globe, about one of the last Banksy pieces left standing in Toronto, and what’s happening with it now that the building it was painted onto, 90 Harbour Street, has been demolished. That’s the original piece, on top there, and that what’s come of it, at the bottom. (Both photos by me.) If you’re in Toronto, and today is October 1, 2011, it should be in print in the weekend Toronto section, Globe T.O. Cool!

If you want to do more reading about Banksy’s Toronto visit, I’d start with this essay by Nick Mount. (Torontoist, which I was the editor of when the pieces all went up, has a new layout that temporarily broke a number of its older articles, so for now you can’t see what all of the pieces looked like when they were first put up, the battle amongst other street artists and taggers over one piece in particular, and what all of the pieces looked like at this time last year.)

A few interesting things that didn’t make it to Globe story, for when you’re done reading it:

• 90 Harbour might not have come down at all, but the province overruled the city. Toronto City Council had declared its intention to designate 90 Harbour Street a heritage property in June 2006, but backed away in January 2008. Why? According to City lawyers (and I quote here from a staff report dated October 31, 2007), “the City has no jurisdiction to impose municipal designation…on property owned by the provincial government or its agencies,” and “The Ontario Realty Corporation (ORC), the agency of the provincial government that owns the property, conducted an assessment…and determined that the site does not have provincial significance.” And then, in gentle bureaucratese, City staff kindly disagreed: “Staff believes that the objection to the proposed designation is based on the issue of jurisdiction and the property has cultural heritage value that merits municipal designation.” No such luck convincing them: a flyer later issued by the ORC [PDF] advertised an “excellent development opportunity” “in the heart of the downtown Toronto core.”
• Simon Cole, from Show & Tell, told me that if the piece were to be moved, “I would say it has zero value, from a fine art standpoint.” While Banksy’s non–street art work has sold for hundreds of  thousands of dollars at auction, the same doesn’t go for pieces that started on the street. “Once it’s removed,” Cole told me, “it’s very tough for anyone to try and sell it and prove that it’s a legitimate piece.” He told me about how at Show & Tell “people have come in with things they’ve preserved from the street asking what it’s worth and who the artist is”—I think this is where he and I both started laughing—”and I’m just like, ‘it’s not worth anything. It’s worth something when it’s on the street for everyone to see it.’”
• Menkes confirmed only at the last minute that they were saving the piece. It wasn’t until Friday morning, more than a week after I started researching and making phone calls for the story, that I got a statement back from them. Until then, no-one would say anything. (The most I could get was from Menkes’ Vice President of Commercial Property Management, who would say only that my questions had been “passed on to the appropriate person,” who might know about the piece. Which person? “I’d rather not say.”) Journalism!
• The most famous things that 90 Harbour Street was shot for, as far as I could find them, were Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, which shot there in 2003, and the TV show Monk, which shot there in 2002. This is the place to start if you’re curious about what role any Toronto building or location had in a production.

If you want to follow along with what happens next at 90 Harbour Street, there’s an Urban Toronto thread about it, just as there are Urban Toronto threads about every building in Toronto. If you want to follow along with what happens next with the Banksy piece standing its ground there, stay tuned?