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Stephen HumphreyStephen Humphrey is a freelance writer and journalist who has lived in Toronto since 1994...
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Guild Inn (2), historic Toronto, urban explorationTheir thoughts keep returning to the impression of a human body in a hotel bed.
Not unusual, perhaps, in a frequently slept-in hotel suite. Unless the hotel has been boarded up for the past seven years.
For decades the Guild Inn was a jewel of Toronto-area hospitality. It was dormant since 2001, however, when the city of Toronto, the inn’s current owners, closed its doors. The once-grand hotel gradually became an eyesore among the statues and greenery of Guildwood.
A year ago this October Norman Cristofoli and his partner Laurell Weiman entered the derelict inn before the oldest part of the hotel complex was demolished this summer.
Cristofoli and Weiman like entering abandoned buildings. They share a sense of fellowship with a culture of curiosity-driven cat burglars who dub themselves “urban explorers”. They go into structures simply because they’re there.
“We’ve been in a lot of buildings,” Weiman says.
The couple say their Guild Inn excursion was inspired by an impulse visit prompted by Cristofoli, who remembered drinking with his father and brother-in-law at the inn, where his sister also had her 50th birthday party. They were surprised to find it closed.
When the two came back they had flashlights, protective clothing and filter masks to block asbestos and mould.
Inside they found sprawling, rusted-over restaurant stoves, paintings hanging in formerly-posh banquet rooms, glasses in trays ready to serve and beds neatly made-up, as if still waiting for guests. By that point, however, would-be occupants needed to clamber up a first-floor balcony to reach still-unlocked doors to the second floor.
Crisofoli and Weiman were especially captivated by the shape of a sleeping body pressed into one suite’s mattress, suggesting that squatters slept in still-furnished rooms. The two found more signs of recent occupation, such as partially-packed luggage and indicators that children might have lived there, such as toddler-sized outfits, toys and a teddy bear.
Rooms still received power, as the couple learned when they tested bathroom lights.
“It was literally like one of those Twilight Zone episodes where all the people just disappear,” Cristofoli says.
Cristofoli and Weiman view a photo from this summer’s demolition. A hydraulic breaker pummels an upper floor of Bickford House, an early 20th-century mansion that was eventually expanded and transformed to become the Guild Inn.
Weiman recalls entering an upper-floor room near the big hammer’s target.
There was little inside the suite besides a 1970s-style console television that was rumoured to turn on, occasionally, by itself.
In Weiman’s photograph the television resembles the unit in the poster image for Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist movie.
While the explorers met no apparitions (or living occupants) they were treated to many bizarre, sometimes eerie sights, such as a corridor populated completely with lamps and dim, drafty hallways where elevator numbers lit up.
They also found a graffitied pentagram and gang-related messages such as, “Stop snitchin’.” One compelling of Weiman’s features a large wooden desk. Various nicknames and short comments are written by unknown fingers into the heavy dust covering it. Like an improvised guest book.
At some point during their hour-long excursion the pair triggered motion detectors installed by the inn’s municipal owners.
They were met by an irritated, and somewhat height-challenged security guard as they crawled under a fence surrounding the inn, after choosing to leave by the front door.
“He was like a child in this uniform,” Weiman laughs. “He was very funny-looking.”
Weiman recalls being incredulous when the guard ordered them to lean against the fence.
“She wanted to fight the guy,” Crisofoli recalls. Both of them giggle. “I’m just – let him be a wannabe cop.”
Soon actual police officers arrived, but Cristofoli says he didn’t worry much.
“You know exactly what’s going to happen,” he says. “Two people like us – we’re not drug smugglers or anything like that. We’re just explorers going through the old building.”
Cristofoli come across like people who would be safe to invite to most dinner parties, no hardened criminals. Their treatment by police amounted to a slap on the wrist.
“The cops come and they, ‘Don’t you think you two are a little old to be doing this?’” Cristofoli says.
The officer informed them they were banned from the Guild. Cristofoli says he returned the next day, although he stayed out of the building.
“I went back and I went under the fence,” he says.
Apparently Weiman was missing her phone.