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16 | T UESDAY, JULY 30, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITIONtrav e l
Dismissed for decades as a postindus-
trial wasteland, Sterling Road, a zigzag-
ging half-mile strip of old factories and
warehouses in Toronto, is getting a sec-
ond life. Last summer, the North Ameri-
can debut of a splashy Banksy exhibi-
tion in an empty warehouse there drew
a global spotlight. With the arrival of To-
ronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art
(MOCA) last fall, Sterling Road is newly
hip, its appeal broadening beyond the
small cadre of tuned-in artists and bohe-
mian types who for years have had it to
themselves. The street’s cavernous
structures have also quickly become hot
real estate.
While creative entrepreneurs with
trendy food spots and boutiques are de-
scending on the road on Toronto’s West
Side, the area’s rapid gentrification is
jolting locals and even some newcomers
into action.
“Artists are the magic of Sterling
Road, and their success is our success,”
said Steve Himel, a craft brewer who
joined with neighbors as well as mu-
seum leaders in a coalition called On
Sterling to “empower people who were
already here. We all have to put the
neighborhood first.”
But for Jeff Stober, a former tech exec-
utive who has developed some of Toron-
to’s buzziest hotels, restaurants and re-
tail spaces as part of his Drake brand,
Sterling Road’s emergence couldn’t
come fast enough.
“It’s like Brooklyn — great bones,
great old manufacturing buildings, and
a great history of artists,” said Mr. Sto-
ber, whose Sterling Road restaurant,
Drake Commissary, became a scene
soon after it opened in a huge former
pickle factory in June 2017. “The trans-
formation’s overdue.” He had earlier de-
veloped the artsy Drake hotel, a former
flophouse turned boutique hotel after a
multimillion-dollar renovation. The ho-
tel opened in 2004 about a mile and a half
away in another district, Queen Street
West.
Situated in an area that more than a
century ago was a manufacturing hub
for everything from ketchup to cars,Drake Commissary serves comfort food
that includes duck-liver pâté and beef
tartare sandwiches. It has seen “up-
ticks” in business since MOCA opened,
rather than a surge of customers, Mr.
Stober said. “But we’re looking at the
long-term horizon.”
The Fitzroy, a dress-rental retailer
that relocated to Sterling Road in De-
cember, is also betting on the street’s fu-
ture. “It’s an area that feels like it’s on
the edge of something, about to blow
up,” said Angela Pastor, a co-founder.
“It’s not yet overexposed or over over-
priced, and it feels like anyone doing
anything cool is coming here.”
Sterling Road’s earliest adopters are
also reaping dividends from the street’s
new profile. The independent Canadian
publisher, House of Anansi Press, whose
titles include best sellers like BehrouzBoochani’s prizewinning 2019 memoir,
“No Friend But the Mountains,” arrived
in 2015, transforming a former garage
into its headquarters and bookstore.
The move proved prescient.
“With Banksy, we saw people come
from all over the world,” said Sarah
MacLachlan, the president and pub-
lisher. “And MOCA shifted everything
about how people think of this area.”
Sales at the bookstore have grown 40
percent this year over the same period
in 2018, she said.
Even bigger changes will come to
Sterling Road over the next decade, with
plans for a park, day care facilities and
affordable housing, according to Lynda
Macdonald, the City of Toronto’s direc-
tor of community planning for the To-
ronto and East York District, which in-
cludes the area.
“Right now, people live in surround-
ing neighborhoods, but nobody lives on
the street itself,” she said. “In the com-
ing decade, we’ll have 540,000 square
feet of new housing in about 900 housing
units, along with 565,000 square feet of
new office space.”
But in a cycle familiar to big urban ar-
eas, artists who had quietly colonized
the area’s disused factories are feeling
the squeeze. They say they are fighting
for their future and the neighborhood’s
creative atmosphere. Soon after the Mu-seum of Contemporary Art announced
its Sterling Road location in 2016, land-
lords were quick to start hiking rents,
and many artisans fled. Some, though,
are fighting back.
“I love living in a hip neighborhood,
but rents in the building next door have
gone up as much as 100 percent since
MOCA,” said Angola Murdoch, a 16-year
resident who operates the aerialist
troupe LookUp Theatre from her high-
ceilinged home in a converted 1890 mu-
nitions factory. “This amazing co-op
woodworking shop, a painter and a met-
alworker — they all left.” In March, Ms.
Murdoch and her neighbors sued their
landlord to prevent conversions of their
lofts to expensive commercial spaces;
they won.
MOCA’s leaders describe the museum
as a force for good on Sterling Road. “We
want to empower the local art scene,
and create a welcoming and accessible
hub,” said November Paynter, the muse-
um’s director of programs. “Part of our
mission is to be socially and culturally
useful.” MOCA’s fourth floor has consis-
tently showcased community groups
and local creators, she added.
More than 100,000 visitors are ex-
pected to visit the museum in its first
year, Ms. Paynter said, drawn by bound-
ary-pushing installations like Mark
Dion’s The Life of a Dead Tree — “a mas-
sive, fully grown, deceased tree, along
with its inhabitants” such as insects and
lichen, according to exhibition text.
Spread across five floors and 55,
square feet, MOCA’s raw concrete
spaces feel tastefully unrefined, thanks
to an industrial-inspired design by the
Toronto firm architectsAlliance. Art
Metropole, a longtime Toronto art-book
retailer, is in the airy lobby, along with
an outlet of the Toronto organic bakery,
Forno Cultura. “This neighborhood
doesn’t have that many public and social
spaces,” Ms. Paynter said.
With Sterling Road in the spotlight,
even some newcomers realize that it
will be a struggle to preserve the street’s
character.
“The concern is that we’ll end up with
a Burger King and a drugstore and a
bank. If we can balance out gentrifica-
tion, we can set a great example for To-
ronto and other cities,” said Mr. Himel
who opened Henderson Brewing inside
an abandoned tent factory in 2016. Ster-
ling Road, he said, “was a wasteland
then.”Toronto’s Sterling Road makes the scene
Scenes from Sterling Road in Toronto,
clockwise from far left: Drake Commis-
sary, inside a former pickle factory;
looking north on Sterling Road toward the
Museum of Contemporary Art; the head-
quarters of the House of Anansi Press;
Mark Dion’s “The Life of a Dead Tree,” an
installation at MOCA.PHOTOGRAPHS BY EUGEN SAKHNENKO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESGentrification brings
duck pâté, higher rents
and fears for the futureBY MICHAEL KAMINERThe first roller coaster Jim Seay rode
was the wooden Cyclone at Coney Is-
land in New York when he was 9 or 10
years old. He admits having been
“pretty scared.” Today, Mr. Seay, 59, is
behind award-winning, heart-in-throat
thrill rides around the world.
After graduating from Cornell Uni-
versity with a mechanical engineering
degree, Mr. Seay worked at the Hughes
Aircraft Company in California in the
company’s aerospace department. In
the late 1980s, as military spending
dropped, Mr. Seay shifted into entertain-
ment, working for Six Flags before
opening Premier Rides, based in Balti-
more, which designs, constructs and
tests attractions like Revenge of the
Mummy at Universal Studios and the
soon-to-open Dragonfire in Qatar. As
president of Premier Rides, he spends
more than half the year traveling to
rides or to explore future coaster desti-
nations.
Below are edited excerpts from a con-
versation with Mr. Seay.What was it like to make the leap from
aerospace to roller coasters?
There was a significant learning curve.
At Hughes Aircraft, it was a white-collar
engineer environment. In the theme
parks, there’s a very technical side. The
engineers are developing the attrac-
tions, but there’s also an entire team of
electricians and mechanics. They are
the people who actually know how to
make things work. I learned that the
people at the theme parks tend to under-
stand the equipment better than even
the suppliers who are building it. They
live with it daily. They inspect it daily. I
learned a tremendous amount about the
safety and maintenance side of things
from the front-line technicians.How do you come up with your ideas?
Sometimes we design our own attrac-
tions based on the creative talent at Pre-
mier Rides. Sometimes you have people
who want to develop something around
an intellectual property and you work
together to develop something. We were
very fortunate to do that with Universal
Studios on the Revenge of the Mummy
attractions. That ride is now in three lo-
cations around the world. Over 160 mil-
lion people have ridden those rides. It’s
very humbling.What is it about roller coasters that
make people such fanatics?
It’s a way to escape the complexity and
stress of everyday life. You put yourself
into an environment where you know
you will be safe, but you’re not in control
of where you’re going, how fast, how it’s
going to turn and maneuver. And you’re
usually sharing the experience with
someone. I see people riding with their
wife or child and they’re screaming the
whole time. At the end, they catch theirbreath, don’t say anything and high five
each other. They remember the ride for
the rest of their lives.How are parks around the world differ-
ent?
You see people love rides and love to be
thrilled no matter where you are, but
there are cultural differences that make
the experience more unique. The Chi-
nese put on these amazing shows, very
elaborate Cirque du Soleil-like perform-
ances.
Here people think of going to a park as
a destination, but the parks in Europe
are very much part of the community.
There are parks like Tivoli Gardens or
Liseberg where people will go after din-
ner to listen to music or ride rides. I was
at a park in Finland called Linnanmaki
when they put on tango music and all
these people just danced on the midway.
It wasn’t planned. They just love the
tango in Finland. It was really interest-
ing. Parks are just part of your commu-
nity there.
In the Middle East they don’t want to
build a traditional theme park. They
want it to be very, very special. For ex-
ample, if you go to Abu Dhabi there’s
Ferrari World. They enclosed the entire
theme park with a bright red, Ferrari-
themed roof which you can see from
outer space. That’s an expense that
would be hard to justify in other areas,
but that’s the scale that they do it at in
the Middle East.Do you have time to be a tourist?
I do. I think it’s very important when you
go to a location to immerse yourself. I
make it a point to always have time to
disappear into the community, meet lo-
cal people, try local food. I’ve never had
a problem communicating, never had a
problem working with anyone. I think if
you respect people when you travel, that
respect is returned. People are not as
different as we think they are.What have been some of your favorite
places to visit?
There are some amazing places to go in
Chile. I was on a business trip to Santia-
go and was looking at other places to go
while we were there. The only way to get
to Easter Island is to fly from Chile.
There’s a direct flight. At the last minute,
my wife, a friend of ours and I decided to
jump on one of those flights. We spent
three or four days exploring Easter Is-
land. There are volcanoes on the island
that you can go to and you’ll be next to 30
of the famous Easter Island heads.What’s on your short list?
I’ve wanted to go to Africa since I was a
child. I just haven’t been. Business is
what drives my travel. I don’t take vaca-
tions because I always get a few days
when I go somewhere. I consider those
my vacations. There are a number of
countries in Africa seeing tremendous
growth, so I think there will be a reason
to go there soon.His goal: Make your stomach drop
BY KELLY DINARDOJim Seay, owner of Premier Rides, at Tigris, Florida’s tallest launch coaster.ZACK WITTMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESJewels of sovereigns since 1780
EXHIBITION FROM 12 JULY TO 28 AUGUST 2019
GRIMALDI FORUM, MONACO
CHAUMET
IN MAJESTY
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