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classyfoxdestiny · 3 years

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Inside the Turbulent Origins of the Miami Building Collapse

It was in the middle of summer in 1980 when developers raising a pair of luxury condominium towers in Surfside, Fla., went to town officials with an unusual request: They wanted to add an extra floor to each building.

The application to go higher was almost unheard-of for an ambitious development whose construction was already well underway. The builders had not mentioned the added stories in their original plans. It was not clear how much consideration they had given to how the extra floors would affect the structures overall. And, most galling for town officials, the added penthouses would violate height limits designed to prevent laid-back Surfside from becoming another Miami Beach.

At one point, the town building department issued a terse stop-work order. But records show that in the face of an intense campaign that saw lawyers for the developers threaten lawsuits and argue with officials deep into the night, the opposition folded — and the developers got their way.

Frank Filiberto, who was on the Town Commission at the time, recalled feeling as if the developers regarded him and the other officials as “local yokels.”

“They were bullies,” Mr. Filiberto said. “There was a lot of anger.”

Although there is no indication that the catastrophic collapse of the Champlain Towers South building in June was related to the tacked-on penthouse, the alteration was just one of many contentious parts of a project that was pushed through by aggressive developers at a time when the local government seemed wholly unprepared for a new era of soaring condo projects.

Surfside had only a part-time building inspector, George Desharnais, who worked at the same time for Bal Harbour, Bay Harbor Islands and North Bay Village. Records show that the Surfside building department delegated inspections of the towers back to the Champlain Towers builders, who tapped their own engineer to sign off on construction work. The town manager was unable to resolve the penthouse issue because, just as the issue came before the city, he was arrested on charges — later dismissed — of peeping into the window of a 13-year-old girl and abruptly resigned.

The development team itself had a dubious record. The architect had been disciplined previously for designing a building with a sign structure that later collapsed in a hurricane. The structural engineer had run into trouble on an earlier project, too, when he signed off on a parking garage with steel reinforcement that was later found to be dangerously insufficient.

The early 1980s was a freewheeling period for construction in the Miami area, known at the time for its uneven enforcement of regulations, but the Champlain Towers project stood apart — both for the tumult that occurred on the job site and the brazenness of the developers behind the project.

Investigators with the National Institute of Standards and Technology are still in the early days of examining the building’s collapse, with ongoing examinations of the integrity of the foundations and the strength of the materials used to support the building. The investigation will include a review of how the building was designed and constructed, including the building’s modifications, the agency said on Wednesday.

Troubled pasts

By the late 1970s, Surfside was still a humble corner of South Florida, so popular with Canadian snowbirds looking for a discounted slice of paradise that the town dedicated a week to celebrating the connection. Winners of the festival’s beauty pageant could receive a trip to Canada.

One of the Canadians with an eye on the town was the lead developer of Champlain Towers, Nathan Reiber, who brought a grand vision to reshape Surfside’s waterfront at a time when the town was eager to find new sources of tax revenue to keep taxes low for full-time residents. As Mr. Reiber’s team filed for the first Champlain Towers permits in August 1979 — with no 13th-story penthouses — city officials were struggling with serious inadequacies in the water and sewer systems that had led to a moratorium on new development.

The Champlain Towers developers came up with a plan: They would provide $200,000 toward the needed upgrades — covering half the cost — if they could get to work on construction. The town agreed.

“It was exciting,” said Mitchell Kinzer, who was the mayor at the time. “Here we are, little Surfside, a tiny town getting first-class luxury buildings.”

Mr. Reiber pursued the project even as he was dealing with legal troubles in Canada. A lawyer from Ontario who had ventured into real estate, Mr. Reiber and two partners were accused by Canadian prosecutors of dodging taxes in the 1970s by plundering the proceeds of coin-operated laundry machines in their buildings in a scheme to lessen their taxable income. The prosecutor also accused the group of using the expenses of a fake building project to avoid taxes on some $120,000 in rent payments.

After court proceedings that dragged on for years, Mr. Reiber pleaded guilty to one count of tax evasion in 1996. Family members of Mr. Reiber, who died in 2014, did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Mr. Reiber’s lawyer, Stanley J. Levine, also figured prominently in the development of Champlain Towers, handling corporate work for some of the companies involved.

About a decade earlier, Mr. Levine and a member of the Miami Beach City Council had been charged with soliciting an $8,000 bribe from a woman who wanted a zoning variance to build a 47-unit apartment building, according to news coverage from the time. The charge was later dropped. Mr. Levine died in 1999, and a member of his family could not be reached for comment.

Allegations of influence-peddling also dogged the Champlain Towers project. In early 1980, the developers had made campaign contributions that were significant at the time — $100 to one commissioner, $200 to another. Mayor Kinzer objected, and the developers tried to take the money back.

Rick Aiken, the town manager who later had to step down, said the Champlain Towers builders were constantly pressing the town to move faster on permits.

“They’d call me on the phone, want to take me to lunch so that I would push the commission toward giving them a permit,” Mr. Aiken said. He told them that they needed to follow the rules, he said, adding that he could not recall any instances of the developers engaging in improper activity.

On Nov. 13, 1979, the town approved the overall plans for the project.

‘Grossly inadequate’

As the construction got underway at the Champlain Towers sites, both at their North and South properties, turmoil was emerging and plans were changing.

By May, the project’s lead contractor, Jorge Batievsky, had resigned. He soon filed a lawsuit, though records from the case have since been destroyed and Mr. Batievsky has died.

The developers brought in a new contractor, Alfred Weisbrod, but problems continued.

As the first levels of the South building were rising above the ground, a crane on site collapsed so violently that its steel was contorted, according to archived video. A week later, crews discovered that more than $10,000 in wood had been stolen from the site.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did Champlain Towers South collapse?

It could take months for investigators to determine precisely why a significant portion of the Surfside, Fla., building collapsed. But there are already some clues about potential reasons for the disaster, including design or construction flaws. Three years before the collapse, a consultant found evidence of “major structural damage” to the concrete slab below the pool deck and “abundant” cracking and crumbling of the columns, beams and walls of the parking garage. Engineers who have visited the wreckage or viewed photos of it say that damaged columns at the building’s base may have less steel reinforcement than was originally planned.

Were residents previously concerned with the building?

Condo boards and homeowners’ associations often struggle to convince residents to pay for needed repairs, and most of Champlain Towers South’s board members resigned in 2019 because of their frustrations. In April, the new board chair wrote to residents that conditions in the building had “gotten significantly worse” in the past several years and that the construction would now cost $15 million instead of $9 million. There had also been complaints from residents that the construction of a massive, Renzo Piano-designed residential tower next door was shaking Champlain Towers South.

Are other buildings in Florida at risk?

What do we know about those who died?

Entire family units died because the collapse happened in the middle of the night, when people were sleeping. The parents and children killed in Unit 802, for example, were Marcus Joseph Guara, 52, a fan of the rock band Kiss and the University of Miami Hurricanes; Anaely Rodriguez, 42, who embraced tango and salsa dancing; Lucia Guara, 11, who found astronomy and outer space fascinating; and Emma Guara, 4, who loved the world of princesses. A floor-by-floor look at the victims shows the extent of the devastation.

Did anyone survive the collapse?

But public anticipation was building. A newspaper ad for the unfinished buildings claimed that only 27 residences remained available. “Get the best — while they last,” it advised.

By the end of the summer, the developers hired a new permanent contractor, Arnold Neckman, and in August they applied to add the new “penthouse” floor to each property, raising the buildings from 12 stories to 13.

The added weight brought by the penthouse had the potential to exacerbate a failure and contribute to the progressive collapse that killed 98 people this year, said Mehrdad Sasani, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern University who reviewed the building’s design plans. He also said the decision to add a new floor to the top of a previous design was not an accepted practice.

But the penthouse addition would not explain the cause of the collapse, Dr. Sasani said, since buildings are designed with large safety margins. “The relative weight of the penthouse compared to the weight of the structure is not so significant that it could have been an initial cause,” Dr. Sasani said.

There is no record of an objection from the architect on the project, William Friedman, or the structural engineer, Sergio Breiterman.

Both had come to the project after some criticism of their past work. State regulators suspended Mr. Friedman’s license for six months in 1967 after an investigation determined that he had designed a “grossly inadequate” sign structure that fell over during Hurricane Betsy two years prior, damaging the structure of a Miami commercial building, according to records from the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation.

About five years before the Champlain Towers project, Mr. Breiterman had been responsible for inspections on a $5 million parking garage in Coral Gables, where officials later found that the walls in the building lacked steel reinforcing rods that would prevent cars from crashing through, according to a 1976 article in The Miami Herald.

Mr. Breiterman also got the job of inspecting work at Champlain Towers. He gave his seal of approval to the work in October 1980, before the penthouse dispute began.

‘A violation of the code’

A month later, in November, the town appeared to approve the added-on penthouse permit, although it is unclear who signed off on the idea. Two weeks later, the police chief, serving as the interim town manager, sent a curt memo ordering the contractors to halt work, revoking their penthouse permits.

The memo, sternly warning that the penthouses were in fact a violation of Surfside’s codes, came on town letterhead, with the name of Mr. Aiken, the town manager who by that time had been arrested on the peeping charge, crossed off with a series of X’s. (The case against him was later dismissed, with Mr. Aiken saying he had been looking for his dog behind people’s homes.)

Then, a week later, the Town Commission voted to allow the penthouses after all.

Mr. Filiberto, the former commissioner, said he believed that some of the penthouse construction was already completed by then. He said the town was left with a tough choice: Grant a variance or order the builder to demolish the penthouse work — and face a lawsuit.

Years later, Mr. Filiberto wondered whether the developers played equally loose with other aspects of the building project. “If they are that overt in violating the height orders,” he said, “think about all the little intricacies that go into building the building.”

Adam Playford and Michael Majchrowicz contributed reporting. Jack Begg and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

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ontarionewsnorth · 6 years

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'Pharmacare Can't Suffer Same Fate As Electoral Reform' Says @CarolHughesMP (Français inclus) @NDP @GovCanHealth #NorthernOntario Version française ci-dessous It's no secret that the cost of just getting by is going up for Canadians.

#CdnPoli #Algoma-Manitoulin-Kapuskasing MP Carol Hughes #Canadian Government #Canadian politics #daily newspaper #Economic Club of Canada #federal politics #New Democratic Party of Canada #news #Northeastern Ontario #political column #political issues

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brookstonalmanac · 4 years

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Events 12.9

480 – Odoacer, first King of Italy, occupies Dalmatia. He later establishes his political power with the co-operation of the Roman Senate. 536 – Gothic War: The Byzantine general Belisarius enters Rome unopposed; the Gothic garrison flee the capital. 730 – Battle of Marj Ardabil: The Khazars annihilate an Umayyad army and kill its commander, Al-Jarrah Ibn Abdallah Al-Hakami. 1531 – The Virgin of Guadalupe first appears to Juan Diego at Tepeyac, Mexico City. 1688 – Glorious Revolution: Williamite forces defeat Jacobites at Battle of Reading, forcing flight of James II from the country. 1775 – American Revolutionary War: British troops lose the Battle of Great Bridge, and leave Virginia soon afterward. 1824 – Patriot forces led by General Antonio José de Sucre defeat a Royalist army in the Battle of Ayacucho, putting an end to the Peruvian War of Independence. 1835 – Texas Revolution: The Texian Army captures San Antonio, Texas. 1851 – The first YMCA in North America is established in Montreal. 1856 – The Iranian city of Bushehr surrenders to occupying British forces. 1861 – American Civil War: The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War is established by the U.S. Congress. 1868 – The first traffic lights are installed, outside the Palace of Westminster in London. Resembling railway signals, they use semaphore arms and are illuminated at night by red and green gas lamps. 1872 – In Louisiana, P. B. S. Pinchback becomes the first African-American governor of a U.S. state. 1905 – In France, the law separating church and state is passed. 1911 – A mine explosion near Briceville, Tennessee, kills 84 miners despite rescue efforts led by the United States Bureau of Mines. 1917 – World War I: Field Marshal Allenby captures Jerusalem from the Ottoman Empire. 1922 – Gabriel Narutowicz is elected the first president of Poland. 1931 – The Constituent Cortes approves a constitution which establishes the Second Spanish Republic. 1935 – Student protests in Beiping (now Beijing)'s Tiananmen Square, dispersed by government. 1935 – Walter Liggett, American newspaper editor and muckraker, is killed in a gangland murder. 1937 – Second Sino-Japanese War: Battle of Nanking: Japanese troops under the command of Lt. Gen. Asaka Yasuhiko launch an assault on the Chinese city of Nanjing (Nanking). 1940 – World War II: Operation Compass: British and Indian troops under the command of Major-General Richard O'Connor attack Italian forces near Sidi Barrani in Egypt. 1941 – World War II: China, Cuba, Guatemala, and the Philippine Commonwealth declare war on Germany and Japan. 1941 – World War II: The American 19th Bombardment Group attacks Japanese ships off the coast of Vigan, Luzon. 1946 – The "Subsequent Nuremberg trials" begin with the "Doctors' trial", prosecuting physicians and officers alleged to be involved in Nazi human experimentation and mass murder under the guise of euthanasia. 1946 – The Constituent Assembly of India meets for the first time to write the Constitution of India. 1948 – The Genocide Convention is adopted. 1950 – Cold War: Harry Gold is sentenced to 30 years in jail for helping Klaus Fuchs pass information about the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union. His testimony is later instrumental in the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. 1953 – Red Scare: General Electric announces that all communist employees will be discharged from the company. 1956 – Trans-Canada Air Lines Flight 810, a Canadair North Star, crashes near Hope, British Columbia, Canada, killing all 62 people on board. 1960 – The first episode of Coronation Street, the world's longest-running television soap opera, is broadcast in the United Kingdom. 1961 – Tanganyika becomes independent from Britain. 1965 – Kecksburg UFO incident: A fireball is seen from Michigan to Pennsylvania; witnesses report something crashing in the woods near Pittsburgh. 1968 – Douglas Engelbart gave what became known as "The Mother of All Demos", publicly debuting the computer mouse, hypertext, and the bit-mapped graphical user interface using the oN-Line System (NLS). 1969 – U.S. Secretary of State William P. Rogers proposes his plan for a ceasefire in the War of Attrition; Egypt and Jordan accept it over the objections of the PLO, which leads to civil war in Jordan in September 1970. 1971 – Indo-Pakistani War: The Indian Air Force executes an airdrop of Indian Army units, bypassing Pakistani defences. 1973 – British and Irish authorities sign the Sunningdale Agreement in an attempt to establish a power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive and a cross-border Council of Ireland. 1979 – The eradication of the smallpox virus is certified, making smallpox the first of only two diseases that have been driven to extinction (rinderpest in 2011 being the other). 1987 – Israeli–Palestinian conflict: The First Intifada begins in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. 1992 – American troops land in Somalia for Operation Restore Hope. 1996 – Gwen Jacob is acquitted of committing an indecent act, giving women the right to be topless in Ontario, Canada. 2003 – A blast in the center of Moscow kills six people and wounds several more. 2008 – The Governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, is arrested by federal officials for crimes including attempting to sell the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. 2012 – A plane crash in Mexico kills seven people. 2013 – At least seven are dead and 63 are injured following a train accident near Bintaro, Indonesia. 2016 – President Park Geun-hye of South Korea is impeached by the country's National Assembly in response to a major political scandal. 2016 – At least 57 people are killed and a further 177 injured when two schoolgirl suicide bombers attack a market area in Madagali, Northeastern Nigeria in the Madagali suicide bombings. 2017 – The Marriage Amendment Bill receives royal assent and comes into effect, making Australia the 26th country to legalize same-sex marriage. 2019 – A volcano on White Island, New Zealand, kills at least 18 people after it erupts.

#Events

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bridgingthegapwellness-blog · 6 years

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Fellow Entrepreneurs We have created a platform and marketplace to support female entrepreneurship for all women to support female business owners looking to network to grow their brand or business in an intimate setting of up to 75 women. This event was put together by women for women! We are creating marketplaces and creating change. Join us for workshops, photo ops, pampering and a weekend of EMPOWERMENT with an opportunity to promote and sell your products and/or services. What do you get out of this offer? 1/2 price to attend the entire conference with the added benefits of creating awareness to you and your business, camaraderie with other entrepreneurs, strong female advocates, potential customers and new friendships. You must apply by completing the Vendor Application! This event will be marketed through multiple outlets such as website event page, social media advertising, radio and/or newspapers, pamphlets, posters and flyer distribution in and around Northeastern Ontario (this includes community boards and local establishments), and of course we could not accomplish a successful outreach to the communities without your help in sharing this event and your friends and family! On the Facebook event page, your Facebook business page will be added to the event page as a host which will allow you to post about your products or your special offer at the event. You will have access to all the clients, speakers, vendors and spa providers who attend. You will have the opportunity to attend and meet others during the social on Friday evening at Harbour View Centre on Friday evening. The cost also includes free access to the conference which includes all meals on Saturday and Sunday. You will have enough room for a 6' table (you are required to bring your own table, if you require a table we do have a limited few that are available). #BalanceForBetter #IWD2019 #vendorsexpo #womenempowerment #womeninspiringwomen #womensconference #mpltribe #ilovewobc #loveyourself #love #stress #anxiety #mentalhealth #trauma #survivor #change #coach #mindbodyheartsoul #coaching #life #holistic #lifeandwellnesscoach #bridgingthegap #wellness (at Haileybury, Ontario) https://www.instagram.com/p/BsuCqmRhhYV/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=x75dkchwirc8

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bellabooks · 6 years

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A little hometown love from a couple of Canadians

Tracey Richardson and Karen Legasy are members of the Canadian contingent of the Bella Books family. They have chosen to set their 2018 novels (I’m Gonna Make You Love Me and Kindling for the Heart, respectively) in their home country and in their hometowns. While both books are romance novels, their Ontario settings couldn’t be more different. Tracey takes readers to the southern most part of Canada, in the peak of summer, just a stone’s throw from the American city of Detroit. In Karen’s novel, it’s the height of winter and the story takes place in a rural and northern part of the province. Think crackling fires, the great outdoors, the rustic living of a small city. In Tracey’s novel, it’s classic cars, hot sun and Motown music blaring from the speakers. Hard to believe both could be set in Canada, and together the two novels perfectly illustrate the diversity of this country to the north. Q: Why set your novel in Canada? Why now? Tracey: I’ve set one other novel in Canada (Blind Bet), and parts of a couple of other novels in Canada as well (Delay of Game and No Rules of Engagement), but it’s been awhile, and certainly the majority of my novels have been set in the U.S. I’m Gonna Make You Love Me is entirely set in Canada, and for the first time, all my characters are Canadian (they even say “eh” a few times in the book!). The timing of bringing my stories back to Canada feels right, especially with the uncertain political climate in the States. I’m hoping readers are looking for an escape, and I think it’s well past time to showcase more of our wonderful country here to the north. Karen: My Forever Hero, my debut book, is set in Australia with Marlee a vacationing Canadian tourist. My second romance, Kindling for the Heart is set in Timmins, Ontario during the middle of a cold and snowy winter. I chose to set Kindling for the Heart in Canada, in my hometown of Timmins, because the setting is close to my heart and it seemed the natural place for Jo and Sam to meet. It’s like sharing a piece of me with my readers. Sometimes I also feel like hibernating back into my comfort zones, especially after watching the news these days. Canada is indeed a wonderful country and I’m proud to portray some of its beauty that I know best in Kindling for the Heart. Q: Explain what sets your home area apart and what it was like growing up there. Karen: Timmins is approximately an eight-hour drive north of Toronto. It’s quite a ways up there in Northeastern Ontario and I guess you could say it’s a bit remote. At least that’s how I felt as a lesbian coming out in the mid 1990s. Timmins is a resource town with forestry and mining as its main industries. I’ve worked in both, but mostly forestry. Many people who live in Timmins love the north and would never consider living somewhere else—like Jo in Kindling for the Heart. Also known as the ‘city with a heart of gold’, Timmins is the hometown of Shania Twain. She went to the same high school as I did and worked at the same McDonalds, but we never did meet. Although I now live in Ottawa, I always enjoy going back to Timmins. It just felt right to put it on the lesfic map. Headframe of McIntyre Mine, Timmins, Ontario Tracey: Windsor, Ontario, is right across the river from Detroit, so I totally grew up in the shadow of the mighty USA. Until I moved away from that area in my twenties, I realized I suffered from an identity crisis, actually feeling more American than Canadian. Culturally, my news, music, film and television tastes were all very much influenced by America (even my accent), thanks to the geography. I still very much embrace some of those cultural experiences, particularly music. Growing up in the 1970s, Detroit was a treasure trove of music. Motown music was king (queen?)! I loved it, because it was so unique and very much iconic and I wanted to pay homage to it in a novel. Nothing said Detroit, and by extension Windsor, like Motown music back then. The Motown record label at the time even featured a map on which my little town could be picked out. I loved that! A little bit of trivia for fans of lesbian fiction is that the city of Windsor is also Katherine Forrest’s hometown! Detroit skyline Q: Was it easier or more difficult to write a novel based in your home area? Would you do it again? Tracey: It’s definitely easier, because you don’t have to do as much research. But it’s almost too familiar, to the point where you have to pick and choose what things you want to highlight because you can’t include everything. In I’m Gonna Make You Love Me, I pretty much honed in on the things that meant a lot to me as a kid (the old military fort, the Detroit River, and the carhop restaurant that still exists today). I would probably set another novel in that area again but haven’t decided for sure. It’s possible my next novel will again be set there. Karen: In some ways, I found it a bit more challenging because I’m very introverted and writing a lesbian romance set in my hometown was a big deal for me. It was also easier though, writing about a place that I’m overly familiar with and is a part of me. I’m contemplating writing a historical romance set there during the gold rush of the early 1900s, but am not sure yet. It’s on my list of possibilities because I think it would be fun to research and share Timmins’ colourful past. Q: The characters in your new novels, could you see them in any other setting…for instance, a different city or a different country? Karen: For sure. Jo could be a forester in any number of other communities, including ones in northern states like New Hampshire, while Sam a criminal lawyer from Toronto, could just as easily be from someplace like Chicago. In writing Kindling for the Heart, I wanted to create a story that could take place in any small community. The vast Ontario landscape just seemed a fitting place to have two women confronted with the challenges of distance and different backgrounds. It could also take place wherever there’s a small town and a big city far away. Oh yeah, and lots of snow. Tracey: I actually think my characters Claire and Ellie were meant to be in Windsor. Claire is a newspaper editor (at the same newspaper where I actually worked for a brief time as a reporter) who gets drawn into a big story that has cross-border implications (not uncommon at all in that area). And then of course there’s the mighty presence of Motown music in the story, to the point where it’s almost like another character. Definitely, this story needed to be in the heart of Motown without actually crossing the border into Michigan. In other words, it’s as close to Detroit as I could make it while keeping it Canadian. But having said that, I’m Gonna Make You Love Me is a universal love story, and Claire and Ellie could have met anywhere and sparks would still have flown! Q: How does it feel being part of such an international group of authors with Bella Books? Tracey: I think it’s so exciting. When I first started doing this, there weren’t many authors living outside the U.S. Now, the Bella family has grown to include authors from so many different countries, which can only lead to a richer reading experience for our fans. When it comes down to it, we all share a love for women, and for books, and those are truly the ties that bind us, no matter where we hail from. Karen: I feel as though my world has opened up since joining the Bella Books team of authors. When Tracey first approached me to write a joint blog to talk about why we both set our latest books in our Ontario hometowns, I was thrilled! The first book I read of Tracey’s was No Rules of Engagement, almost ten years ago. I thoroughly enjoyed the story and wanted to know a bit about the author. I remember how excited I was to discover Tracey is Canadian, and from Ontario no less. It also gave me hope that one day I too would eventually have a lesbian romance published by Bella Books. Kindling for the Heart is available now. I’m Gonna Make You Love Me comes out this December. http://dlvr.it/Qm42kv

#Books #Karen Legasy #Tracey Richardson

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bruceeves · 7 years

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“Work # 978: Chronicle of a Life Retold”

In my opinion, the late 1970s was the last gasp of true artistic freedom. I initially got involved with the precursor to the CEAC (Centre for Experimental Art and Communication), the Kensington Arts Association right after school in ’75, because there was an involvement with the gay liberation movement and they seemed to be doing interesting things other than simply just slapping paintings on a wall. As an art student I was very interested in conceptual art and the KAA was very much on the same wavelength with me, so it seemed a natural fit. It’s hard to imagine today, but by comparison there was very little activity in the art world at the time. Discounting the commercial secondary market places in and around Yorkville, there was only the Isaac’s and Lamanna galleries, at Yonge and Bloor, that were presenting current work; and the alternative artist-run places were only beginning to pop up – KAA and A Space opened in the very early ‘70s, Art Metropole around 1975, and all the others were later.

In 1970 a loose grouping of people (read commune) living in a vernacular Toronto house at 4 Kensington Avenue (just north of Dundas) in the Kensington market neighbourhood formed what would become by 1973 the Body Politic newspaper and the Glad Day bookstore, which would have been at the beginning of the second wave of the gay liberation movement in Toronto. I was still a starry-eyed art student so this was a little before my time, but gay issues were central to my art practice from that time onward.

The work I was doing at the time was certainly encouraged by KAA and in truth there were limited venues at the time that would have welcomes unabashedly gay-themed work. General Idea was dancing around the edges and being euphemistic about it for commercial careerist reasons, but they grew increasingly conservative and opportunistic as time went on. While its nostalgic today to talk about ‘liberation’ against a backdrop that positions any gay person as being as controversial as being a blond, at that time in the early to mid ‘70s there was a current of activity among groups and individuals who were like the grandchildren of Warhol working parallel to conceptual artists – the Cockettes, John Waters, Gilbert and George, Charles Ludlam, Jack Smith (and me). We were Warhol plus gay liberation. Even as late as the mid-70s society was very harsh in dealing with gay people – lack of job protection, the relationship with the police was fraught, but more interestingly, the art world was notoriously homophobic (I’d venture to say it still is) – so for anyone to make gay issues a central part of their art practice was quite radical at the time. I remember being asked by our Canada Council officer, Brenda Wallace, “why was so much hostility between A Space and the CEAC – is it because their gay?” How could I possibly answer that without laughing in her face?

The issues today are different, and in a way more challenging, because with tolerance comes blandness . . . (Being tolerated is, in essence, merely being allowed to exist, akin to the Irish novelist/playwright Sebastian Barry claim that “people talk about tolerance, but it’s not really about tolerance. It should also be about emulation and reverence and learning from.”)

My involvement with KAA was gradually increasing over the course of 1976 and at the time I was making a series of theoretical drawings for proposed environmental installations involving bodily fluid such as shit walls, cum floors . . . The only one actually realized was a room-sized floor-installation of cum – “Work # 059: Semen Floor” (1976) at the same time I participated in a KAA project in cooperation with Ryerson University to produce a series of multi-camera broadcast quality videotapes with the goal of having artist-made videos shown on television. My project was intended to be an S/M fashion show but the camera crew stormed out in protest at the appearance on camera of a man naked except for boots, leather vest and chaps. The screen shot here is from the couple of minutes that was taped.

It was at the new John Street location that I became much more directly involved, and that space was needed because the programming required it the Kensington location was merely the narrow ground floor of a not very large house; 86 John Street by comparison was two floors of quasi-industrial space that could easily accommodate large events and elaborate programming. It was here that the CEAC name began to appear alongside KAA. I’m unsure when the move actually happened but I surmise that it was in late ’75 because in January 1976 an exhibition of Body Art opened and in April, following my fiasco at Ryerson, I curated a performance art festival, “Work # 042: Bound, Bent, and Determined (a Look at Sado-Masochism)” with works about S/M by Andy Fabo, Wendy Knox-Leet Paul Dempsey, and Ron Gillespie (now Giii). It’s the only time in living memory I’d seen an audience of Leathermen in full regalia (outside of the Opera). This was also the beginning of our international exchanges and performance art tours. In total, there were three European tours with multiple stops at venues from Aalst to Zagreb; one-offs throughout southern Ontario and the northeastern United States; international conferences; and representation at Documenta. The John Street location only operated until September 1976 when the 15 Duncan Street flagship location opened and the CEAC was officially born. This was a ground-breaking event in the history of Canadian art – it was the first time in history that an artist-run centre (and queer-Marxist-dominated one at that) in Canada purchased a permanent home thanks to a $55,000 grant from Wintario. The four story building, located at the north east corner of Duncan and Pearl streets, was a substantial one indeed and CEAC occupied the top and bottom floors with the middle occupied by pre-existing tenants, one of which was the Ontario Liberal Party. Aside from museum spaces, the main performance area on the top floor was easily the largest gallery in the city, and the basement level was similarly large and open, and would eventually become the homes of the Crash ‘n Burn, Toronto’s first permanent punk rock venue, followed by the Funnel, Toronto’s first permanent venue for experimental film.

It was at this time that I was hired as assistant programming director and a few months later, in the late spring of 1977 participated in the second performance art tour of Europe with work presented in Amsterdam, Aalst, Warsaw, Lublin, Bologna, and Ferrara and participation in conferences in Warsaw and Paris. This was followed by an invited to participate in the Free International University’s Violence and Behaviour workshop at Documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany.

During every iteration of Documenta, a survey of the best in cutting-edge art that happens roughly every five years in eastern Germany, Joseph Beuys would install himself for one hundred days in the Fridericianum, a lavish 18th century palace and one of the oldest museums in Europe, and become Headmaster of Free International University. Its program at Documenta VI dealt with a range of contemporary social themes and issues where radical and creative new thinking was needed to overcome existing problems, including human rights, urban decay, nuclear energy, refugees, the Third World, violence, manipulation by mass communications media, and labour issues. These topics were discussed in an interdisciplinary way by a changing stream of international politicians, lawyers, economists, trade unionists, journalists, community workers, sociologists, actors, musicians, and artists. The participants invited to participate in the “Violence and Behaviour” workshop included a contingent from Toronto’s CEAC, a group from South Africa, the British behavioural performance team Reindeer Werk, and a contingent of the Polish contextualists. While Beuys maintained a commanding presence in the museum for the entire run of the exhibition, the “Violence and Behaviour Workshop” was only a small part of his programme and lasted at most a week to ten days. “Work # 971-(02): Dossier # 02 (Violence and Behaviour Work-shop, Documenta VI)” (2016) is a trio of archival documents from those workshops. I am next to Beuys at the far left, videotaping the proceedings. While unrecorded, my lecture on homoeroticism and the simulacra of violence in punk and leather/S&M, while widely praised afterwards, aroused much hostility from the audience in attendance. At the after party when the workshop had finished Beuys launched into a series of demeaning and contemptuous impersonations of his invited guests and ended his thanks by sticking his tongue down my throat. I’m probably one of a dwindling number of men that had been aggressively kissed by an actual card-carrying Nazi (As far as I know he’d never shown any contrition for his wartime exploits). Beuys thought of us as his students; we came to think of ourselves as props. He was a HORRIBLE man, and when he died in 1986 I didn’t shed a tear (crocodile or otherwise).

“Work # 954: Then and Now (Parkside Story)” (2016) brings together two works created thirty-eight years apart which, when united in marriage, question some of our most basic assumptions. The first work, written not long before being sexual assaulted by Joseph Beuys, consists of a grumpy and waspish account of two evenings on the town at the legendary Parkside tavern in 1977 – on its own not of insignificant historical interest – but combined with the second more politically provocative work from 2016 the paradox of present realities in conflict with nostalgic longing comes to the fore. The intent of embedding the incendiary position that “things were better when everyone hated us” on top of a murky and confrontational image is not to malign the magnificence that a certain degree of normality has been allowed to envelop our lives, it is about mourning some of the things we’ve sacrificed in achieving our state of grace. This shift back and forth in time illustrates that, in Luc Sante’s words “utopias last five minutes, to the extent that they happen at all. There will never be a time when the wish for security does not lead to unconditional surrender.” We have allowed, welcomed even, the wholesale corporate sponsorship of our existence – the benevolence of which doesn’t lead to more freedom and creativity, it leads to less. I remember hearing stories, after the gay liberation movement went mainstream in the late 1970s, of single straight men becoming fretful (the poor delicate things) of lunching alone with other men because of, shall we say, appearances. Such was our power to terrify.

The text reads:

“January 14, 1977. Arrived at the Parkside at about 10:00 p.m.; sat down and scanned the room. Not yet full to capacity but quite crowded nonetheless. “The Look” is as it always has been – that of a pseudo-working class dress: flannel shirts, denim; some leather, but not much tonight. Generally everyone takes care of their bodies, physical fitness abounds. I seem oddly out of place – the clothes are right but the body is all wrong. I’m really a wreck tonight, more so than usual. Soon we are invaded by two groups. The first being a pair who’s fantasies lie in the Vogue/Gentleman’s Quarterly life-style; one tells me with relish that they’re going to New York in March and asked if I’d ever been. I said regularly, he said, no seriously . . . I said, regularly. We devised a plan to get them to leave saying we will meet them later at another bar. Lies of course; it worked. The second group was of four fitting the stereotype of the room. They too seemed devoid of intellect. We changed tables to sit with two friends and a third who was a diminutive version of Karl Beveredge; I told him so but, of course, he didn’t know what I was talking about. Conversation was very pleasant. These two have finely-tuned sensibilities; certainly a rarity. Around closing-time we all decided to go dancing. I went only as a treat to myself because I worked hard all week and was pleased with my progress.

“The situation there was similar – many of the same people, same general look. The atmosphere in the Parkside is very casual; no obvious sexual searching exists. The disco was the opposite – people standing, wandering around; waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. Maybe the next one will be . . . waiting, waiting. As always I seem to arouse no interest, for I’ve never really fit into the stereotype. I began fantasizing them all masturbating into mirrors. This situation inhibits me to the point of being afraid to ask anyone to dance. A rejection tonight would be heart-breaking.

“I left; 4:00 a.m., went home.

“February 12, 1977. Got to the Parkside about 9:30 to meet David there but he didn’t show up until 10:15. The crowd was the same as usual; didn’t know a soul. Everyone dressed alike. Everyone very butch but I could only pick out one person that didn’t have his lumberjack shirt ironed. I wore black police boots, green work pants (dirty) black t-shirt inside out with the right armpit torn, hair all over, the beginnings of a Hitler moustache. A much raunchier version of the rest of the room; the Xerox machine was broken, I guess. David arrived, we had couple. Changed tables for a more central location because our view of the landscape was blocked by pillars. Had a couple more, discussed Robert Handforth’s looks, too bad he’s the enemy. Went down the road for a couple after much debate but David wouldn’t be served. So we went back. Sat with a friend of David’s I remember him from the march but can’t recall his name. Went to another table, I can’t remember why; had a couple more. Conversation was about commercial films. Ended up God-knows-where in the East end. David getting the attention of two while I sat like a lump. All went back downtown for a burger at Fran’s – typical service. Got a ride home at about 4:30. Ron was up, had some tea and went to bed.”

I stumbled upon this text entirely by accident. After a health scare forced me to get my affairs in order I began researching my own career at the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections at York University, which houses the CEAC archive. When I found this long forgotten hand-written document my brain screamed “what the fuck . . . !” Having never been a diarist, what I find perplexing is why did I begin with this account of a couple of nights on the town, and why did I stop after only two entries? Had I been disciplined enough to continue one can only imagine the shock and horror that would have been provoked by firsthand accounts of the crises our community faced with the AIDS epidemic and beyond.

To say that the Parkside Tavern was ugly would be an understatement. Attracting the leather/levis cohort of the community and located at 530 Yonge Street, this exclusively male enclave in the back room of the tavern was a brightly lit and minimally furnished dive. It was a room that style forgot. The Parkside had all the charm of a backwoods Legion Hall. But this would be an insult to every Legion Hall in the country.

It was absolutely my favourite place.

“Work # 954: Then and Now (Parkside Story)” has only ever been shown twice; as part of a mini-career survey at the Robert Kananaj Gallery in Toronto in early 2017 and, more significantly, for one day at the 519 Community Centre as part of the 2016 Nuit Rose festival. I stood in the corner of the room when it was displayed like a nosy spider and was stunned by the reaction to the work. Aside from the idiots that can’t pry themselves away from their phones, the text was devoured and tempers were flaring. I remember in particular an older woman and her much younger friend heatedly arguing – the young woman would have none of it, the very idea that gay life before her birth may have had anything to offer was not only an absurdity, it was an insulting dismissal of her world-view. Her much wiser companion disagreed. Loudly. The work was constantly surrounded by a crowd. At another moment a man turned away in tears; not old enough to have been to that marvelous dump but perhaps in silent agreement with the older woman that contemporary urban gay life is a bit . . . sterile and over-designed?

At the end of 1978 I moved to New York City and I simply detested it there. The filth, the segregation, the expense, the pretentiousness, the provincialism . . . I was ready to come back after six months, but then I me someone who would turn out to be the man of my dreams, John Hammond. At the time I thought “ok, I’ll give it a shot. But if it’s not perfection I’m out of here.” Twenty-one years later John came around to my way of thinking and agreed that New York was indeed a shit hole and acknowledged it was time to move on. So we sold our house (in the slums of Brooklyn) and headed north in the spring of 2001. Had we waited six months, current events would have rendered our house worthless and we’d have been stuck there. But let me digress . . .

Art was completely on the backburner. I’d come to the conclusion that by the end of the 1970s art had hit a brick wall; that the very idea of an artist as innovator had played itself out, that the narrative of art history had come to an end. This was bolstered by the rise of the post-this and neo-that’s and all of their attendant derivativeness. Aside from all of these theoretical questions, given the health crisis gay men were beginning to face, art seemed kind of pointless when everyone around you was dropping like flies. It was not until the early 1990s, once I’d been able to digest the horrors of the previous 15 years, that I made tentative steps to revive a long dormant art practice. As a consequence, during this period my time was occupied with jobs as the art director of Christopher Street magazine and the New York Native newspaper. Concurrent with this, for a time, I was also an on-call page designer and night art director at the Village Voice. In my spare time I was the co-founder and chief archivist of the International Gay History Archive (now housed as part of the Rare Books and Manuscript division of the New York Public Library). At the end of this period saw my archival collection providing the backbone for the landmark 1994 exhibition at the New York Public Library “Becoming Visible: The Legacy of Stonewall” and publication of the accompanying book “Becoming Visible: An Illustrated History of Lesbian and Gay Life in Twentieth-Century America” (Penguin/Putnam 1998).

Instigated by Carlos Gutierrez-Solana, director of the New York non-profit Artists Space, the gallery would dedicate an area near the front entrance as an “AIDS Forum”, to be in place until a cure was found and showing work by a different artist each month that had been inspired by the epidemic. It was a noble idea, but most of the work was sentimental claptrap. In early 1993 Carlos commissioned me to create a site-specific installation directly on their walls (Sol Lewitt-style) as part of a multi-artist, gallery-wide project evocatively titled “Activated Walls”. During their fund-raising period, the artists worked in the gallery during regular business hours, supposedly allowing the public to witness the mythical “artist process” as it unfolded. After the opening with the standard bad wine the exhibition would remain for the also standard three weeks and them be painted over and destroyed. Based on previous work, Gutierrez-Solana knew I would in all likelihood create an inflammatory polemic and thus increasing the profile of the gallery. I was being groomed as the next sortie in the on-going culture war.

“Work # 163: Interrogation (An AIDS Forum)” (1993) was designed in the blunt, take-no-prisoners style of Russian constructivism and was completely at odds with all the variations of lyrical abstraction being vomited onto the other walls of the gallery. The walls were painted the colour of dried blood and a row of ten Xerox enlargements of prominent government scientists, journalists, and movement spokespeople were glued to the wall near the floor. Above these images was a stenciled (and carefully footnoted) text which declared in part that “these collaborators maintain their positions of authority through theft, questionable research, conflict of interest, fabricated data, bogus medications, lucrative publishing deals, and star-studded fund-raising scams. Along with their AIDS movement flunkies and media cheerleaders, they have conspired to stifle any research that does not centre on HIV theory”. Brightly coloured chalk lines, like laser beams against the red background, connected the individual charges with the heads of the accused. Very high up on the wall was stenciled “AZT=Death” parodying and implicating the “Silence=Death” slogan of the then fashionable ACT UP.

That the text was incendiary was beside the point; it was the calling into question the depth of the liberal pieties paraded around by the red-ribboned Chanel and Armani set that was going a step too far, and would prove to be explosive – leading to unintended consequences. Being photographed at the opening by Vanity Fair was no insulation against the social death caused by tossing a bomb into the middle of that year’s trendy cause. Even though the installation was described as being the best of the entire series so far, a week later the director was fired by the Board of Directors (which at that time included Cindy Sherman) and his replacement unilaterally cancelled the AIDS Forum project quicker than an executive order from Donald J. Trump.

As I’ve said, I simply detested New York City. Throughout this whole period I’d felt neither comfortable nor particularly welcomed there, but the feelings for my man so far outweighed my feelings for the city that we bought a little broken down house in the slums of Brooklyn in 1984 we spent the next several years transforming it into our home, playing host to an ever expanding network of artists, activists, actors and writers from around the world. Throughout the 1990s we were both becoming increasingly disenchanted and our trips to Canada increasing in frequency. The decision to leave was in many ways a no-brainer, John’s final years in the States were frustrating and unfulfilled, and all of our friends had either died or had already left, so by Christmas 2000 we were ready to leave New York.

After the grueling closing/packing/getting-out-for-good that any real estate transaction entails, the trauma of our final escape to Canada at the end of May 2001 was complete when we were nearly arrested. We were lost somewhere in the middle of New Jersey, driving in the wrong direction on a one way street into the oncoming headlights of a police cruiser. The cops had their flash lights out and their guns at the ready and were none-too-quick in concluding that these two pieces of human wreckage were not running the guns, or drugs, or white slaves, or weapons of mass destruction they had been hoping to find. I’d left Canada 22 years before with a small knapsack and was returning with the contents of a three storey house, plus a man and a large dog in tow; the onus was on my paltry shoulders to cross an international border and not screw up. I’d worked myself into a paranoid frenzy by the time we got to Niagara Falls, only to discover that the Customs and Immigration staff looked like they had pot parties after work and were actually excited with the prospect of a returning Canadian.

When I was approved as John’s sponsor and he had received conditional approval from Immigration through the family class category in April of 2003, he took to wearing a maple leaf pin in his lapel. I found this slightly cringe-inducing. But the depth of John’s growing animosity toward his own country peaked when he confessed a wish that he had been born a Canadian; this I found truly shocking.

We were partners in the truest sense of the word, with an avid interest in whatever projects each of us was pursuing at the time. We would help one another through our frequent bouts of self-doubt, and soldier on it the face of those financial crises that only seem to occur at the most inopportune of times. We would find ourselves both happily unemployed after getting out of particularly soul-destroying jobs only to discover that our house had termites; or in 2001 when we finally did the adult thing and invested all of our extra money in mutual funds on September 10th . . . In March 2004, after much toing and froing, we got married when it became possible at City Hall on our twenty-fifth anniversary. And then cancer paid a visit . . .

While John’s health had been fragile for some time, it seemed to have improved dramatically; he no longer needed to use an inhaler and he was for the first time in years relaxed and stress-free. When he was diagnosed with lung cancer, surgery was planned then aborted after a second test revealed that the cancer had spread to his pancreas and liver and the prognosis was very negative – 3-12 months. In August John complained of shortness of breath and was taken to the emergency room, his cancer had spread quite rapidly and was beginning to affect his kidneys. Plans were arranged for him to die at home but he passed away in the early morning of September 12, 2004 a few hours before the delivery of his deathbed. February 6, 2017

Bruce Eves creates conceptually-driven photo-based works that explore the shifting nature of time, focus, and perception, as well as the ever-changing relationship between image versus interpretation and memory versus present-day reality. He co-founded and was chief archivist for the International Gay History Archive (now part of the Rare Books and Manuscript division of the New York Public Library). His work is represented in a diverse number of public collections from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Tom of Finland Foundation.

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