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Giambrone's tango around the Matador

JOHN BARBER
Globe and Mail, October 16, 2007

Councillor Adam Giambrone would rather talk about his recent junket to France, where he goggled at gold-plated infrastructure in his capacity as a "future leader" of la Francophonie, than the dubious future of a clapped-out booze can in his downtown ward.

On his desk there is a stack of brochures, folders and CDs documenting the marvels he beheld in France, each item fixed with a sticky note directing it to the attention of this or that local bureaucrat. Just as the TTC's young chairman once dreamed of creating a new ferry service in the midst of a fiscal crisis, today he dreams of a French-style payroll tax to fund heavy rail. On such subjects Mr. Giambrone waxes smooth and easy.

But when he comes down to Earth - particularly that part of it occupied by the Matador Club, which once served country music to late-night boozehounds - the words stop up.

What he tries to get across is that he no longer wants the Toronto Parking Authority to expropriate the club and replace it with a handful of parking stalls. But he doesn't want to say why: because the sudden appearance of a "Save the Matador" campaign, ably organized by an ambitious political opponent, caught him in the act of doing just that.

"We're not," he began, speaking of himself in the plural, comme d'habitude, then trailing off and rephrasing.

"We didn't watch, umm ..."

Trying again: "We weren't, uhh ..." Another pause, then: "To be honest with you, we didn't give it a lot of thought."

But now we must. Downtown gadfly Simon Wookey, who ran against Mr. Giambrone in the last municipal election, has assembled what he called "a large group of angry people" to harangue the parking authority at its meeting today. The hipsters are up in arms.

"How can we take a club so storied and so symbolic and turn it into a parking lot?" Mr. Wookey asked. "It flies in the face of everything we're trying to do in the city."

More than that, it exposes a highly dubious use of the powers of expropriation, which the parking authority wields with city permission. Fable is one thing, according to Mr. Wookey, "but a parking lot is hard to argue as a public good." And how is it, he asked, that 45 councillors could unanimously approve such an outrage without one note of protest?

Councillor Kyle Rae, who sits on the parking authority board and opposed the Matador expropriation there - though not when the issue came to council - hopes to kill the proceedings behind closed doors this morning. He also hopes, perhaps vainly, to hold demonstrators at bay until the deed is done.

"I think the board needs to rethink," he said. "I don't think we need to be yelled at to do that."

Even the local Business Improvement Area, which first prompted Mr. Giambrone into action, has backed away from the idea, according to Mr. Rae. Why it got as far as it did, he added, is a mystery. "We don't go to this form of land acquisition without impetus," he said.
But it's clearly going no further with the ward councillor now opposed. "It clearly seems unacceptable to have a parking lot," Mr. Giambrone said. "We've expressed that we're not supportive of tearing [it] down."

Now that nobody can blame the sub-royal we at city hall for the demise of the Matador, it will likely continue its decline into oblivion unmolested. There hasn't been music there for years, and "after hours" is a diminishing time frame of interest only to an unsavoury hard core. Now the owners can sell quietly to a developer without the embarrassment of documenting their business losses at an expropriation hearing.

"The Matador isn't what it was, and it won't be what it is," the Magus of Ward 18 pronounced.
With a weave and a dodge, it's back to the clouds.

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