Monday, May 21, 2007

One piece of mail dominated my mailbox last week – a thick 6 X 12 folder. And I soon discovered that that was just the beginning.

When I unfolded it, my desk was covered by this now-12 X 36 piece of unaddressed mail. Talk about, "Go big or go home"; this was "Go gargantuan or go to hell."

The cover was very understated. In fact, it was so understated that, at first, I had trouble figuring out what I was looking at.

After spending some time studying it, I determined that the duotone full-bleed photo was either of a branch framing a target in the sky or of a leafy branch and a concentric-circled ripple in water. The gold type set over the brownish-purplish photo read, "Living Shangri-la Toronto" so that wasn't much help.

Not certain of what to think, I flipped to the back cover. It showed the back of a woman from shoulders to mid-butt, wearing a kimono. Or was it a sari? Admittedly, I'm not up on my foreign female fashions but this garment looked like a combination of both. (Where's James Hilton when you need him?)

To learn more, I turned to the only paragraph of explanatory text. The first sentence read, "University Avenue may be Canada's most ceremonial grand boulevard."

To which I say, so what?

The next sentence read, "Living Shangri-La Toronto, a 704-foot glass tower, is a timeless, elegant form."

I repeat, so what?

Sentence #3: "A subtle bend in this grand boulevard" – Do you mean the tower is now a boulevard? – "allows this new icon to announce itself as one of Canada's greatest buildings." Wait a minute. Now you're telling me that the boulevard is an icon but it's telling the world that it's a building?

Then they really get me confused. The next sentence read, "Soon to be Toronto's finest five-star hotel, Living Shangri-La Toronto will offer breathtaking views and an impressive array of world-class amenities, designed to captivate Toronto's skyline and attract discerning connoisseurs."

So they're building some 700 foot glass tower hotel just so they can dominate (sorry, "captivate") the skyline and generate traffic from connoisseurs of who-knows-what?

All I could say was that they'd gone to a lot of expense just to get me to stay in their hotel and impress some connoisseurs. I also had to say, "I can't afford your rates."

They talked about The Residences on floors 18-48 being available for $800,000 and up. And their Private Estates on floors 49-65 starting at $2.3 million. For how many nights, I wanted to know. And does that at least include a free mini-bar?

But I shouldn't have asked. At the bottom of the back cover are the words, "Sales June 9". Ah ha, I said to the back of the kimono-sari lady, you're selling units in a hotel.

I only had two questions left in my mind:

(1) Why didn't they state what they were doing in the beginning, instead of beating around the glass tower bush?

(2) Why are they distributing this piece to middle-class neighbourhoods in North Vancouver?

For one thing, we're 3000 miles from Toronto and I don't know of any of my with-children neighbours who would be mildly interested in pulling up stakes to live in a glass tower, even if it is situated on a bend on a ceremonial boulevard.

And unless the men and women on my street are only faking their concern about paying pennies more for gasoline these days, I don't think many of them have an extra $2.3 million to invest in such a property, regardless of how many connoiseurs it attracts.

At least that's the opinion of the neighbour named,

Dr. Bob
b_knight@telus.net