Crack

Abstract

Crack was written a couple of years after I moved to Hamilton Ontario. I was the founding artistic director of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto for eighteen years (from 1979 to 1997) and moved to Hamilton in 2003. The move was very much a class issue: as my partner and I are both artists, we didn’t have enough capital to purchase a house in Toronto, where the average price of three-bedroom home has easily been over four-hundred-thousand dollars lately. Also, the condo boom in downtown Toronto was getting on our nerves. After a condo arrives in a community, the big box stores and chains that accompany it kill the small businesses and the street life that was once so charming, diverse, and intimate. Recently, the Drake Hotel, the Gladstone Hotel and the Distillery District were created arbitrarily — not by artists, but by administrators and entrepreneurs obsessed with gentrification. The messy, cross-class Queen Street community that we had so enjoyed was replaced by corporate-created pseudo-artistic institutions predicated on the premise that art — if it’s sexy enough — will sell condos.