The Drake Hotel: How a Queen West Flophouse Became a Symbol

The Drake Hotel stands at 1150 Queen Street West, a red-brick corner building in the stretch the city calls West Queen West. It is a hotel, a restaurant, a music room and a rooftop bar. In Toronto conversation it is also a shorthand. When people argue about how this part of Queen Street changed, the Drake is usually the first building they name.

Before the boutique

The hotel's own account says the building first opened in 1890. For much of the twentieth century it was a cheap hotel on a working street, and by the late 1990s it was widely described as a flophouse: rooms of last resort for people with few other options.

West Queen West at that time was a strip of low rents, small shops and old commercial buildings. Artists and musicians had been moving in for years for exactly that reason: space was cheap.

The reopening

In late 2001 the building was bought by the Toronto entrepreneur Jeff Stober. After a renovation of more than two years, it reopened as the Drake Hotel on Valentine's Day 2004: a boutique hotel with a restaurant, a basement stage for music and a rooftop patio. The red-brick shell was kept and the inside was rebuilt. Later the hotel added a second, contemporary building, which it calls its Modern Wing.

Why it became a symbol

The Drake did not invent West Queen West's art and music scene, which had grown up over the previous decade and more. What it did was turn that reputation into a destination with a front desk. A hotel draws visitors from outside the neighbourhood and tells them, in effect, that the street is worth coming to. Over the following years galleries, design shops and restaurants opened along the strip, and rents rose.

That is why the building comes up whenever the word gentrification does. Its story contains both sides of the argument at once: a landmark brick building saved and put back into use, and a set of rooms that once housed people with nowhere else to go, given over to visitors. The facade records the first. Nothing on it records the second.

Visiting

The Drake is a working hotel and restaurant, so look from the street or go in as a customer. It sits a short streetcar ride west along Queen Street from downtown.

How this connects to a Roamer walk

No Roamer tour goes to the Drake itself. The closest Roamer walk is the Trinity Bellwoods walk, which starts at the old college gates on Queen Street about a kilometre east of the hotel: ten stops over about 1.3 kilometres through the park, around an hour. For the neighbourhood story, there is also the Kensington Market and Chinatown walk, which starts about two and a half kilometres east of the Drake at the Kiever Synagogue on Denison Square: eleven stops over about 1.8 kilometres, about 85 minutes at an easy pace. It tells a related story from an older neighbourhood, of houses that became shops one front yard at a time and communities that took over from one another, and you can reach the Drake afterwards by streetcar along Queen. For more on how this stretch of Queen Street has changed, read Queen West: How a Street Changes Hands.