The Marriott Hotel on the north side of Bloor Street East is closed for renovations. It’s been sold to some hotel group or chain or consortium I’ve never heard of. New ownership requires new branding. That’s the law. In the case of this hotel, that includes removing the marquee that has, for years, loomed over the sidewalk providing cover for homeless people, valets on cigarette breaks, cabbies from the taxi stand, and confused tourists up from the subway and looking for all the world like bears fresh from their hibernation. As a local, I know nothing about the hotel and am one of the people least likely ever to patronize it. So a change of this order suddenly puts me on an equal footing with everyone else.
As I watched the marquee’s demolition, I learned that its drab grey cladding had been stuck to a frame of steel girders. (I have no idea how anything works in the real world, so my terminology could be all wrong.) After they pulled off all the cladding, they took a torch and started cutting through the girders. However, because that stretch of sidewalk is heavily travelled during the day, they did all the cutting at night. That had the incidental effect of giving locals like me a light show.
When I look at the photographs I took of the nighttime cutting, I hear a crackling sound. This is not memory (at the time, I could not hear the workers for all the traffic on the street). It’s more a synaesthetic experience. I ‘hear’ the images. There is nothing mysterious about this; nothing extraordinary. Sometimes images grow unruly and insist on breaking out of their expected bounds. They are rebellious. They refuse to stick to their lane and, instead, cast off their auditory surplus for those with ears to hear.
