The Globe and Mail

There is a city that I want to recognize as my own -- where artists are not driven from their homes, but treated as essential agents -- so essential as to be left alone. In this metropolis of genuine texture, there's a thriving urban ecology of artists -- painters, filmmakers, videographers, writers and dancers -- and, in one instance, about 100 of these people live and work in a century-old former lamp factory with industrial steel doors and freight elevators lined with inky wood and lanky cables. In this creative city of deep imagination, there is no chance this venerable old building will be knocked down.