The wildest stories from the legendary 888 Dupont art squat

“IN 1993, I lived at Davenport and Ossington, so I passed 888 Dupont on my bike all the time. I had some friends living there, and when I got word that someone was leaving, I jumped on their unit. I was 31 and had recently come back from trips to Asia and Africa.

Besides the fact that it was one of the cheapest big places you could get in town—I paid around $700 a month—the building was also famous because everyone knew you could buy drugs there. I never went down to the basement because it had this really weird smell from drugs. I’m not even sure what the drugs were, but it wasn’t just pot. On my floor, there were nice quiet people who kept to themselves.

I’m a collector, so I loved having all the wall space to put everything up. It was a huge place, and it had very high ceilings, which I covered almost every inch of with art, found objects, belts, jewellery. I had a lot of fabrics and crafts and sculptures I brought back from my travels. There was also art made by friends, including Kurt Swinghammer, Fiona Smyth, Erella Ganon and Bill Wrigley. And then there was a bunch of different pop culture items, like merchandise from the movie E.T., toy sewing machines, old board games, Raggedy Ann dolls and tons of other stuff I picked up at garage sales. People called it the gOgO museum.

I lived there alone, and I never built anything in it. So there were no rooms, not even a bathroom—just a wide open space. Right in the middle of the room was a toilet and a shower. When anyone came over, I’d have to turn around while they used the toilet, or else they’d have to go to the shared washroom down the hall.

On one side of me was a sewing factory, and I could hear the machines and people speaking Chinese, and behind me were the train tracks. So there was all this low-frequency oscillation in the background, like the hum a fridge makes, and I always slept really well there.

When I lived there, I worked in media relations for a virtual reality company called the Vivid Group—or as I liked to say, I did VR PR. I also wrote for a technology art magazine called Cyberstage, run by Mark Jones, who was head of Seneca’s media program at the time. We’d have editorial meetings at my place.

I didn’t have a lot of parties, but once a year I threw a big party on my birthday, and hundreds of people would come. I knew a lot of people from hanging out in the ’80s and ’90s, doing art things and promoting raves. This was before Facebook and Instagram, so I’d just invite people by phone. At the time, Bell had this thing where you could make lists of people and record a message and it would send that message out to the entire list. That service didn’t survive the internet, but it was fun while it lasted.

I left 888 in 1998, after I got married. In 2021, when I heard that the landlord was selling the building, I went to the last party. It was in the outside space that faces the supermarket, and Keith Mustachi, this groovy young kid, was deejaying. I went up to my old space and saw that it was being used by Andrea Shahara Kong, who does really cool art projects. And I thought it was great that, so many years later, my old space was being used by someone like her.”

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