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The Docks turning into a Casino??
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| itikia |
From Toronto nightclub dot com:
The embers glowing and crackling in the fireplace behind Jerry Sprackman’s desk lull you into thinking “cozy.” But Sprackman doesn’t do cozy. Not nearly so well, anyway, as he does prickly. Suggest that the location of his office is unfortunate—in the decrepit Portlands, at the east end of the Toronto harbour—and he stands abruptly, navigating the pillars of file folders and documents on his office floor to get to the wall switch and dim the overhead lights.
“What do you think that’s worth?” he demands, waving toward the window beyond a 30-foot credenza scattered with Sprackman-and-a-celebrity photos. He doesn’t wait for my response to the view of the glittering skyline. “Millions,” he says. “This is a goddamn jewel is what it is.”
He’s referring to the setting. And Sprackman, a trim 66-year-old whose close-cropped hair gives him a faint resemblance to the comic Joey Bishop, has yet to embellish it with the gem he feels it deserves. In 1996, the market for high-rise office towers on Polson Street was less than desirable, so he opened the Docks, a sui generis “entertainment complex” in a former metal-manufacturing plant. Shortly afterward, the Docks’ perimeter fences were discovered to have enclosed a public boardwalk and a parkette. Sprackman complied with the city’s demands to move the fence line, claiming the encroachment had been an innocent mistake. But the incident began a push-and-shove war with officialdom that has continued ever since.
Conducting a tour of the Docks eight years later, Sprackman believes that he has emerged the winner. So far, at least. Brusquely, as he does most things, he reels off the amenities: a half-acre dining and nightclub area with 20 bars and a licence to serve 2,500 people; a torch-lit, football field–size patio, billed as the world’s largest, with another 11 bars and a capacity of 10,000; plus dozens of pay-per-use amusements for kids of all ages. Patrons can enjoy a “beach” four feet above the harbour ($10), 16 beach-volleyball courts ($15), a four-foot-deep swimming pool ($10), a mini-putt golf course ($6), weights and gym equipment ($5), a rock-climbing wall ($10) and the giant Scream’n Demon swing suspended from 125-foot-high steel towers ($25). A paintball range tests your marksmanship, a speed cage your baseball, football and hockey skills. Overlaid with the pump of rock music on a warm summer day, the place is a clubber’s playground inspired by Fear Factor. During peak season, the Docks has been known to attract as many as 50,000 guests per week. Though Sprackman won’t reveal dollar amounts, if each patron were to leave behind $50 over the course of a Saturday afternoon—probably a conservative estimate—that would translate into gross revenues of $12 to $16 million, perhaps as much as $40 million in a good year.
Still, Sprackman would readily tear it all down tomorrow, he says, if given approval to exercise his real ambition, the so-called gem—Toronto’s first genuine casino. The project he has in mind, detailed in a spiral-bound document he pushes across his cluttered desk, has been commissioned by a group called the Docks Casino Consortium—he won’t name the backers—which ponied up $40,000 to produce the proposal. Printed in dreamy pastels, the “Polson Key [sic] Masterplan” envisions 1,830 rooms in three 18-storey hotels; eight five- to 21-storey office, retail and apartment buildings; a 150-acre golf course; an aquarium; a 400-boat marina; and, of course, a full-scale casino—slots, craps, blackjack, baccarat, the works.
Sprackman admits that applause from the city and province for the proposal has not been deafening. But he’s confident that the financial benefits a casino would spin off will ultimately win governments over. If anyone can achieve the unachievable in the Portlands—where revitalization has been pathologically stalled—it’s Sprackman, the only developer so far to build anything new in that cursed Toronto quadrant.
Jerry Sprackman grew up in Forest Hill and attended Forest Hill Collegiate. He persuaded his parents (his father was an accountant, his mother stayed at home) to let him go to Ohio State University, which, he says, “was the only place I could get into with my marks.” He learned the development business by taking on some minor projects in the 1970s, then founded Landawn Shopping Centres to build malls in Oakville, Oshawa and other small Ontario cities, a niche that larger developers passed on. At its peak in the late 1980s, Landawn had 150 or so holdings, including malls in Ottawa and Toronto, and was ranked Canada’s sixth biggest commercial-property manager. In 1986, while checking out the building at the end of Polson Quay as a possible headquarters for Landawn, Sprackman was smitten. “I took one look across the harbour,” he remembers, “and in five minutes, I said I wanted to buy the building.”
Even if the market for office towers had been favourable, he might have had trouble proceeding: Landawn was waylaid by the recession, and by 1994, Sprackman filed for bankruptcy protection. Ultimately, banks, trust and insurance companies got Landawn’s assets, which amounted to $300 million.
Sprackman professes to feel no bitterness about the setback. “I’m self-made,” he says. “I’ve probably made and lost more money than most people in Canada. I’m not proud of losing it, but business is like war. There’s no disgrace in losing.” He managed to hang on to his office in the Polson Street building, but he insists he doesn’t own it or any of the Docks’ assets. When I press him on the subject, he reacts in character: “You don’t get it, do you?” he flares. “Due to what I went through at Landawn, I make sure I don’t own anything in my name anymore. I just can’t, that’s all. I’m a promoter of the Docks and the manager of the property, but I don’t own anything.”
The man who runs the business is Docks president Rob Gilroy. Responsible for overseeing events and operations, Gilroy was running a club in Orillia when Sprackman hired him for the Docks job. As cheerful as Sprackman is grouchy, Gilroy says the two work well together hatching new plans. They’ve grown the operation by sprawling onto nearby land, expanding their space to a mammoth
30-acre plot. A 1.2-kilometre go-kart track sits on a leased parking lot across the street; a 60-tee heated driving range doubles as a drive-in theatre four evenings a week in summer. On top of that, last winter the Docks erected an air-supported dome over the volleyball courts and installed an artificial-turf soccer pitch that it rents to local leagues. Soccer has proven so popular that Sprackman plans to add a second dome. He’s installing a $500,000 sound system in the nightclub. And this spring, he unveiled plans for a second storey on the main building.
Such additions, as well as everything else Sprackman tries to shoehorn into the Docks property, require zoning amendments. “We’ve had more conversations with Mr. Sprackman than I can count,” says Ted Tyndorf, the city’s director of community planning. “He’s a very aggressive businessman who becomes impatient when approvals take longer than his business plan allows.”
In fact, Sprackman’s standard MO is to proceed before he has permission. The movie screen was up at the drive-in before approvals were given or anyone noticed; the go-kart track appeared in the lot, on space the Docks is required to provide for nightclub parking. Pam Coburn, executive director of the city’s municipal licensing and standards department, is cynical about the notion that these are innocent violations. Sprackman is as fluent at reading regulations as anyone in the city, she says, and is a virtuoso at exploiting their weaknesses. “Assuming the courts are even willing to convict, there is very little, if any, fine or penalty,” she adds. “More likely, they’ll adjourn the trial in order for the offender to obtain the permits.”
Sprackman shrugs off the criticism. “If you don’t push, you go bankrupt.” But some charges have stuck. In 2003, the provincial Alcohol and Gaming Commission, alarmed by the stack of police citations against the Docks for overcrowding and drug and alcohol offences, called a hearing to discuss penalties. Perhaps fearing the consequences— including possible loss of the Docks’ liquor licence—its lawyers cut a last-minute out-of-court settlement. But the deal was costly: the Docks would have to reduce crowds at concerts, stop the all-night raves and stop serving alcohol in May. The last penalty prompted Sprackman to shut the place down for the entire month.
And Sprackman may not yet be through with the courts. Fed up with the Docks’ routine disregard for noise by-laws, Toronto Islanders, some of whom live only a few hundred metres away, have pressed the city to prosecute. The club was already convicted of one noise violation last year, which it is appealing, and there’s another charge pending. Far from chastening Sprackman, the experience seems only to have confirmed his characterization of Islanders as government-supported whiners, a view he’s not afraid to pronounce even when I confess that I’m an Island resident. “They have to understand that noise travels over water,” he says, scowling. “Toronto in the summer is for the whole city, not for the few who might be disturbed.”
While the notion of common courtesy toward others seems foreign to Sprackman, he flies off the handle when he feels he’s been slighted. In the middle of extolling the tourism benefits of the new ferry service between Rochester and Toronto, it suddenly occurs to him that Lisa Raitt, the federally appointed CEO of the Toronto Port Authority, should hear his views, too. He’s riled that, at the time of our interview, the TPA hasn’t yet broken ground on the Toronto ferry terminal that Sprackman sees funnelling customers to the Portlands. When he’s told that Raitt isn’t available, he slams the phone down. “I’ve tried her 10 goddamn times,” he growls. “She won’t take calls from me.” Sprackman had to make do with one of Raitt’s colleagues, who did eventually return his calls.
His massive mood swings have landed him a reputation. “Some people don’t like me because I’ve got a short fuse,” he acknowledges by way of apology, grabbing a handful of vitamins from a large jar. “I think developers are like visionaries, and they scare people.”
Whether he is, in fact, the owner, developer or merely a consultant, as he likes to call himself, Sprackman is deservedly proud of building the first new business of any account in the Portlands in the past 25 years. When asked about the various other waterfront players, he goes off on another tirade. “All they do is plan. The Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation, led by Robert Fung, has no money and wants to take over the Toronto Economic Development Corporation, which controls land but earns no taxes for the city. The Toronto Port Authority sues the city over plans. But nobody actually does anything.”
Except Sprackman, who barrels along on his own agenda, seizing opportunities and tilting at convention. His long-term casino plans have been back-burnered by government resistance—a temporary setback, he insists (he’s been lobbying Mayor Miller to hold a referendum to generate popular support for the idea). In the interim, he’s been adding to his empire, embarking on other commercial enterprises in the area. In 2003, for instance, he managed to take over a 20-year lease granted to the now defunct Knob Hill Farms, just as it was closing. A consortium of partners (again, Sprackman won’t name them) paid owner Steve Stavro $3 million for the transfer of the six-acre property.
Parking alone made the Knob Hill property attractive; Sprackman needed to replace the spaces his go-kart track had taken from the Docks. He also had plans to turn the 40,000-square-foot hangarlike building on the land into a Home Depot–style store. When the city rejected the big-box idea in 2003, Sprackman promptly presented a different plan: he and Charles Khabouth—owner of the Guvernment, the nightclub on Queens Quay, and the posh Queen West eatery Ultra Supper Club—plan to nearly double the size of the place. Sprackman says they have approval for office space and retail and wholesale businesses, though he’s not sure what goods will be sold. In the meantime, to generate cash from the property, Sprackman says they’ve spent $500,000 renovating an existing diner in the Knob Hill building and adding an indoor flea market with 180 stalls, each renting for $425 a month.
There’s not much evidence of the investment, or payback potential for that matter. In May, half the stalls stood vacant. Sprackman, who tools the quarter mile or so between the sites on Polson Quay in his $86,000 Lexus, remains confident that his Docks strategy—laying on the attractions—will also work on this new endeavour. But as incompatible as a flea market and nightclub might seem, his intention to open an outdoor farmer’s market on weekends in the parking lot of the Cherry Street property is odder still. For one thing, it would compete with the popular and historic St. Lawrence Market up the street, where he posted flyers advertising his new venture. For another, benefits he expects from the Toronto-Rochester ferry might not materialize. The boat is scheduled to land three times daily just south of the Docks, unloading up to 750 passengers and 220 cars, traffic Sprackman chooses to see as cash flow. “Every car that comes off the ferry goes by the Docks and the Cherry Street Flea & Farmers Market, so I’m going to do something that makes them aware we’re here,” he says. “We’ll cross-promote the flea market, the Docks, the drive-in—everything we’ve got down here.”
Going forward, though, Sprackman sees his Polson Quay project as the perfect development for the Portlands. And if having such a Shangri-La on their doorstep isn’t enough to sway Torontonians, Sprackman maintains that getting it for free will help. Instead of using tax dollars, he says, gambling would boost tax revenue. “It’s the catalyst. It could generate $500 million that could be used to develop infrastructure.” To kick-start the catalyst, the project’s unnamed sponsors have pledged financing of $300 million.
Would the city really benefit from a casino? Yes, says Sprackman. Casinos in Niagara Falls, Windsor and Orillia already contribute mightily to the provincial coffers; there’s no reason one in Toronto couldn’t do the same, he argues, with enough left over for the city as well. “And don’t give me the moral argument against gambling,” he growls. Woodbine Racetrack grossed $375 million from slot machines alone in 2003, he notes. Why is adding a few craps and blackjack tables something new or morally repugnant? “Gambling is here now,” he says. “And it’s run by the Ontario government.”
He’s probably right, but as usual he’s jumping the gun. Whispers that Toronto is considering a bid for the 2015 World’s Fair promise yet more development delays if the Portlands, as usual, are viewed as a possible venue. Big events, seen as a means to pay for and justify infrastructure, rarely deliver. Development froze while Toronto prepared its bid for the 2008 Olympics and then waited for the decision. It has pretty much remained frozen ever since.
Sitting in front of the fireplace in his office, Sprackman alternates between nostalgia and rage as he ponders what could have been. But he brightens when he ticks off what he’s accomplished. The Docks, an entertainment category that he invented, is immensely successful, dominates the east end of the harbour, employs up to 350 in peak season and appears to have no limit for expansion.
The second-storey addition was under way in April, but a few days after construction began, the city’s urban development department imposed a stop-work order—Sprackman hadn’t yet been issued a building permit. At press time, the city was pursuing prosecution of the Docks for non-compliance, but the permit was going to be issued nonetheless. |
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| djbruuen |
| omg what the hell...i finally get to check out the docks, i like it, and now they want to make it a casino??? ohwell, by the sounds of it, that won't be having for a long time... |
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| Fir3start3r |
A casino would be amazing for Toronto, especially on the Waterfront.
Could you image a day of sailing on the lake and then docking at a nice casino on the waterfront???
Some city would kill to have an opportunity like that!
If the Docks is having that many problems and the area isn't really being utilized to it fullest potential then why the hell not?
It would create thousands of jobs and be a revenue booster; sounds win/win to me.
I say go for it! :D |
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| High on PSI |
| they better have hold'em :p |
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| AwakenedAddict |
| quote: | Originally posted by Fir3start3r
If the Docks is having that many problems and the area isn't really being utilized to it fullest potential then why the hell not?
It would create thousands of jobs and be a revenue booster. |
Yea, i'm definately with you on that one.. i'd love for a casino to open up and it's not like the docks' area is going to get any worse
| quote: | Originally posted by High on PSI
they better have hold'em |
My favorite game!! The best poker action is hold'em
-+Aron |
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| Skipper |
| That'd be a big waste of a big sound system. |
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| AwakenedAddict |
| quote: | Originally posted by Skipper
That'd be a big waste of a big sound system. |
Meh, more where that came from... plus system and occasionally the guv and the zone are all the mega-systems i need!
-+Aron
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| Fir3start3r |
| quote: | Originally posted by Skipper
That'd be a big waste of a big sound system. |
Dunno about that...seems to be a lot of clubs opening up that can take care of that problem... (i.e. Vivid) |
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| arek |
| I thought the docks was a cheese factory. |
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| Jayx1 |
The city forced them to ban "all night raves"...
I love how "progressive" our society truely is...
yeah right! |
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| malek |
casino in the city = 
especially with your big asian population :nervous: |
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| djeso |
| gambling can become a sick addiction |
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