OCTOBER 26, 2024

Dear reader,

Remember when Donald Trump was known as a blowhard business tycoon whose debacles mostly involved money and real estate rather than threats to democracy? Prepare to be teleported back to that era via the new Trump biopic, The Apprentice, which finally hit theatres this month following delays related to legal threats and difficulty securing a distributor.

The biopic—not to be confused with the wildly successful reality TV show of the same name—tracks Trump’s rise to power as a real estate mogul in New York during the 1970s and ’80s. A key point in the film is the opening of Trump Tower, the physical manifestation of a man looking to make his mark on the city. Torontonians will recall our own Trump Tower (now the St. Regis Toronto), which opened at the corner of Bay and Adelaide in 2012 amid controversy and a deluge of lawsuits.

The Toronto Trump Tower’s condo-hotel occupancy model initially attracted a couple of hundred buyers, and dozens of them went on to sue the developers for misrepresentation, breaches of the Ontario Securities Act, breach of contract, breach of the Condominium Act and conspiracy. Leah McLaren’s 2013 feature about the lawsuits chronicled the mess—and, today, promises to transport readers to a simpler time in Trump’s notoriety.

For more great long-reads from Toronto Life, subscribe to our print edition here.

—Chris Bilton, features editor

The Trump Tower, downtown’s tallest new condo-hotel, is a monument to excess. And like its tycoon namesake, it’s surrounded by controversy: 38 investors are suing the hotel for millions. Lessons from a post-crash real estate market

BY LEAH MCLAREN | JULY 2, 2013

When developers approached Donald Trump about building a hotel in Toronto, his reality show The Apprentice was riding high in the ratings, and the Trump brand was associated with luxury, success and business prowess. The businessmen worked out a deal to license the Trump name and planned a condo-hotel set-up that would be a model for Manhattan-style luxury living in Toronto. By the time Toronto’s Trump Tower opened in 2012, ten years after the plan was hatched, the financial climate had drastically changed. The hotel now felt like a throwback to a cockier pre-recession era. And deals with its investors, who believed they’d bought into a get-rich-quick scheme, began imploding. Here, Leah McLaren investigates how something so promising went so wrong.

In the latest issue: 20 Torontonians doing big things with small footprints. Plus, the ugly truth about Ontario’s reform schools, a Q&A with the city’s traffic czar, vintage cars retrofitted for the electric age and more. Still not receiving Toronto Life at home? Subscribe today.

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