The current listing for a condominium at 1599 Bathurst St. which was briefly home to Ernest Hemingway, has recalled the great writer’s six month sojourn (1923-24) in Toronto as an employee of the Toronto Star. It was the condo, then an apartment, to which Hemingway retired each day after frequent humiliating assignments given him by Star editor Harry Hindmarsh. One such embarrassment was to write a fluff piece about a white peacock which the Star was donating to the Toronto Zoo. The recollections of a fellow reporter, the late Tom Williams, recount how that instead of writing the story, Hemingway went out and got very drunk. “Returning to the office stiff as a teakwood plank, he sat down at his typewriter and wrote his resignation. To hear it from the news people present, it was one of the great moments in Canadian journalism, certainly one of the most unforgettable,” wrote Wilson. “Hemingway knocked off page after page of vitriolic prose in which he castrated the unfortunate peacock and the loathsome Hindmarsh. As the pages flew from his machine the reporters would scoop them up and pin them to the walls.” The condo by the way is in a pre-1925 building called The Hemingway and is listed for $730,000. Oh yes, it’s a fourth-floor walk up. Take a look.
