When Streetcar Developments founder Les Mallins opened the Broadview Hotel on Queen Street East in 2017, he stole a longtime employee of the Queen Street West arts hub at the Gladstone Hotel.

It was an attempt to infuse a new hotel with some of the Gladstone’s cultural spice.

A day after the announcement that Streetcar with its partner Dream Unlimited has purchased the Gladstone, Mallins offered reassurances that he sees the Gladstone’s character and culture as a big asset to the acquisition.

“The Gladstone is a successful thriving operation that is already an anchor of the community and the things that happen in the Gladstone are already a reflection of the things that make West Queen West so great,” he said on Thursday.

No condo conversions, additions or rooftop terraces are being contemplated for the 131-year-old Victorian that was designed by George Miller, the architect of Massey Hall, Annesley Hall and many of Parkdale’s old residences.

The city’s oldest continually operating hotel will go on providing hospitality as the bathrooms are renovated, the sound attenuation challenges addressed and the HVAC replaced.

As for the Gladstone’s signature concept of 37 individual artist-designed guest rooms, it will be modernized and reinvented. Mallins said he will be consulting the artists and staff about their ideas on how to reinterpret the original idea realized by the Zeidler family that is selling the property after 17 years of building its reputation as an arts hub.

“There’s a lot of regulars, specifically in the LGBTQ community, that probably have a lot of input into what works and what needs tweaking,” he said.

Built in the ornate Richardsonian Romanesque style, the Gladstone started as a railway hotel near the Parkdale station on the old Grand Trunk Railway. As its fortunes faded it served as a rooming house and a dive bar before its revival became a passion project for architect Eberhard Zeidler, who is now 90 and the father of the Gladstone’s president Christina Zeidler.

The new owners, who take possession at the end of this month, expect it will take about a year to refresh the guest rooms. They will move on to the structural and mechanical issues early next year.

Christina Zeidler has known Mallins since he used to stop in for coffee while he was doing a mixed-use development on Gladstone Avenue, between 2009 and 2014. Zeidler says the new owner was always curious and marvelling at the hotel’s activity.

“This opportunity for him is so win-win. He gets the secret sauce,” she said.

A filmmaker and artist who turned 50 this year, Zeidler calls herself an “accidental hotelier” who is ready to turn her attention to other projects. But she expects to continue participating in the Gladstone’s arts events.

“I live three blocks away. I might need to stay off property for a month so I don’t come in and rearrange the furniture all the time,” she said. But, she added, “I really feel like I’m a phone call or a coffee away.”

“All of our arts programming is staying in place,” Zeidler said. That includes the eighth annual Grow Op from March 12 to 15, where all the hotel’s public spaces and galleries showcase a themed exhibition by a group of artists. This year’s theme is weather.

“It’s a cool time when you can come and see the hotel really activated and what we do best,” she said.

The reassurance will be a relief to the Gladstone’s patrons, said urbanist author Shawn Micallef, and a contributing columnist for the Star, who says he has attended at least two weddings and countless arts events at the Gladstone.

“There are so many different communities that use it as a hub. It’s an interesting place that you bump into people from other scenes,” he said.

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Micallef said he often kicks off or ends the annual Nuit Blanche arts crawl at the Gladstone.

“You could count on it being crammed to the rafters with all kinds of people,” he said.

The Gladstone became a hub for the LGBTQ community that emanated out from the Gay Village near Church and Wellesley streets to turn Queen West into Queer West, Micallef said.

“What the Zeidlers did with the Gladstone and what Christina Zeidler did keeping it open to so many subcultures should be commended. I hope the new owners see the importance of that,” he said.

“Everybody feels like it’s their place,” Zeidler said. “I don’t think anyone minds if you redo a bathroom. I think they get worried that the soul of it is going to change.”

“This is a nice moment ... it’s going to continue, the legacy is going to keep going.”