Toronto businessman Gil Blutrich splashed out $100 million (U.S.) to snap up 325 hectares of Port McNicoll. With the trucks rolling into the Georgian Bay town last week, residents — recalling the days of grand passenger ships and the ensuing decades of broken promises — don’t know whethe
September 03, 2006
Judy Gerstel
Who is Gil Blutrich?
It’s a question the people of Port McNicoll are asking a lot these days after learning, from a website, that he had bought their town for $100 million (U.S.).
“Israeli businessman Gil Blutrich has purchased the historic town of Port McNicoll, population of some 1500 families,” reported ynetnews.com in December 2005.
For the residents, suggested a newspaper in the area, it was akin to Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds 1938 radio broadcast. Was the town about to be taken over by aliens? And if so, how on Earth did they find a place almost no one can locate?
“Where is Port McNicoll?” says Guy Lepage of the Ontario Ministry of Tourism when asked if his ministry knew about the sale (thereby answering the question).
Indeed, the only article with a Port McNicoll dateline in a Toronto newspaper in recent times, a Globe and Mail story about low water levels in the Great Lakes in 2003, misspelled the town’s name, lopping off the last “l.”
Then again, Port McNicoll, located on Georgian Bay about 90 minutes north of Toronto, has been misspelled from the start. Founded 100 years ago near Midland as a CPR port and company town, it was named for CPR vice-president David MacNicol. Dubbed the “Chicago of the North,” it was a major hub, with goods and immigrants ferried to the prairies and grain funnelled back east.
From Port McNicoll, a fleet of grand passenger ships — the Athabasca, the Keewatin, all with white linen tablecloths and white-gloved stewards — steamed across the Great Lakes.
But when most of the ships and trains pulled out by the 1960s, pushing the second largest grain elevator in North America toward obsolescence, Port McNicoll took a dive.
And so, when news arrived that a developer with an impressive track record had purchased the town — or more accurately, the superb deep-water harbour, the grain elevator, 10.5 kilometres of shoreline, waterfront lands and wetlands, about 325 hectares in total — the whereabouts of Port McNicoll were almost as much of a mystery for people outside its environs as the identity and wherewithal of its buyer were within it.
Is Gil Blutrich a white knight coming to rescue the town? Or will a luxury resort obliterate the existing community? Or, as some cynics in Port McNicoll predict, could it all be a chimera, a projected future as fragile and evanescent as the past?
This much is certain: When a dynamic force meets a dormant town, transformation is inevitable. Soft-spoken and quietly charismatic, Blutrich could be characterized as a latter-day Ayn Randian protagonist whose entrepreneurial capitalism and concrete edifices project daring and potency.
After arriving in Toronto from Israel in 1997, he founded Skyline International Development Inc., a subsidiary of his Israeli real estate company.
“He’s probably like a miniature Donald Trump,” says Joe Cohen, who manages Anglo Saxon Real Estate near Tel Aviv.
Because, while most men express their personalities in apparel and automobiles, Blutrich, who dresses in denim and khaki, expresses himself in buildings.
The two sides of the man, says someone who knows him well, are symbolized by his high-rise downtown boutique hotels, both of which opened within the last three years.
One is chic and aspirational with glitz aplenty. The other is gracious and serene with purified air, a Zen-influenced spa and an “energy consultant.”
At the Pantages Suites Hotel and Spa, a 111-room hotel within a condominium across from the Eaton Centre at 200 Victoria St., with its floor of conference rooms, lobby bar and Fran’s Restaurant open `round the clock, the bustle is palpable.
Step into the lobby of the Cosmopolitan, a condominium hotel at 8 Colborne St., near the busy corner of King and Yonge, and you’re in a spare urban oasis with a restaurant and cocktail lounge, Doku 15, fetching attention for being cool and swanky.
The Cosmopolitan, called one of the world’s hottest new hotels by Condé Nast Traveler and the only Canadian hotel on the magazine’s list of the best 60 new hotels around the world, has become a prototype for Zen lifestyle hotels.
“For me, the Cosmopolitan is a great experiment,” says the boyish-looking 40-year-old .
But hotels are merely a hobby for Blutrich, a man whose company, in its first four years in Canada, invested more than $130 million (Cdn.) in nine different projects in downtown Toronto and now owns or is developing several thousand residential condominiums in this country as well as millions of square feet of commercial space.
The pair of hotels probably commands less of his time and energy than his philanthropic projects, which go far beyond donating money: They become so personal that he has found employment for people he brought in off the streets.
In December, Blutrich hosted and helped sponsor the Coldest Day Symposium, an initiative of the Homes First Foundation that seeks to end chronic homelessness.
There is, despite the irony, a common theme in developing luxury residences while also devoting considerable time and energy to solving the problem of homelessness and street people. Underlying both is a recognition of the human yearning for protection and shelter and a roof over one’s head.
“Real estate, in a way, is security,” he says. “It’s connecting to the ground.”
Real estate is his business — acquiring, developing and leasing residential and commercial property for an average annual return on equity of 15 per cent or more.
Skyline has become a conduit for the flow of Israeli capital into Canadian real estate. In the mid-1990s, Israel removed the formidable obstacles to foreign investment. Under the headline, “Who Knew?”, Canadian Business magazine reported last year that in a decade Israelis have “poured billions into Canadian property and development … roughly $1 billion annually.” One informed estimate ranks Israelis behind Americans and Germans as the top investors in Canadian real estate.
Among the properties Blutrich and his partners have bought are 55 Town Centre in Scarborough and 154 University Ave. They’re building the two-tower London Condominiums on The Esplanade.
Now, with the purchase of the magnificent waterfront land of Port McNicoll and the plans to turn it into a luxury vacation resort that could rival Collingwood — the first trucks rolled into town last week to signal the beginning of the clearing process — Blutrich appears to be a Promethean force set loose on the landscape of Ontario.
And a town that was obsolete could soon become some of the most desirable property in the province, even as the denizens remain skeptical and apprehensive about how their community and their lives may be forever altered.
When Blutrich, a wealthy international investor and developer, meets Lefty Duncan, whose father built the hardscrabble little marina he operates on shoreland leased from Canadian Pacific, globalization is not just some grand economic theory; it’s as real and hard as the rocks flanking Georgian Bay and as unyielding as the water crashing over them.
“Some people are very happy about it and some people are very prejudiced,” says marina owner Lefty Duncan who’s lived all his 58 years in Port McNicoll.
His personal feeling? “It’s a great little town. Somebody with some money and some confidence in it can punch it back up to speed.”
But Mike Ladouceur, a municipal councillor, agrees there’s tension in town about the projected transformation.
“Personally, I have no problem with it,” he says, “but there are mixed emotions.”
Ladouceur is having Sunday breakfast with his wife and two other couples at C J’s Family Restaurant, one of two eateries in Port McNicoll.
It’s a comfortable greasy spoon where a couple of eggs, bacon, fries and coffee will set you back $4, where the walls are decorated with old pictures of steamers that plied the Great Lakes between Port McNicoll and Port Arthur, now Thunder Bay.
Clad in a faded Maple Leafs baseball cap and orange fleece jacket, Ladouceur calls Port McNicoll “a small, sleepy town.”
He’s being kind. There’s no resident doctor and no longer any store selling fresh meat or groceries. “You can get stuff, you can get by,” says Lefty Duncan. “But it’s changed. Everything changes, of course.”
The sole purveyor in town now is known as Louie. Like Blutrich, Louie also found his way to Port McNicoll from the Middle East — except that it was 35 years ago.
Jewy Louie, he’s called, even though he’s an Arab from Tunisia and his real name is Zouhir Elmtibaa. (”Better put Louie in brackets,” advises a clerk at the store when she spells out his real name, “otherwise people’ll be coming in wanting to know who bought the place.”)
“They call me Jewy Louie, they don’t know the difference, if it’s Israeli or Arab or Italian,” says Elmtibaa. “If you are a foreigner, you are a foreigner.”
He explains, “Racism maybe is everywhere, but they are not saying, `We don’t want the Jews or we don’t want the Arabs.’ They welcome any kind of investment.”
Elmtibaa’s Village General Store is open every day of the year — the owner, who is in his mid-50s, lives upstairs with his second wife, whom he brought to Port McNicoll from Tunisia, and their year-old son.
They hope to sell the business if and when Port McNicoll’s economy improves and return to their homeland. Blutrich may make that possible. But it’s also possible, says Elmtibaa, that new stores springing up as part of Blutrich’s development could make his little shop obsolete.
Ladouceur, however, is optimistic about how his town’s fate will be altered. “We’re prime land now,” he says. “Economically, it can only do good.”
Still, he confesses to concern that the value of development may be outstripped by the cost, at least in the short term. “The scary part is,” he says, “who picks up the infrastructure and at what cost to the taxpayer?”
Lefty Duncan is more blunt. “Whatever it costs to build this thing,” he says, “them Israelites are going to have to get their wallet out and pay for it.”
But Ladouceur is apprehensive about more than start-up financial costs to the community. And he wonders: What will be the cost to the quality of life, the small-town congeniality and homogeneity?
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`It’s a great little town.
Somebody with some money
and some confidence in it
can punch it back up to speed’
Lefty Duncan
Marina owner
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“We’re good neighbours here,” emphasizes Ladouceur. “The Lion’s Club, the Legions, we all really work well together.” He muses reflectively, “How fast will it grow? And how fast will it affect the community?”
He observes somewhat wistfully about Blutrich’s grand plan for Port McNicoll and the people it will bring, “It’s geared to high income, because it’s a shoreline development.”
But along with that apprehension is another nagging doubt: It might not ever happen at all.
“We’ve been hearing about something coming for the last 15 years,” says Ladouceur.
In a small town, everyone has a nickname. Don Mitchell’s nickname is Development Don. His company is Development Concepts.
Working with Marathon Realty, incorporated in 1963 to administer CPR real estate, Mitchell arranged more than a decade ago to purchase the CPR land, harbour and grain elevator in Port McNicoll, with ambitious plans to build cottages, townhouses, condos and docks.
“It is Donald Mitchell’s intention,” wrote Pat Brennan in the Star on July 1, 1995, “to return this community to its glory days and make it once again a prime destination … Mitchell said he hopes to see residential construction start next spring.” That is, 10 years ago.
Subdivision maps, floor plans and landscaping information have been displayed on Mitchell’s website, georgianquay.com, for the last five years.
Meanwhile, Mitchell has been overseeing extensive environmental assessments and decommissioning of the property that includes significant wetlands; Wye Marsh is nearby.
But Mitchell lacked what Blutrich was able to bring: the partners, investment funds, acumen and audacity to put Port McNicoll back on the map.
Blutrich intends to make use of Mitchell’s original basic planning but, he says, the architecture and “the flavour” will express his own vision of a heritage community — “to bring to life, to make a renaissance of this old village, and bring back the Victorian time.”
One of his goals, he reveals, is “to bring to the village a very high-end hotel that caters for corporate functions, and a yacht club with a 1900s design, like old Key West.”
In a later conversation, he says he’s thinking of building two hotels in Port McNicoll.
For now, he and his partners are focusing on pricing, with engineers working on cost analysis. It’s expected that prices for condos will start in the $350,000 range.
Insists Blutrich, “It’s going to happen and it’s going to be unique.”
Even as a lad, Gil Blutrich was an astute businessman, says his father, Uzi, still a resident of the small town near Tel Aviv where Gil and his three siblings grew up.
As a schoolboy, Gil organized classmates into collecting for charities like the War on Cancer and sold cactus plants with the help of classmates.
Unlike most kids of his middle-class background, he bypassed university and went directly to hotel-management school.
“I think he saw you can go farther without `wasting’ time at university,” explains the elder Blutrich.
At the age of 23, Gil set out to make money.
“My dream and worry was to have a condo for myself in Israel,” he recalls, “a roof on top of my head. Prices were such that it would have taken 40 years of working to buy a condo there, and I knew my parents would not be able to help me. I was very worried about how I would be able to live.”
It didn’t take long for the entrepreneur to find his way.
“I met Gil when he first started out, working as a real estate agent,” says Israeli businessman Cohen. “I did a lot of business with him before he left for Canada, and what really makes him stand out is his tremendous flair.
“Here’s an example: He asked us to sell his personal house for him before he left for Canada, and he didn’t do it in the regular way. He wanted us to market it as `the most expensive house in Ra’anana.’ It probably was. He asked $2 million, and that was an enormous amount then, but no one else would market it that way.
“He’s very outgoing and flashy. He knows how to say `yes.’ Whenever anyone came to look at a property, Gil would make it happen. He’s not frightened to take risks. He uses the best architects, the best PR people — that kind of thing. He would get involved in the community, too. I know a lot of people who didn’t like him, though.”
Among those who didn’t like him after he came to Canada were individual condo owners in New Times Square on Front St. E. and other downtown buildings. Blutrich’s company had bought up units and was renting them on short-term leases, officially as short as 30 days but, according to a Star story in 2001, as short as two nights, much to the dismay of owners who objected to transient renters.
The controversy brought lawsuits on both sides, but Blutrich eventually called a truce and changed strategy, constructing and managing brand new condo buildings, including the two hotel residences.
Admired for his business acumen, he acknowledges not always being so smart.
A miscalculation he almost relishes recounting came in the Manhattan market, where he’d invested before buying property in Canada. He’d bought condos at $50,000 to $60,000 and sold them at $300,000 — but they soon turned over again at much higher prices.
He’s learned, he says, that it’s important to be attuned to the body and not just the mind.
Once, when he had to submit a bid in a sealed envelope, he wrote down a number and signed the bid. As he was putting it in the envelope and preparing to seal it, he says, “I felt heat all over my body. I reduced the price.” And he won the bid.
So, who is Gil Blutrich?
“Just a guy from a small town, having fun, enjoying what he’s doing, keeping busy … trying to make the best from every day, every hour, every minute that I live.”
Although obsessed in his 20s and 30s with building financial security and establishing a real estate empire, he’s seeking now to find balance and make a contribution, he says.
Blutrich has struck up personal and business alliances in El Salvador, travelling there as a guest of the nation’s vice-president.” They invited me to the country and I found it amazing, beautiful,” he says. “We have very big plans.”
Every year, he travels to India to visit an ashram and meditate.
“I’m trying to concentrate on the here and now,” he explains. “It’s changed — because there are stages in life. Success is not just money in the bank. It’s quality of life.”
The transformation didn’t happen overnight. “It’s a process that takes years, to learn to educate yourself to let go.”
On some mornings from his perch on the balcony of a downtown penthouse, he photographs the sunrise, the lake, the skyline of downtown Toronto — or he paints them.
“I never painted since kindergarten,” he confesses. “Last year, I started painting. I have a teacher in Yorkville.” He’s also taken to writing poetry. Self-expression and a little well-earned self-indulgence are among the priorities in his life now — along with his Toronto-based family, which includes two teenage sons and a younger daughter.
Then it’s time for early-morning business calls overseas before arriving at Skyline’s offices in a downtown building owned by the company. All over the premises are photographs of Toronto in the 1800s and 1900s. “The heritage of the city is fantastic,” he says.
He has been fascinated with “how Canadians put this society together — not a melting pot, like Israel, but respecting each other, how a huge society should work.”
That Canadian society is reflected on the large video screens playing throughout the Skyline offices with the same programming seen on TTC screens — among his other ventures, Blutrich is a partner in One Stop, the mass-transit digital communication network operating in the TTC and in transit systems in several big U.S. cities.
Although his cellphone is almost always on, he doesn’t own a Blackberry, and he generally checks his email only once a day.
And on fair summer afternoons, he leaves the office early, gets behind the wheel of his black luxury sedan, and makes the short drive to the 40-foot corporate yacht.
There are no private luxury yachts in Port McNicoll. Not yet.
But even as the people of the port anticipate the upsurge that Blutrich’s resort development promises, they retain a skepticism born of repeated disappointment.
“We’re not even too sure it’s going to happen now,” says Lefty Duncan about the rebirth of the town as a major resort.
Blutrich, of course, harbours no such doubts.
“Sometimes the reality,” he says, not about anything in particular, “is bigger than the dream.”
