If you screamed “Sir Henry Pellatt!” down Yonge St., almost nobody would recognize the name.

Rich out of all proportion, he built Canada’s largest private home – now one of Toronto’s top tourist landmarks – yet he remains almost anonymous. Why?

A reading of Sir Henry Pellatt: The King of Casa Loma, a 1982 biography by Toronto writer Charlie Oreskovich, suggests the man lived apart from the city’s true development and primarily for his own self-aggrandizement.

Champion runner: In 1879, at the age of 20, Pellatt ran the mile in New York, beating the U.S. champion and setting a world record at 4:42.4. That same year, however, Toronto’s Edward “Ned” Hanlon captured the English championship in the far more popular sport of sculling, and the next year clinched the world title.

Eye for beauty: Pellatt married Mary Dodgson in 1882 and commissioned an artist to depict the back of her head. He found the nape of her neck exquisite, he explained. Unfortunately, Lady Pellatt suffered chronic poor health. She died at 67 in 1924, the year they were forced out of Casa Loma.

Hydro-electric visionary: In 1903, Pellatt and two partners won exclusive rights to generate the first large-scale hydro-electric power for Toronto at Niagara Falls. Public opinion was against private ownership of water power, however, and in 1906 the province claimed the resource on behalf of all Ontarians.

Lavish patron: Pellatt saw himself not only as king of his castle, but also as commander of his own army, the Queen’s Own Rifles. At the time it was a reserve company unarmed, untrained and without uniforms. Showering money on the unit, Pellatt lifted it to a respectable outfit that formed part of Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee honor guard and achieved other distinctions. The public viewed Pellatt’s generosity as self-serving, however, and never recognized him as a philanthropist.

Top financier: In 1913, Pellatt was said to rank among 23 stock-market investors who controlled the Canadian economy. He achieved success, however, by manipulating stocks unethically. A public inquiry into the insurance industry found him in conflict of interest and clarified the law to limit his dealings. Castle builder: Between 1911 and 1914, the construction of Pellatt’s hilltop house, with its 30 bathrooms, drew little media or public interest. “It just did not fit into the Toronto world,” Oreskovich writes. After 10 years, Pellatt was in tax arrears and the city forced him out. He died with $85 to his name.

Credit: John Goddard Toronto Star

Caption: A champion runner, Pellatt won several athletic prizes by age 20. Sir Henry Pellatt in Aldershot, England, with members of the Queens Own Rifles. The self-bought army reserve led to the British knighthood in 1905. Courtesy of Casa Loma

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.

Service club risks being evicted from castle as deadline passes

The Kiwanis Club is refusing to fire the chair of Casa Loma’s board, a move that could lead the city to evict the service organization from the castle.

Council set a deadline of July 31 for the Kiwanis Club – which has operated the interior of the city-owned attraction since 1937 – to replace Richard Wozenilek, a lawyer who allegedly directed $218,938 in castle legal work to himself over 18 months.

But the deadline has passed and Kiwanis has decided to back Mr. Wozenilek.

“The Kiwanis Club continues to maintain its full support behind Mr. Wozenilek as chair of the Casa Loma Board, and it understands the members of the Board also fully support him,” Joachim Gerschkow, the president of the Kiwanis Club of Casa Loma, said in a statement Tuesday.

At the beginning of July, council ordered Casa Loma’s operators to clean up their act. It demanded that Casa Loma’s board meet monthly; that Kiwanis develop a revised financial plan; that a joint working group be established so the castle can begin to meet its goals; and that Mr. Wozenilek be replaced.

City manager Joe Pennachetti said at the time that Kiwanis had agreed to all the conditions except ditching Mr. Wozenilek.

A lengthy staff report accused the club of blowing deadlines and failing to make scheduled payments to the city. The club disputed most of the allegations.

“Council is not looking for a fight here,” said Councillor Joe Mihevc, an ex-officio member of the Casa Loma board. “Council is looking to build Casa Loma to become the jewel it could and should be.”

Kiwanis now wants an independent mediator brought in.

“While we do not agree with any of the city’s unfounded allegations, we look forward to getting on with the dispute resolution process in good faith,” Mr. Gerschkow said.

In previous interviews, Mr. Wozenilek has argued he did nothing wrong in acting as both the volunteer chair of Casa Loma’s board and its lawyer. He said he never hid the fact he did legal work for the castle, a practice the Casa Loma board has since halted.

He declined comment on Tuesday, referring questions to Mr. Gershkow.

Service club has until July 31 to remove chair alleged to have directed legal work to himself

Kelly Grant

City Hall Bureau Chief  Globe and Mail Update Published on Wednesday, Jul. 07, 2010 10:01PM EDT Last updated on Thursday, Jul. 08, 2010 1:43AM EDT

The Kiwanis Club of Casa Loma has until July 31 to recommend a new chair for the city-owned tourist landmark.

Toronto Council decided Wednesday that if the club doesn’t do so, the city will start looking for a new operator to replace Kiwanis, which has managed the castle for 73 years.

The city is concerned that commitments to upgrade the facility have not been met and wants the board to suggest possibilities to replace lawyer Richard Wozenilek, with the decision to be made by Mayor David Miller, said city manager Joe Pennachetti.

Wozenilek, who has held the post since 1991, couldn’t be reached for comment.
“They haven’t come close to completing the projects that were anticipated. They know that,” Pennachetti said.

Miller told council the city has been patient.
“We have given them every opportunity in the world to say, ‘Yes, we’ll address these issues,'” the mayor said. “Again and again and again, they haven’t.”

A city briefing note contends the city has tried hard to resolve differences with Kiwanis over how to showcase city-owned Casa Loma as a tourist and reception facility. It says Kiwanis acknowledges it has fallen behind on upgrades outlined in a July 2008 management agreement and has spent only about half of the $1.6 million it was supposed to on upgrades meant to be completed by June 30.

“Kiwanis is a fantastic organization,” Miller said Wednesday. “They do great charitable work. It’s just that a volunteer organization has been proven to be incapable of running this heritage site.”

Credit: Paul Moloney Toronto Star

Casa Loma is the perfect setting for palace intrigue, and that’s exactly what’s unfolded beneath its Norman and Scottish towers in the last two years.

Now the intrigue is moving from castle to council.

Toronto’s elected officials will decide this week whether the Kiwanis Club, the charitable organization that has managed city-owned Casa Loma since 1937, deserves a third chance to drag the tourist trap into the 21st century or whether the city should begin severing a partnership that’s been a royal pain for both sides.

Internal e-mails and other confidential documents obtained by The Globe and Mail show conflict has plagued a new City-Kiwanis management agreement practically since the deal took effect in the summer of 2008. The mayor now admits he was wrong to support the Kiwanians in 2006 and 2007, when a public review of Casa Loma’s future recommended putting the 98-room castle’s operations out to tender for the first time in seven decades.

“I rarely second-guess myself,” David Miller said, “but on the Casa Loma matter, in the big scheme of what I have to deal with as mayor, it was not at the top of my priority list. I should have paid more attention to it and to the deficiencies that the public process identified.”

The Kiwanians, meanwhile, feel deeply wronged after 73 years of service to the castle. They accuse the city of blind-siding them by releasing two damning reports at executive committee last month – one laying out missed deadlines and cash-flow troubles, the details of which Kiwanis disputes, and another demanding Kiwanian Richard Wozenilek resign as chair of Casa Loma’s board of trustees for allegedly funnelling $118,000 in castle legal work to himself.

“I have a right to protect my name and reputation,” said Mr. Wozenilek, who insists he did nothing wrong. “They brought the battle forward and I’m not going to step aside just so the mayor can be appeased and feel he won the day.”

If this seems like little more than inside-the-drawbridge politics, consider the consequences for Casa Loma.

The five-acre estate should be on the cusp of a renaissance. Toronto’s Taylor Hazell Architects are nearly finished a $33-million restoration of the exterior of the castle and its stables, a remarkable undertaking funded largely by the city that began in 1997 and should be completed by 2012. (Historically, the city has been responsible for Casa Loma’s exterior, Kiwanis for its interior.) But the feud has cast doubt on an equally ambitious overhaul that is supposed to be happening inside the castle – one that celebrates the Edwardian heritage of the mansion and the entrepreneurial spirit of its builder.

Sir Henry Pellatt, the brilliant tycoon who brought electricity to Toronto from Niagara Falls, hired E.J. Lennox, the architect who designed Old City Hall, to build him the grandest pile in Toronto.

Constructed by more than 300 men for $3.5-million between 1911 and 1914, Casa Loma was, on the outside, largely an homage to old world architecture.

But on the inside, Casa Loma was a 170,000-square-foot new-world showpiece. It boasted electric lighting, central vacuum, 40 telephones, heating and cooling systems and an elevator.

“Toronto was the place to be and Pellatt knew it,” said Charles Hazell, the architect overseeing the restoration. “He was remarkable because he loved the city. That’s the deeper story, not the cliché.”

A cliché, unfortunately, is what Casa Loma devolved into after Sir Pellatt’s fortune collapsed.

In 1924, the city seized the castle for unpaid taxes. It sat vacant for a dozen years before the Kiwanians offered to run it as a charitable venture, giving the profits to causes they supported. The service club marketed Casa Loma as a medieval castle; as the years passed it became a cheesy draw for American tour groups, brides and movie producers. (The castle makes cameos in X-Men, Chicago and Cocktail, among others.)

The city contributed to Casa Loma’s deterioration by slapping paint on the building’s Roman stone, a no-no that trapped water in the man-made brick. The liquid froze and cracked the stone, creating hazards like a chimney so badly damaged Mr. Hazell could rock it back and forth with his bare hands.

“There were school kids below on a picnic bench,” he recalled. “It was a disturbing and galvanizing impression of what was wrong. You looked around the building and it was just full of those conditions.”

The city decided that if it had to sink a fortune into Casa Loma’s exterior, it ought to look at the inside, too.

In 2004, it struck the citizen-led Casa Loma Advisory Committee, which concluded two years later that Kiwanis should be thanked for its 70 years of service and invited to bid against competitors when its lease expired at the end of 2006.

The Kiwanians fought back. They hired councillor-turned-lobbyist Paul Sutherland and rallied club members to speak at committee meetings. Kiwanis convinced council to postpone the matter until after the 2006 election, after which the club drafted a new strategic vision for Casa Loma that won the support of city staff, most of council and Mr. Miller. Kiwanis and the city set out to make the strategic vision a reality, including a new curatorial focus on Edwardian Toronto, the creation of a heritage district with the nearby Spadina House and City Archives, and a refreshed visitor experience that would lure more locals to the castle.

The new, 20-year management agreement that took effect July 1, 2008, created a Casa Loma board of trustees made up of seven Kiwanians, seven city appointees and a handful of ex-officio members.

Disagreements flared up right away.

The management agreement stipulated that the new board’s chair would be appointed by the mayor, upon the nomination and advice of the president of the Kiwanis Club of Casa Loma, for a three-year term.

Kiwanis put forth Mr. Wozenilek, an imposing grey-haired lawyer with tortoise-shell glasses who had been overseeing the attraction since 1991. Mr. Miller tried to limit Mr. Wozenilek’s term to a year, after which he would step aside for a city employee, but Kiwanis refused and installed Mr. Wozenilek for three years.

The relationship grew more strained when facts related to Mr. Wozenilek’s alleged conflict-of-interest were highlighted.

In January of 2009, Casa Loma management asked a member of the board to approve invoices from Mr. Wozenilek for legal work he had performed on a new caterer’s contract. (The city’s official report says it’s $118,000; Mr. Wozenilek says it’s about $40,000.) Mr. Wozenilek, who said he’s always been open about the legal work he’s done for Casa Loma, inserted a clause exempting his firm, Keel Cottrelle, from the new board’s conflict-of-interest agreement.

He didn’t point out the provision or recuse himself, but he said he believed that everyone on the board – along with Mayor Miller – knew that Casa Loma paid him and Keel Cottrelle for legal work. As Don Kibblewhite, a Kiwanis appointee, pointed out, board members had received bios of their new colleagues, including one saying the chair was a lawyer at Keel Cottrelle.

“I don’t think I made any errors,” Mr. Wozenilek said.

In April 2009, the Casa Loma board appointed a sub-committee which voted to pay Mr. Wozenilek’s bills, cut the Keel Cottrelle exemption and direct future legal work to another firm.

The matter seemed settled until late that year, when it came to the attention of the Mayor, who eventually demanded Mr. Wozenilek’s resignation.

“This is my appointee,” Mr. Miller said. “I can’t have it on my conscience as mayor of Toronto that I appointed someone who was paying himself hundreds of thousands of dollars from a facility that isn’t meeting its goals, that is financially strapped without properly dealing with the conflict of interest.”

By early 2010, relations between the city and Kiwanis were crumbling like Casa Loma circa 1996.

Mr. Wozenilek sent several e-mails to board members trying to sniff out who had spoken to the Toronto Star for a story about the castle’s troubles. In an April 19 e-mail to the board he said there was a, “very well orchestrated attempt designed to cause us to fail in our efforts,” citing the Star story, letters from city staff and an unpleasant meeting with the mayor.

The dispute burst into the open last month, with the pair of reports to council’s executive committee.

The main report accused Kiwanis of failing to hold up their end of the management agreement. The deal stipulates that all the castle’s net revenues, a new ticket surcharge and the equivalent of property taxes – which the city stopped collecting from Casa Loma under the new deal – be deposited in a Casa Loma Improvement Fund to pay for upgrades.

But Kiwanis has been using the fund to cover operating shortfalls, meaning there will only be $335,000 in the account by 2011, not $1.5-million as projected, according to the city. Kiwanis has blown deadlines and failed to complete required projects, the report says.

Virginia Cooper, Casa Loma’s CEO , says the recession hit the castle hard. She and Kiwanis sent a lengthy rebuttal to councillors alleging errors in the city’s report – there’s at least one glaring mistake in that Sir Henry’s Café, the new basement restaurant that replaced Druxy’s deli, is open for business, contrary to the report.

It’s true, too, that Kiwanis has had some achievements: The new deal with Pegasus Hospitality Group of Palais Royale fame, a cutting edge new audio and visual guide and an innovative partnership with a women in skilled trades program to redecorate Casa Loma’s hunting lodge in Edward fashion.

Still, according to an internal board report, the castle lost $317,875 in 2009, a year in which attendance dropped 3.4 per cent and sales at the basement gift shop dropped 20.7 per cent.

That’s why Rita Davies, the city’s director of culture, is eager to see work accelerate and the intrigue end at Toronto’s palace.

“It is an emblem of modernity,” she said of Casa Loma. “It has a lot more interesting story to tell about Toronto than knights in shining armour.”

After 70 years of serving on its battlements, the Kiwanis Club should surrender its hold on Casa Loma. The service club’s stewardship of Sir Henry Pellatt’s fanciful estate, a prominent landmark owned by the City of Toronto, has been plagued by missed renovation deadlines, wasted potential and unmet promises. And it just isn’t good enough to blame the recession, as does Richard Wozenilek, chair of Casa Loma’s board of trustees.

Pellatt’s neo-Gothic extravagance remains a popular Toronto tourist attraction. But the faux castle, built complete with battlements and secret passageways in 1914, is in desperate need of upgrades and repairs. The board of trustees, composed of city appointees and Kiwanis delegates, was supposed to handle interior renovations, but it has fallen far short of its commitments.

City staff is recommending several changes, including creation of a new joint working group, fresh auditing, more board meetings and a new financial plan, with Kiwanis pushed out if it fails to comply. But given its failures to date, the service club has already been granted all the consideration it deserves. Mayor David Miller is right in urging that the city take charge and start over, with a new operator in charge. Surely there are private-sector firms with expertise in tourism and the hospitality industry that are willing to run this remarkable estate.

Torontonians should be grateful to Kiwanis for its work over the decades in preserving Casa Loma. But the club can do one final service for the city by stepping aside and making the transition to a new

Original Post

Lawyer rejects charge Casa Loma is far behind on renovations; Miller wants new leadership

Toronto Star
Author:Paul Moloney
Date:Jun 19, 2010

Mayor David Miller may want him removed, but Casa Loma’s chair says he enjoys the support of his board, which believes the landmark is making progress on its turnaround plans.

Lawyer Richard Wozenilek fended off city allegations that invoices totaling $118,000 were paid by Casa Loma for legal work he did on a new management agreement between the city, which owns the castle, and the Kiwanis Club of Casa Loma, which has run it for decades as a tourist attraction.

In an interview, Wozenilek said the billings presented to the vice-chair in January 2009 came to approximately $40,000.

“They’re saying in January 2009 the vice-chair was asked to sign invoices in the amount of approximately $118,000 for payment to my firm. That’s what they’re saying and that’s not true.” Miller responded that the figure of $118,000 covers billings from when the new management agreement came into effect two years ago, when the city appointed half the voting members of the board.

At the time of the change in the board, Miller named Wozenilek to continue as chair as recommended by Kiwanis. But by this March, in a meeting with Kiwanis to discuss the issues, Miller indicated he wanted to see a new chair.

“I think every Torontonian understands that the chair of a board who is serving at the pleasure of the mayor and is doing it in a volunteer capacity should not be charging legal fees to that board,” he said Friday.

Wozenilek wouldn’t reveal the total amount of fees he has billed for Casa Loma legal work, saying, “That’s between Kiwanis and me.”

Miller says he wants to “start over” with new leadership.

Wozenilek said his board discussed the city’s demands earlier this week. The two sides met Friday in an effort to reconcile their differences.

The city says it is concerned that the castle has fallen short on its renovation goals because money has been used to cover operating shortfalls. It says renovations that were to be completed by now include new third-floor exhibits, a visitor centre and a restaurant.

“Kiwanis needs to do two things,” Miller said. “They need to recommend another chair and they need to follow the steps that were set out in the staff reports to the executive committee.”

By the end of next month the city wants a joint work group to schedule monthly board meetings, prepare a financial plan and conduct an audit of operations and finances.

A separate report called for the Kiwanis Club to recommend a new chair to the mayor and amend the management agreement to clarify that the mayor can unilaterally replace the chair with another board member at any time.

Credit: Paul Moloney Toronto Star