A host of film festival parties, Fashion Week events, and Halloween festivities booked for the old Don Jail this fall have been cancelled after Slingshot Inc. announced that Bridgepoint Health has pulled the plug on the event-planning company’s contract with the hospital. In an interview Wednesday, Slingshot partner Chris MacKechnie said the company was ordered out of the historic site in late May, just weeks after signing a contract with Bridgepoint—the site’s owner—to manage summer activities in the former jail.
The firm went public with the news in a press release issued this week. “We were respecting Bridgepoint in not saying anything. But after working on it for two months we realized it wasn’t going to happen and that we had to start doing some damage control ourselves,” MacKechnie said.
MacKechnie reported that Slingshot spent four months, from January to April, ironing out details of a contract with Bridgepoint Health. “We signed it on May 8 and it came into play on May 25. We moved in, had tours booked, and a day later someone from the hospital came in and told us we had to leave due to concerns raised by the Ontario Realty Corporation,” he said.
The O.R.C., which owns the adjacent—and operational—Don Jail still has a lease on the old facility. That means the provincial government agency must approve access to the venue, which BizBash toured in April.
Julia Sakas, a spokesperson for the realty corporation, told The Globe and Mail Tuesday that access agreements were in place for the public tours operated by Bridgepoint, but not for the Slingshot events. “A licensing agreement allowing for more extensive use of the facility has been discussed by [the corporation] and Bridgepoint,” Sakas told The Globe, “but currently there is no agreement in place for that.”
MacKechnie said Slingshot’s first event was to be held on site on May 29, but he reported the O.R.C. wouldn’t allow it to proceed. “We had 35 events that were booked [well into October] and it all fell apart,” said MacKechnie, who noted that the company had also sold 1,000 tickets for daily tours. “It’s a horrible situation.”
Bridgepoint's public tours of the jail will proceed as scheduled over the next four weekends for those who purchased tickets during the Doors Open Toronto event in May. The hospital is slated to begin construction on the 145-year old facility, closed since 1977, in November.
