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Naturist park?s closing leaves nudists with limited options
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Premium Member
Brian

Posted: Aug 27, 2009

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 http://www.metronews.ca/toronto/local/article/295115--left-out-in-the-cold

By this time next month, about 150 nudists will be cast out of the province?s oldest naturist retreat because their 100 acres of Eden is being sold to a private owner.

The several dozen nudists who live within Glen Echo?s grounds on campsites got their eviction notices on Tuesday.

?We have to be out by Oct. 1,? said Keith Scott, a member since 1995.

?We?re all very disappointed. You suddenly lose your second home, our home away from home.?

The nudist movement in Ontario had its genesis with Glen Echo Park, which was founded in 1955 as a co-operative. Most in the community got their first taste of naturism at the site, which is nestled along the Oak Ridges Moraine in King Township. In its mid-1990s heyday, as many as 350 families were members.

But in recent years, interest in the movement has sagged across the world.

Glen Echo?s owners, Mary and Edward Todorowsky, are approaching 80. Off and on Since 2005, they?ve been trying to sell to someone within the nudist community, who would keep their sanctuary open.

But after fours years of trying and several failed offers, the Todorowskys gave up. The property was sold for a rumoured $2 million.

Many members say they?re worried about where to go next.

There are three other nudist resorts in and around the GTA ? Four Seasons, Ponderosa and Bare Oaks, which is not far from Glen Echo.

?Losing a club is not good for naturism,? said Stéphane Deschênes, who owns Bare Oaks. ?It just means there?s less space. So many people have grown up in Glen Echo. It?s just really sad.?

Hoping to attract a younger crowd, both resorts are moving away from the old ?roughing it with nature? mentality by installing plumbing, electricity hook-ups for trailers and satellite television.

?We just added WiFi,? said Four Seasons manager Tom Landers. ?I?ve been talking to the owner of Bare Oaks and both of us feel that this market is in its infancy.?

The pair even discussed launching joint marketing to promote the naturist lifestyle, which Deschênes explains is about being at one with nature and not about being naked.

Reached at Glen Echo, it?s apparent Edward Todorowsky isn?t thrilled about losing the camp. He and his wife had hoped to live on the property under the new ownership.

?It?s a private matter,? he said. ?I really have to go, we only have a short time to move.?

Premium Member
Brian

Posted: Sep 28, 2009

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 http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5jZbE6xXMhy4kyqTfd0n1Va1Ux31w

Nudists to appear at hearings to fight for homes in southwestern Ont. park

POTTAGEVILLE, Ont. ? Members of a southwestern Ontario nudist club are set to appear before landlord and tenant board hearings Monday to fight to keep their homes after the park was sold to new owners.
The nudists say they received word in August that Glen Echo Park would close its gates on Oct. 1.
There are about 90 land lease homes at the park in the small southwestern Ontario community of Pottageville, located about 50 kilometres north of Toronto.
While the residents own their homes, they lease the land on a yearly basis.
Community members says Glen Echo Park is one of the oldest nudist or naturist communities in Canada.
They say naturists traditionally pride themselves in living lightly on the land, leaving a small and shallow ecological footprint.

Premium Member
Brian

Posted: Sep 29, 2009

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 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/nudists-avoid-sudden-eviction/article1304846/

Nudists avoid sudden eviction

The aging members of the Glen Echo Family Nudist Park might prefer the al fresco life, but they're glad the emperor ? or in this case, Ontario's Landlord and Tenant Board ? has clothes.

A board adjudicator, after all, ruled in the nudists' favour on Monday, after they argued that a sudden eviction from their mobile homes and cabins would be unfair. They claimed they were de facto lessees, not mere seasonal users, and as such deserved far more notice than what they got from the park's elderly owners, who sold the 100-acre park over the summer.

Now it will be up to the new owner, rumoured to be planning a religious community for the site, to see that the nudists are given at least a year to vacate once their current leases run out.

That is, if the impending Oct. 1 sale doesn't now fall through.

?It's just amazing,? said Laurent Leduc, the balding, bearded, retired academic who led the nudists through the day-long hearing in North York. ?I'm very happy, very pleased about the decision. It could have gone either way.?

Indeed, the affable Mr. Leduc was up against an actual lawyer, Jack Rosati, who was able to rattle off far more legal arguments than the nudists.

The central question before adjudicator Sylvia Watson was whether the nudists' makeshift cabins and year-to-year site rentals constituted a land lease arrangement ? which would entitle them to protection under the Residential Tenancies Act ? or merely a seasonal, transitory camping-type of transaction.

Mr. Rosati argued the latter was true, since the nudists generally used the spartan, mostly unwinterized dwellings as weekend or summer getaways. And besides, he said, the exclusivity of the nudists' club violates human rights provisions that forbid landlords from discriminating against tenants.

Ms. Watson, however, dismissed these claims. She heard from several nudists, including some with tenancies of more than 30 years, during which they erected permanent buildings on their sites with the full blessing of the landlords, Edward and Mary Todorowsky, a nudist couple who founded the camp in 1954. Some said they used the sites year-round and listed them as primary addresses.

Wearing telltale summer tans that peeked out from autumn clothes, 10 of the camp's estimated 100 residents attended the hearing, which ran more than eight hours in a sterile, windowless and anything-but-natural room on the seventh floor of an office building.

Mr. Leduc spoke first, calling the camp his ?Henry-David-Thoreau kind of Walden Pond? since he took up his site in 1988.

Robert and Roberta (Bob and Bobbie) Kennery, meanwhile, have enjoyed the calm breezes of Glen Echo for 30 years, and now count it their sole Canadian home, since they winter in the southern United States. ?We even vote in the town? of Schomberg, near the camp, Mr. Kennery said.

?It is apparent to me from all the evidence that these homes are intended to be permanent, that they're intended to be occupied,? Ms. Watson said when giving her ruling. Whoever winds up as owner of the park after Oct. 1 ?now has an obligation to give notice? of one year, in keeping with the law as it deals with land leases, she said.

In other words, a new owner could still force the nudists out, meaning the Glen Echo residents ?may have won the battle today, but the war is over,? as Mr. Rosati put it.

At the very least, though, the ruling provides much-needed breathing space for tenants who only just learned of the pending sale of the park on Aug. 21. And breathing space is precisely what they have long sought at the forested retreat on the Oak Ridges Moraine, about 50 kilometres north of downtown Toronto.

?The best thing about being up there is the solitude, the quiet, the peacefulness,? Mr. Leduc said. ?I feel much more alive there.?

Premium Member
Brian

Posted: Oct 1, 2009

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 http://www.thepeterboroughexaminer.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1777191

NUDISTS MUST COVER UP

KING CITY, Ont. -- Residents of Ontario's oldest "naturist" park are being stripped of their right to go nude.

Jack Rosati, lawyer for Glen Echo Family Nudist Park's owners, told Sun Media everyone must keep their shirts -- indeed all clothes -- on at the King Township resort.

He said the decision by Eddie Todorowsky, 85, and his wife Mary, 80, was in response to a Landlord and Tenant Board ruling Monday that the facility is a "leasehold" property and tenants must be given notice to vacate -- in this case a year.

Eddie "felt quite betrayed by ... the act and by the tenants" and is now insisting "they will have to be clothed," Rosati said.

The owner's latest gambit in his dispute with tenants over the sale was based on his lawyer's argument at the hearing that leasehold regulations do not permit discrimination

That would mean limiting membership to nudists violates human rights codes, Rosati said.

Letters will be sent to owners of the cabins and trailers warning "they have to dress," the lawyer said.

"If they don't, I'm not sure if we have to call the police or if there are bylaw enforcement officers," Rosati said. "But it will be strictly enforced."
So I guess the sale went through officially, then. Sucks for them, and for the naturist movement in general whenever this happens. At least they have their place! And I bet they'll figure out some sort of system where they let each other know when the owner is and isn't around.

Also, if the place is indeed turned into a religious retreat of some sort, I hope the truth of the previous use spreads around! At least that'll make for a great true story around the campfire!
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