Burns was an Ice Cream Social regular until her recent move to Toronto. The internationally famous have dropped in too, including The Black Keys, Danger Mouse and Ms. Perry. "Katy Perry was like 'Hey this is cool; next time I'll stay here,' " says Mr. Fazio. "I was like 'Okay; here's my card. You're not gonna stay here.' " She probably won't. Small and functional, the hotel's 10 renovated rooms are not the main draw. Nor were they meant to be. "We see the hotel as an amenity to the arts and culture complex, which is kind of the inverse to if you go to, say, the Hotel Vancouver," says Mr. Fazio. This weekend, the hotel will mark its first anniversary with a Halloween art-meets-amusement park extravaganza, with a 16-storey high Drop of Doom installed in the parking lot, and a midway where artists have been tasked with re-imagining classic carnival games. Next weekend, the Eastside Culture Crawl will hold a major pre-crawl event here -- a first. Its days of being in the middle of nowhere may be numbered. Thomas Anselmi, the hotel's creative director and co-owner, agrees with Mr. Rennie and other developers that the area is bound to change, and that the Waldorf's renewal will be an important chapter in that transformation. "We're going to contribute to the gentrification of this neighbourhood; we're going to," he says. "We don't necessarily want to. But we just are. All of a sudden there's going to be a building across