Three months before its official opening (now scheduled for June), Circa, still under construction, looks less like the superclub of tomorrow than the cavernous remnants of a party that ended and petrified. “When Peter called me, I said, ‘You know, I don’t do this stuff anymore,’ ” explains Travis Bass, who is serving as my high-energy tour guide, and whose oversize black-rimmed glasses could almost pass for goggles. Bass, 38, moved to New York from L.A. in 1998 to design art and light installations for Limelight and the Tunnel before becoming a full-time event planner. “But I came up here because I love Peter. Then I saw the venue and right away went, ‘I’ll do it.’ ”

As we tour Circa, Bass clutches a pile of design mock-ups and gestures wildly in the space, conjuring up the planned attractions: a seventies-themed Swedish sauna bar, a Fellini-esque surrealist ballroom, the “Washroom Bar,” a gay-bathhouse-themed disco that also houses the actual bathrooms. “It’s an homage to the bathroom bar at the Tunnel,” Bass says. In fact, the whole club has a self-referential feel, like a meta-club whose broad theme is the kitschy excess of Gatien’s past venues. Yet despite the retro feel, Gatien and his associates fully expect Circa will be among the most culturally significant venues on the planet. “We’re thinking world,” Bass says. “We’re thinking, What artists from Japan can we bring in? What artists from Paris?” He points to an incongruous mall escalator, leading up to the second floor, a remnant of the previous tenant, a video arcade. “Hilarious!” he declares. “At random points in the evening, we’ll project video onto the escalator to create a cool hologram effect. So maybe at one point you’ll see fish swimming up the railing! Or a fat kid sliding down!”

He rhapsodizes about Toronto as a sort of New World—fresh-faced and wide-eyed—just ripe to be set alight by Gatien and his expert team of party people. “There’s almost no way I would’ve done this project if it was in New York,” says Bass. “I’ve been falling more and more in love with Toronto. It’s probably comparable to New York fifteen or even ten years ago. People who had that edge or that artistic quirkiness—Peter represented those people. Now the only people you’ll see at big clubs are very rich Upper East Side kids with their bottle service who believe they’re VIP because they’re sitting next to Paris Hilton. When they had to pay $500 to sit on some cheap ottomans! That’s not what New York was.”

It’s an intoxicating, if jarring, vision of New York’s extinct past resurrected in Toronto’s immediate future. If Gatien can pull it off, it will certainly transform the city’s nightlife—traditionally, Toronto’s nightclub scene has never attracted artists, celebrities, or the social elite, who prefer dimly lit lounges that “nobody” knows about. Instead, Circa’s neighborhood on Richmond Street, with its colorfully painted, laser-happy establishments with names like Joker and G Spot, is a magnet for the ball-cap-wearing suburban boys and their girlfriends in rayon minidresses. “It’s a really risky proposition, particularly with that kind of club,” says Shinan Govani, a gossip columnist for Canada’s National Post. “In New York, there are just more socialites, more dilettantes, more arty people, more mystery expats—that whole mix of colorful people you need to make a place burst. But I’m certainly not counting him out. Torontonians more than anything love to be compared to New York, and they endlessly compare themselves to New Yorkers, so there’s kind of a Sally Field–ness here. Yes, he was deported here. But you can sort of conveniently forget that he’s not here by choice.”

The stairwell leading up to Gatien’s fourth-floor office is adorned with crude graffiti sprayed by Xander—JUNIOR CLUB KING, most of them say. (“He’s practicing,” says Gatien’s publicist.) Gatien’s office is beige and lit with fluorescent tubes. It contains sparse, mismatched furniture, a single filing cabinet, and a large wooden desk pointed awkwardly toward the door. The cheap industrial carpeting, also plastered onto one wall, gives the office the feel of a suburban call center.

Stripped of the reputation, the glitzy context, and the eye patch (“It was a hot look when I was younger, but I stopped wearing it in 2000 because it made me too recognizable,” he says), Gatien is unexpectedly gracious, even deferential. His glasses, which at first strike you as a little sinister, eventually seem to function more as a shield for his protection. He is dressed casually, in a striped shirt with a gray T-shirt layered on top, jeans, and a pair of khaki sneakers with bright-orange laces. He leans back on an old office chair, with his feet up on another one, smoking a Marlboro menthol. He has the air of someone grown accustomed to cross-examination. “I don’t think I’m being delusional about it,” he says. “Most people believe I took a royal screwing.”