The clientele at Yorkville's Mira Linder spa are anything but relaxed. They're panicked about losing their oasis -- a place where cellphones were turned off and stress melted away.
"I don't know what I'll do," said Barbara Coven, one of the spa's earliest clients. "I keep hoping it's a big mistake and they'll change their minds."
Three decades after opening the country's first full-service day spa in downtown Toronto, Lily Alexander is closing the doors of the Mira Linder Spa on Avenue Road.
When she opened the business in her mother's name, it was a one-of-a-kind sanctuary of beauty and relaxation -- a place where clients had their first mud body wraps, seaweed facials and essential oil massages.
Today, chi-chi hotel spas with lavish budgets are popping up all over the city; hair salons and cosmetics companies are offering a menu of aesthetic services. Tremendous competition, combined with the added stresses of severe acute respiratory syndrome, the Iraqi war and the events of Sept. 11, 2001 in the United States, have all taken their toll on the pioneers of pampering.
"I know we were the originals -- the innovators and the groundbreakers -- but life changes and we have to move on," said Kate Alexander, Lily's 37-year-old daughter, who now runs the spa.
"A lot of staff have been with us for more than 25 years and they're going to be retiring too. We're really a family here, but families grow up and move on," she said.
Kate is expecting her first child in October and relishes the idea of devoting her time to being a mother; 60-year-old Lily will have the chance to savour her new husband's companionship.
Ms. Coven first stepped into the spa 30 years ago, after she incurred a serious sunburn while vacationing in Aruba and heeded a friend's advice to call Lily right away.
"What am I going to do now?" said Andrea Watley, who has been loyal to Mira Linder for more than a quarter of a century. "I don't want to go traipsing through a hotel. I've gotten used to the technicians. . . . They never make you feel like you're on an assembly line."
Though many celebrities have walked through the spa's doors over the years -- star siblings Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen popped in for facials, Luciano Pavarotti for a pedicure and Minnie Driver for a massage -- the staff are praised for treating all their clients with the same degree of tender loving care.
"Our mandate is once you're in a waffle robe everyone is the same," Kate said.
The Sept. 30 closing brings an end to a business that spans three generations of enterprising women. Mira Linder, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor, became an executive at a cosmetics company in Tel Aviv, then moved to the United States and opened the first spa in Detroit in the late 1960s.
Ms. Linder's daughter, Lily, and Lily's late husband, John, were also involved in the business, but they moved to Toronto to raise their two daughters. After friends continued to seek Lily's beauty advice, she decided to open the tiny Mira Linder Esthetics on Davenport Road in 1973.
Kate has helped with the family business since Day 1, from labelling bottles and sweeping floors as a young girl to her current job as director of the five-storey, full-service spa on 108 Avenue Rd. that opened in 1981.
"It's in my blood. I grew up in it. I've been immersed in it my whole life," Kate said. "It's going to be very hard to walk away."