Steve Kupferman

Last night, I saw Toronto go temporarily insane

I don't have TV at home, so last night, while I was eating dinner, I listened to Canada's big Olympic hockey victory on AM radio.

It was the perfect way to experience the win, because radio announcers have to get way more excited about goals than TV anchors do.  It comes with the medium.

When Canada scored the game-winning goal in overtime, I believe the announcer's exact words were:

"IT'S OFFICIAL!  CANADA GOLD!  YEAH BABY, YEAH BABY, YEAH BABYYYYYYYYY!"

And then he calmed down immediately and started describing how the rink personnel were rolling a carpet out onto the ice, which made the enthusiasm seem kind of rehearsed and calculated.  But it was still a huge moment.  My allegiances were divided, but when it was all over I realized I'd been rooting for Canada all along.  And I don't even care about hockey, normally.

Afterward, I had a decision to make: stay home and read, or go out into the cold and see what was happening on Yonge Street--which, according to Twitter, was where all the fans were migrating for the impromptu post-game celebration.

What clinched my decision, ultimately, was the realization that, with the Maple Leafs as its sole local hockey franchise, Toronto wasn't going to have a similar victory to celebrate for a long, long time.  Out I went.

The scene on Yonge Street wasn't an all-out riot, but it was close.  There was riot potential.  It was, in any case, the most boisterous crowd activity I've ever seen during my three years in Toronto.

Yonge Street was full of cars.  There were so many of them that they could barely move, and I was able to outpace them easily on foot.  Most of them were honking, and a lot of them had people leaning out of windows and doors, waving flags and jerseys, and high-fiving pedestrians.

There were people standing on the sidewalks, high-fiving everyone who walked past.

I saw one guy driving with one hand and using his other hand to hold a big plastic horn to his mouth, so he could blow into it.

Someone lit a bottle rocket on the sidewalk, and it exploded about a foot from a second-storey apartment window.

One old woman with a walker stood in place on a corner and did a little fist-pump dance that made her look like a wind-up toy.  I don't know if she even knew about the game.  Maybe she thought we'd won a war.

I walked south towards Yonge-Dundas Square, which was the epicenter of the party, and at some point a woman came up and started chatting with me, spontaneously, on the sidewalk.  Under ordinary circumstances, the only people who strike up spontaneous sidewalk conversations in Toronto are people looking for money (for themselves, or for any of the handful of charities that find it worthwhile to employ armies of professional sidewalk harassers).  This woman was a lawyer, from Yorkville, and all she wanted to talk about was hockey, and Canada.

She was maybe forty-five.  She said she was a second-generation immigrant and that she owed everything to Canada.  She said she had a meeting in half an hour, but that she was going to call and cancel, "because I can't miss this."

I told her I was new to Toronto and had never seen anything like the scene that was unfolding around us.  Even people working in some of Yonge Street's shops and restaurants were starting to come to their windows to wave flags and gawk.  The bouncer at the Brass Rail strip club was smiling and shaking hands.

She said it had been similar when the Blue Jays won the World Series.  Then she called her mother.

I circled around to the west side of Yonge-Dundas Square, which was so dense with partiers that I couldn't get in, and saw a group of fifteen or twenty people standing on the curved, glass roof of a transit shelter, until a policeman on horseback forced them all to climb down.  Elsewhere, police were confiscating open beer containers and directing traffic around the bulk of the crowd (Yonge was closed from Gerrard to Dundas).  If there had been even a handful of violent drunks in the crowd, things could have soured pretty quickly, but the local media was mercifully free of reports of injuries or deaths this morning.

I left Yonge Street that night at around nine o'clock, and as I was riding home, a guy standing in the middle of Bloor Street with a Canadian flag draped over his shoulders locked eyes with me.  "And what about you, Mr. Bike Man?" he asked me.

And I said, weakly: "...go Canada."

Last Week: The Day I Finally Saw an Astral Garbage Bin Being Installed

Toronto has slowly been replacing all of its ugly old metal garbage bins with newer, gray plastic ones.  There's all sorts of controversy swirling around the new bins, though.  Public space advocates don't like them because they're allegedly not functional enough.  And then the City's a little fed up with Astral Media, the advertising company that's installing the new bins, because of a multi-million dollar dispute over whose responsibility it is to pour concrete pads, which are needed in cases where the new bins have to be installed on grass.  They can't just be bolted into dirt; they need something solid to sit on.  And also, there's this scathing critique from the Globe:

Garbage on the inside, garbage on the outside [Globe]

...which might as well have been titled "insult to injury."  See, I actually like the new bins.  They look sleek and sturdy to me--and, perhaps because of their forward-leaning posture, strangely eager to accept my trash.

The weird thing about the new bins is that they have a way of popping up overnight, like toadstools.  There's never any notice, and the old bins are always removed without a trace.

Last week, as I was biking down Spadina, between Bloor and College, I finally caught the bin installers in the act.

First I took some photos from a distance.

All the new bins were wrapped in blankets (perhaps they were cold) and lashed to the back of a flatbed trailer, which you can see here in the foreground.  The yellow truck in the background (blocking an entire lane of traffic) was being used to carry the old garbage bins, which were being removed immediately prior to installing the new ones.

After snapping my fill of long-distance shots, I crossed the street to speak to the crew.  Courage was required.  Orange vests are intimidating.

I told them they were like ninjas, because I'd never caught them in the act.  They seemed to find that funny.  Actually, in general I think they were pretty amused by someone taking such a peculiar interest in what, to them, must be a pretty onerous job.

I got them to move some of their tools out of the way so I could snap a shot of the base of the bin, before the bin itself was installed.  The reason those expensive concrete pads are needed in grassy areas is because those three huge metal screws (each roughly the width of my thumb) need to be driven several inches into pavement.

To my knowledge, these are the first photos of the Astral Media garbage bin installation process available on the internet.  I think I just broke a story, here.  A really boring story.