Two brothers, I dunno, ten and and eleven, were escorted to the back of the streetcar where I was sitting, by their dad. He sat them down and suddenly realized he’d forgotten to get transfers. The one kid was buzzing to look out the back of the car and he kneeled on the empty seat between me and the matronly, scraggly-haired woman on the other end. His dad sat him back down. Guess he thought the kid would be pestering us.

There were two empty seats across from me – the back  is a half-circle facing each other – so I offered to give the kid my seat. I knew the dad would want to sit with the kids anyways (correctomundo, btw), so I thought the kid might as well have a few seconds of fun gazing out the back of the streetcar. I loved looking out through the front of subway cars when I was young, so I get it. And I honestly didn’t see the harm. The boy was polite, he was obeying his dad, he was keeping his feet off the seats, backpack neatly to the side – damn if that kid didn’t deserve an ice cream sundae!

So shit, peeking through a greasy, filth-covered window for ten seconds seemed appropriate for a young man of that calibre.

Offered it to him twice. Twice he refused.

Scraggly-hair to my left says, “good for you!”, to him. “You listen to your dad!”

Okay, guess she had a point. But you know, not like he’s gonna roll up his sleeve, tie off a vein, and start hitting the dragon back there. Plus, potential weirdo ends up in a seat farther away from the kids. Where would be the downside?

Dad came back, seat gladly accepted. The opportunity was gone.

Oh well, the kid did refuse. And that should’ve been the end of it.

Scraggly-hair pointed at the kids and said to the dad, “You shouldn’t leave them alone like that here. This isn’t a safe neighbourhood.”

Internally, I begged to differ. Oddballs? Painful piercings? Imaginative body modifications? Yes, yes, and yes. Dangerous? No. But, this was still just between her and the three of them.

The dad replied, “I teach my sons well and they know how to handle themselves.”

The buzzing kid popped erect, beaming a smile, and immediately added, “We take the streetcar by ourselves all the time. We walk home, we take the subways, we take the buses. I know what to do if I get lost. On this streetcar, if I got lost, I would get off at St. Andrew Station and …”

It went on for another five minutes with the other boy interjecting excitedly in sporadic bursts to further heighten the tales of their prowess. The dad finally stopped them when they got on the subject of late-night taxi rides (if only he’d let them look out the window).

“You never know who’s around them down here. All sorts of people”, responded scraggly-hair after a short pause. “It’s just not safe.”

Then she looked over at me. For fucks’ sake!!

“I didn’t mean to imply that you’re a criminal”, she explained sheepishly.

Steady, old boy, I thought to myself. Not a problem, a broad smile and that’ll be my reply. No problem. I never felt myself to be a criminal, so ho harm no foul. And no statement.

“But don’t you think it’s dangerous?”, still looking at me.

“Well”, I replied, measuring each word, “I remember watching a documentary about urban parents that send their kids into the city by themselves. This guy isn’t alone. Personally, I’d be hesitant to send out any kid younger than ten, maybe eleven. But, you know, that’s just me. Not my call to make on anyone else’s behalf.”

“But you gotta admit it’s dangerous. Even for us!” She wasn’t going to let this go.

“To be honest”, I said gingerly, “I’ve lived in a number of cities and I can’t say that Toronto is that bad. I’d let my kids out by themselves.”

The look on her face … the look on her face … lipsed pursed tight, eyes squinting shut, head shaking gently from side to side, mouth pulled back in that broad, thin smile that says, unequivocally, that  you are so fucking wrong.

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Well I’ve lived here for six years and I’ve experienced some terrible moments”, she retorted.

Out of nowhere, the dad cut in firmly, “I’ve lived here for forty years and I think it’s just fine.”

Silence for the next two stops, at which point the three left the streetcar.

Scraggly-hair stayed on with me for another few stops. She’d only meant it in the best interests of the boys, she assured me. He (the dad), was mad at her, she could tell.  Yeah, she was sure of it. And Toronto is no place to be sending children alone. She was attacked not too long ago herself!

“Oh wow, what happened?”, I asked, hiding a regretful and nearly instantaneous wince.

“Just down there … you know … the park on Queen?”

“Yeah … Trinity.”

“No, the one on McCaul.”

“Oh, that one.” (There is no park at McCaul and Queen.)

“Some drunk, or maybe whacked out on drugs, grabbed my backpack like this”, she motioned feebly at the air much as an injured walrus might. “If my partner wasn’t there, I don’t know what would’ve happened. My partner stood between him and me”, she made another pathetic attempt at a blocking gesture with her elbows, “he stood between us, and he said ‘no!’ And the man was scared because my partner is, like, six foot two, and then he ran away. My partner scared him away. Lucky for me.”

Lucky indeed, I thought. Lucky he’s your “partner”, as you keep reiterating, and not some other less formal entity in your life. That ten-foot pole distance would probably suit me fine too.

But lucky for me, her stop had come more suddenly than she’d realized and she had to bid me a hasty goodbye as she ran for the rear exit. “Stay safe!”, she urged, leaning back into the car for one final wave.

Maybe, I remember thinking, my kids will have something to fear down here after all.

By the way, the faux posters above are from a new National Post campaign to promote better manners on public transit. They may be real posters if anyone prints them out — large sizes available on the Post’s site. The “TTCC” stands for “Toronto Transit Civility Commission”; a quiet pet project of the paper. Normally I make a point of linking to the Star but what can ya do? A good idea is a good idea.

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Haha! I know, that last one’s not transit. But I had to share. I spent enough time around that area to have seen inebriated lawnmower drivers, and let me tell you, it’s hi-freakin-larious. Under normal circumstances, these gentlemen wouldn’t think to drive an unbalanced buggy with sharp, high-velocity, metal blades underneath, up a very steep hill. But then they partake of a few.

I guess there was one thing kinda related to the subway, the Toronto Sun’s lament about the state of our highways. Mostly, they were talking about this:

This is the picturesque Don Valley Parkway. It’s picturesque because it’s late in the afternoon on Sunday. At almost any other time, it’s bumper to bumper, stop and go. If you’ve been on it, you know what I’m talkin’ about, right? How many years of your life have you lost on that road? And on some sections, you’ve got a foot between you, the concrete barrier, the car on the other side, and the car in front, and the jerk behind is honking his horn for you to get outta the way. That, buddy, is how that dipshit down in the valley down there crashed his car. That’s why we’re moving extra slow. That’s why you can kiss my flatulent ass you …

Gosh, even thinking about it gets me all worked up; that’s one angry road. The attached 401’s not much better, but that’s a whole different kinda rage; high-speed, low-brow, middle-finger. You can’t shout at those speeds once you achieve them.

Torontonians know what I’m talking about, right? Yeah! Grandma’s doing eighty in the fast lane with nothing in front of her, tapping the breaks a few times a meter. What the fuck is her problem?! HONK H-O-N-K *H-O-N-K* GODDAMMITYARR!! *smash smash smash* GAAAARRR!! Then black out. Wake up under a highway overpass somewhere by the airport with blood on your hands and a dead body in the trunk of your car. Evade police for weeks in a massive manhunt through rural southern Ontario. Eh? Yeah. What Torontonian hasn’t been there?

So to avoid that scene, and since there’s no way we’re biking in from the sticks every day, there’s public transit. But not the fru-fru, surface streetcar my spoiled butt takes every day. We’re talking about the city plumbing; the subway.

There’s been a lot of talk about putting new stuff into the city center, which is fine by me, but it seems like a lot of the outlying, underground stuff is being forgotten. Specifically, the Bloor-Danforth subway line. That’s not to say that the Yonge-University line isn’t need of bit of a facelift too:

Vintage. The tiles look nicotine-friendly, don’t you think? But, at least, in good condition.

However, in the stations, if you’re in a hurry, headphones in, reading email, you might not notice how rustic they’re getting.

Often, it’s not straight ahead; that’s just an attractive young blur. Sometimes you have to wait for the crowd to clear (as in Sunday), and then look up:

Or you have to be at the right end of the platform:

Right, not that right. The other right. Your right. Right And you’re right, it is unsightly. But I haven’t heard of any plans to take care of it. Has Scabby Row been foresaken? I did my teen years there and it was pretty grungy. I was back recently and Kennedy Station had an even more watch-your-back feel to it than I remembered.

I’m one of those incurably sunny people who think that one of the ways to deal with the problem is to make the place nicer. For being so busy, it’s a grim station. On one side, it’s got a raised road with a raised LRT train track under it (two storeys of concrete, basically) so it’s dark, and on the other the parking lot of a grey-slab of a community centre. Stabbing or shooting someone here doesn’t seem out of context.

So, change the context I say. I’m sure it’s been tried and tested somewhere. And I’m sure I didn’t come up with it; wouldn’t that be a sad world to live in? I’m just too lazy to find a link.

Spruce up the stations. Scrub off some of that water damage. Repair some of those broken chunks. Put a little more life in there.

That probably won’t come out of the downtown streetcar money, which itself is in question. And that  infrastructure funding that was supposed to have paid for things like this turned out to be not so much. But there is the community.

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Imagine my surprise when I stumble outdoors into the still-full sunlight of seven o’clock and — there’s the streetcar. This would never have happened when I was all hypothermic in the middle of deepest darkest winter.

Me and the guys from work jump on and continue our discussion of chicks we’d do. Yes, ladies, we are admiring you from afar.

While I remark how short our wait at the TTC stop was, the conversation naturally meanders over to public transit (anything’s interesting inebriated, no?), and we get to talking about the purpose of streetcars. Or maybe that was in the bar.

Anyway, I make a sparkling remark about rails being in the earth since Toronto was a wee’un. We got ‘em, makes sense to keep using ‘em. That must have been the deciding opinion in the discussion because everyone suddenly looses interest in the topic.

As my colleagues alight at University, I settle back to dream about the future of transit in Toronto:

Neat.

I hop off the streetcar at Yonge and head straight for the subway where, much to my surprise, the same chums I left earlier are now chatting up some girls heading north on the same line. In the time it took me to make it two blocks on the streetcar, they were able to go south three, do a u-turn back north a further three, all the time making relaxed stops at stations in between while psychically enticing me to hop on the same train.

That pretty much settles the argument of streetcar efficiency in my mind.

As my buzz starts to wear off I start to wonder how a longer streetcar (that’s basically what the new vehicles will be), would have made this trip any shorter. As much as I like the idea and even the look of the new trains, I suspect that until the city either widens the street or starts randomly detonating taxis, they won’t do much to make transit faster.

But I’d still do ‘em.

If they have a toilet, cuz I really have to wee.

For example, my morning commute on the 504 King West was handled by a dapper fellow donning the full Transit Commission regalia. His headwear was not unlike a full police constable hat (did you know they made these?), his uniform was Picardesquely neat and authoritative, and the mirror shades and Gestapo gloves he gesticulated wildly with were the final word on professionalism.

Here’s a wholly inadequate picture that I took:

If you look real close, you can make out the edges of the hat.

Like I said, wholly inadequate. But that doesn’t matter because I didn’t want to single out one specific driver, though you’ll always be in my heart, streetcar number 4187 operator.

What the situation reminded me of were some of the old photos from the Toronto Archives I’d been browsing recently while stealthily dodging work; pseudo-nostalgic images of a gentler time in the TTC’s history when men were men and ulcers were the size of a baby’s head.

Here are some of the tippity-tops from my short list:

On the way home to murder the cheating wife at a Wellesley bus stop, 1957:

Distracted-lesbian guided tour at King subway station, 1957:

Tommy Holmes, TTC conductor and chronic masturbator, 1930s:

Little Oliver Twist with his mum and their parole officer, 1926:

Holy shit it’s sinking!, 1927:

Hahahahahaha, 1928:

On the way to the re-education camp, 1928:

Here I am plunking down $2.75 a trip and the streetcar doesn’t even mow down pedestrians with a cow-catcher anymore. The TTC used to be the better way, now it’s just the adequate way. At least the operator of the  4187 car is making an effort to rekindle the glory days.

Them’s the times, I guess.

]]> http://www.torontocitylife.com/2009/04/15/hahahahahaha-1928/feed/ 0 http://www.torontocitylife.com/2009/03/27/big-reds-gold/ http://www.torontocitylife.com/2009/03/27/big-reds-gold/#comments Sat, 28 Mar 2009 02:00:30 +0000 Patrick http://www.torontocitylife.com/?p=1256 It’s innocuous and mostly ignored. It just stands there performing its function as best it can, providing a vital service to thousands of Torontonians each day without so much as a mumble, and lately it’s been spitting up gold.

Here is my accumulated trove from the past few days, complete with a likely reconstruction of the sequence in which they came out →

Aren’t they great? Each one a unique fuck up; some mis-cut, some mis-printed, and most that didn’t fully make it through the rollers. Then there’s Blue Mountain of messed up transfers, the double-print. Super gracias, TTC!

These will find a home somewhere on my shelf, lovingly enshrined in my homage to the quirks that make the city great. MiCkie Dick’s and towers don’t a shelf make nah more.

Should you care to brighten your own morning, visit the right-hand machine at the Dundas southbound subway platform, when it’s “fixed”. I’d be just chuffed to share your own sunny treasures here (comment or email, whatever floats your boat).