In Torontoist's first article, on October 26, 2004, co-founder Sarah Lazarovic promised to readers that "Never again will you blindly wonder what's going on in the city....Torontoist will provide you with everything you've ever needed, 416-wise." Populated by a "collective of persons, all wryly knowledgeable in the arenas they will be posting on," Torontoist would, even if its contributors didn't always collectively agree, be using the collective voice—the editorial we—that characterized the other city sites owned and published by Gothamist. One year after that first article, NOW named Torontoist the best blog in the city, describing its scope as "the landscape of Toronto and all the weird and wonderful things that take place therein," and summing it up as "a pleasurable browse that doesn't feel like a news site."

A lot has changed since then, and a lot hasn't. I've been the editor of Torontoist for two and a half of the site's four years, first with Ron Nurwisah (until December 2006), and then with Marc Lostracco (from January to December 2007). During my time here—which has spanned seven thousand articles, thirty-six thousand comments, and ten million hits—I've seen Torontoist grow dramatically in number and breadth of readers and contributors. I've seen it take a spot in the margins of Toronto's media, and prove that the relationship between vast media empires and small internet publications need not be a parasitic one where the latter feeds off the former but a symbiotic one where both use—and complement, and need—one another. I've seen it twist the "city blog" format into something greater than that, something that saw the quality of content, not its quantity or profitability, as the ultimate end. I've seen it lauded, slammed, copied, envied, loved, and overlooked. But most of all, I've seen the city and Torontoist change together, day after day, article after article. I am intensely proud of what Torontoist has done and what it has become, and I'm very hopeful for the future of the city that has always been its focus. But in 2009, as Toronto continues to move forward, I'm very sorry to announce that Torontoist will no longer be there to bear witness.

At the end of this month, I will be stepping down as Torontoist's Editor-in-Chief. I've loved everything about this job since I started it, and my decision to leave was not an easy one to make, but it is, ultimately, the right one at the right time for the right reasons. Gothamist has decided, as a result of both my resignation and the recession, to close Torontoist on January 1, 2009 and concentrate on their more lucrative American sites. That decision is the right one, too: as it exists now, Torontoist can barely be sustained, let alone developed, and it has survived and thrived as long as it has, in spite of modest means, largely because of the ceaseless hard work of that aforementioned collective. Torontoist may return at some later date, if conditions are different; until then, it will remain in suspended animation, its content still public and searchable.

A month and a half ago, a few days after our fourth birthday, NOW named Torontoist this city's best website one more time, and their readers chose us as this city's best blog. The magazine ended their mostly-curmudgeonly (and pretty self-oblivious) endorsement with unfeigned applause and a call to arms, concluding that "overall, there is no other blog that cares so much about the city. For that, Torontoist should be saluted—and the rest of the local blogosphere should try harder." It's not just the "blogosphere": Torontonians need to be shown more often that their city is not ugly, banal, mean, or dangerous, but also reminded that it is not perfect or unimpeachable. Toronto warrants honest praise, honest criticism, a bit of heart, and a half-decent sense of humour. Torontoist has tried to provide all of those things, and it owes its success and whatever legacy it has to the editors, contributors, and readers, past and present, who have understood that great cities are not born but made and endlessly remade, and that they are ours to make better.

Thanks for reading, and stay with us: we've still got plenty left before the end of the year, and maybe a surprise or two to top it all off.

David Topping
Editor-in-Chief, Torontoist

Photo by Miles Storey.

Torontoist will be there to see the new year after all.

After announcing that the site would close at the end of this month, we received a totally unprecedented amount of encouragement from our readers and attention from lots and lots of media outlets here and elsewhere (and had an imitator or two to boot). The consensus—an encouraging one—has been that Torontoist can't and shouldn't end like this.

I decided to leave Torontoist only when I felt that the site could go no further in the direction I'd attempted to steer it, and that any potential progress would be necessarily stunted by financial circumstances that could only get progressively worse. As I put it a week and a half ago, "as it exists now, Torontoist can barely be sustained, let alone developed"—by any editor. Gothamist agreed, and planned to shut the site down in the new year as a result.

But a lot has changed for the better in the past week and a half, and a lot now seems possible for the site's future that wasn't before. And while Torontoist does not yet have the financial support it needs, we do have the support of our readers and our city, and that is what we've always needed most. So I'm happy to announce that up to, through, and past January 1, Torontoist will continue as Torontoist, with its existing name, existing contributors, and new content. (And, for now, it will continue to be supported technically and sustained financially by Gothamist.) It won't just be business as usual: it is the entire staff's shared mission to give the site one big concerted push, one that will see us in far better shape in six month's time and that should ensure not just our survival but our growth and success. We're going to do what we can to make Torontoist better than ever. It might, of course, not work. But we're not done—not yet.

Thanks for reading, and stay with us.

David Topping
Editor-in-Chief, Torontoist

Photo by Miles Storey.

A little over a year ago, Thorarinn Ingi Jonsson walked into the Royal Ontario Museum, left a bomb just inside its entrance, and walked out. The bomb, of course, was fake, a replica created for a class project at OCAD, but that hardly mattered: it looked just like the real thing, and when it was discovered, wrapped in a plastic bag with a note that said "this is not a bomb" on it, it shut down not only the museum and a significant stretch of Bloor Street but an AIDS fundraiser. Jonsson spoke to Torontoist before turning himself in to police; after that, he was thrown out of OCAD, charged with (and pleaded guilty to) mischief, placed on probation, and returned to Iceland, before coming back to Toronto in February and, only recently, speaking to press again.

Not too long ago, we asked Jonsson if he wanted to do something for Torontoist about his past year, now that he's off probation and back in the city. Jonsson was interested, and he's chosen to express himself with—appropriately—more art, though the only thing this piece might threaten is your carpal tunnel syndrome. It's a 640 x 5184 pixel image (appropriately titled loka.jpg) that includes some familiar imagery: OCAD, Old City Hall, the ROM, explosions, planes about to crash into office buildings, etc.

Jonsson says that the image is "a narrative of my interactions with institutions and their mortal employees for the past year and a month. The underlying creed these institutions live, kiss and kill by is underlined in the coldness of their building materials." So now you'll surely get it! Jonsson's piece is after the fold.

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains of 2008—the people, places, and things that we've either fallen head over heels in love with or developed uncontrollable rage towards over the past twelve months, with one hero and one villain selected by each participating staff member. On Christmas Day: the heroes. On Boxing Day: the villains. And next week, cast your vote to determine the Superhero and Supervillain of the year.

At a press conference late this morning at Spadina Station, the TTC rolled out the beginnings of their snappily named "next vehicle arrival notification pilot project" that will eventually see the new street furniture transit shelters outfitted with LED screens, new and old subway stations across the city outfitted with LCD and LED screens, still more stops updated with numbers that riders can text message to, and the TTC's new and much-improved website updated with a smart trip planner—all to get riders real-time transit information on where their ride is and when it's going to get to them.

Adam Giambrone, the TTC's chair, gave his presentation in front of Spadina Station's new pair of LCD screens. One screen shows times for when the streetcars along the 510 Spadina route, the first route to have the system fully set up on, will arrive in the station; the other half shows a real-time map of where on the route each individual streetcar is. Facing those LCD screens (above, top), above where commuters wait for the 510 to shuffle out of the dark, is an LED screen (above, bottom) that also shows riders how long they'll have to wait for the next car. And in no time, six thousand transit shelters across the city will have LED displays like them, and those stops without shelters or not outfitted with screens will have a stop number on them that TTC riders can use SMS to get the same information from.

The whole system uses a "predictive algorithm," that, said Giambrone, will factor in everything—from each vehicle's location as measured by GPS, to traffic delays, to road closures, to weather—that will only improve and refine itself over time. (The 510 route is a "few seconds" off and getting better, said Giambrone.) A set-up like the one at Spadina—which was tested intermittently over the last week, how
one BlogTO reader caught a look at them Friday morning—is also now active at Union Station. The next train arrival system rolled out in subway stations in September will also be up at every subway station by the end of 2009. It's all, Giambrone said, the "next step in our e-initiatives" that are creating a "web of information" for riders to make "intelligent choices" about how to best use the system. By fall next year, Giambrone promised, one way or another, "you will have access to real-time information for your stop."

George Talusan, one of the developers of the Red Rocket iPhone application, told Torontoist that "we're excited about the TTC's planned GPS-based departure time system and we think it will be a valuable addition for the city's ridership." "Hopefully," Talusan said, "the TTC will allow third parties to hook into their system. It's not hard to see how this functionality would be of great benefit to Red Rocket users and we would jump at the chance to integrate it." Kieran Huggins of MyTTC.ca—which provided Red Rocket with all its stop data—agrees. "We'd love to see the TTC open the data feed up to the public," Huggins said, "and would definitely jump on any opportunity to integrate that with our schedule data. In fact, we've been hoping for something along these lines for quite some time!" Huggins is interested in seeing "how the live positions match up against both [the TTC's] dataset and [MyTTC's]—it would certainly be a great tool with which to refine the accuracy of our schedules. And of course, any improvements we can make are passed down the line to anyone who wants them."

The project will cost the TTC $5.2 million, part of which will be provided by advertising on the system's OneStop screens—which hopefully won't mean a compromise in the quality of information for the sake of profit. Regardless, Giambrone is insistent that the system will not be a burden to its riders, claiming that "I don't think our riders want to pay for this." (If you send a text message to the system to find out when a vehicle is arriving at any given stop, the TTC will not, for instance, charge you a fee on top of the one your carrier does, for that sent or received message.) And while the spacing between the C and L above the Spadina Station LCD display will surely frustrate Joe Clark, and one bystander boomed out "fuck you!" on their way past the press conference, this moment, and this year, may be a defining one for the TTC, a year when the TTC finally launched itself head-on into the future. It's about time.

All photos by Miles Storey/Torontoist.

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains of 2008—the people, places, and things that we've either fallen head over heels in love with or developed uncontrollable rage towards over the past twelve months, with one hero and one villain selected by each participating staff member. On Christmas Day: the heroes. On Boxing Day: the villains. And next week, cast your vote to determine the Superhero and Supervillain of the year.

When we tried out the bench prototype at the street furniture unveiling at City Hall in June, it was one of the few items we were pretty much okay with. But because Astral Media can't do anything right (when it comes to street furniture and billboards, anyway—their other divisions seem to be functioning relatively well), they've managed to screw this up, too.

No sooner had the benches started appearing than complaints about their awkward placement began to surface. In the comments of Spacing, Geoffrey wrote that "Roncesvalles got a nice new bench/barcalounger south of Garden Av that manages to make the sidewalk all the more difficult to navigate past the pinch point the old style bus shelter and vegetable stores present." Joe Clark posted a couple shots of a recent installation in the Beach(es), observing that it's "Too far from the curb." (We like Russell McG's comment, too.)

We snapped the above pic on a Friday night at the northwest corner of Bloor and Palmerston. The bench has been installed in the place where these Koreatown businesses put out their garbage for collection.

Add to that the fact that the stainless steel frame and armrests get cold (and, at other times of year, will likely get hot), and we'd say this is pretty much par for the course for AMO and Jeremy Kramer.

Five hundred of these behemoths are supposed to go in by year's end.

Photos by Jonathan Goldsbie. Goldsbie is a campaigner with the Toronto Public Space Committee.

Australia! It's a big country, and to be terrifically unfair and dismissive we'll be honest and say until recently it hadn't given us very much. Off the top of our head, we thank it for inspiring an enjoyable episode of The Simpsons, a couple of 2000 AD stories (Oz and Song of the Surfer), and, uh…

That all changed recently, because we've been watching Summer Heights High on HBO. It's superb and makes us reassess our general blanket ban on everything Australian—for everything except the film that takes the country's name. Because Australia is directed by Baz Luhrmann, who (to us) feels like the cinematic equivalent of someone scraping their nails down a blackboard.

This is not the case for other critics, of course! NOW's Norm Wilner rather sweetly states that he "will follow Baz Luhrmann anywhere"—hopefully not over the side of a cliff, which is where we'd direct him—but that he "cannot accompany him to Australia." No wonder, it's, like, a really long flight. He explains, "Australia feels like a far emptier (and far noisier) place than it might otherwise have done." Noisy and empty…what on earth else would anyone expect, we could quip, if we were in the mood to continue to be unfair and dismissive (which, generally, we are).

Let us instead be positive, by noting that the Bloor Cinema continues its excellent work by screening a couple of interesting documentaries throughout the week: FLicKeR, concerning Brion Gysin's "Dreamachine"; and I Think We're Alone Now, which we reviewed when it played the Over The Top Film Fest and called "interesting as an exercise examining our own views on people with obsessions."

Also on release this week, Restless, The Killer (Le Tueur), A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noël), and Transporter 3.

In festivals, the AluCine Toronto Latin Media Festival, Brazil Film Festival, and Eh! U European Film Festival finish up this weekend, with the Eh! U festival screening Hunger, one of the most celebrated films of this year's TIFF, at 8:30 p.m. tonight at the Royal Cinema.

And if you can't be bothered to leave the house (to go to, say, Cinematheque Ontario, which continues), Criterion have started an "online cinematheque" where you can watch a selection of films for $5 each (and then deduct that $5 from the cost of the DVD if you like the film enough). We'd be in hog heaven if we could make them stream to our Xbox 360 (especially if they expand the line-up a bit).

First, hipsters were going to spell the end of western civilization. And, now, western civilization is going to spell the end of hipsters. In the latest edition of NOW, Joshua Errett (Torontoist's co-founder, for what it's worth) argues that hipsters are so totally over, thanks in no small part to a certain Barack Obama. Maybe Errett's just being ironic (or post-ironic?). Or maybe Sarah Nicole Prickett—justifiably cited as something of an expert on hipsterdom in NOW's article—was sorta right.

Adam Giambrone's Facebook status—a surprisingly good source for transit news—just changed, which makes it just about official: the TTC will not be raising fares in 2009, period. Mayor Miller, who pushed for the move because of the "growing economic crisis," said today that in 2009 "many [TTC riders] will be people looking for work." Why, that's not disheartening at all!

Wild Toronto was a bi-weekly comic strip, created by Rosemary Mosco, about the animals and plants that make a living in our city. It ended last July, when Rosemary left the city for greener pastures, but we decided to bring her—and her column—back for one final edition before the new year.

When TTC spokesperson (and esteemed Torontoist commenter) Brad Ross contacted YouTube superstars Syrus and Randal, they figured they were about to be hit with a cease and desist for their parody music video "I Get On (the TTC)." Turns out he just wanted to invite the pair to today's public TTC meeting at City Hall to honour them and give them free January metropasses.

Their mention was the first order of business, with TTC chair Adam Giambrone introducing the young men and leading the room in applause before playing the video. The cult hit was greeted with smiles and appreciative chuckles (and even some bopping in place from Mayor David Miller).

Then the floor was handed over to Syrus, who drew laughter when he gave his reason for making the video: "We were bored." Mayor Miller praised the guys for being smart enough to film in the stations without permission (more laughter) and called their video "fun and whimsical." "In the '80s," Miller said, "I remember 'Spadina Bus' was the cool song about the TTC, but I think you have eclipsed it."

Photos by Amanda Factor.

On Sunday afternoon, one of the coldest days of the year so far, the Art Attack wing of the Toronto Public Space Committee spent several hours turning a TTC shelter into a cozy igloo.

Jeff Chapman may have passed away in 2005, but Pete Forde is keeping his legacy of urban infiltration alive. Inspired by a Torontoist article on the deserted Canadian Domain Ride at the Toronto Zoo, Forde and two friends who wish to remain anonymous trekked from one end of the line to the other. An amateur photographer, Forde has decided to document the ongoing journey for a project he's titled 40 Days on the Monorail. Every weekday, he uploads a new picture portraying the rail line in a different way. The pictures are stunning: Forde captures the sense of dereliction through a combination of Polaroids, digital and analog shots, and an awesome video. He wants to showcase an aspect of the city that isn’t—and shouldn’t be—accessible to everyone, sharing the wonder he feels without promoting it as an alt-tourist destination.

But it doesn’t stop at the end of the forty days. Forde intends to keep this going as much as possible, publishing books on demand from Blurb.com, selling prints off the recently launched website, and throwing a massive party when it’s all over. He says it is the most ambitious thing he has even done on a whim and is eager to show people something beautiful.

Keep up with the remaining fourteen days of 40 Days on the Monorail on Flickr, Facebook, LiveJournal, and Twitter. You can also check out two Torontoist-exclusive photos in the gallery above.

All photos by Pete Forde.

Finn O'Hara grew up in Inglewood, "the middle of rural Ontario" as he puts it, with a name "as Irish as it gets"—Finn Donal Douglas O'Hara—in a sea of Daves and Jeffs. He wanted to be a hockey player (his name would've looked cool on a jersey), but ended up as a professional photographer instead. Just as well: after a revelatory moment in the shower a week ago, O'Hara has created I Love Your Fucking Name, a project devoted to collecting and photographing the human specimens attached to the most "magnificent," "brawny," "awesome," "unusual," and "offthefuckingwall!" names.

The project is as much about each person's name as "the story behind it," O'Hara told Torontoist—the turmoil and teasing that necessarily accompany some of the names, but also everyone's endurance of them. In a way, says O'Hara, having an unusual name is "like being born with half an arm": once you get used to it, "it's pretty fucking easy." The project is starting off here in Toronto, but word of it has already spread. It will grow to be "as big as it wants to be," says O'Hara, to the point where he hopes that over the next year or so he can visit people with interesting names worldwide—like the Harry Beaver who lives in Virginia who's already submitted his name—when he's in their neck of the woods. As it is being shot, the project will be slowly unveiled to the Fucking website, with a gallery show and book potentially on their way after all the shooting is done.

If you've got a particularly attention-worthy name, you can sign up yourself, and, should your name attain what O'Hara labels "the seal of awesomeness," you'll get $50, fame, and a print of your photo. And no cheaters; you'll be photographed with ID.

Photo courtesy of Finn O'Hara. Tip via MyHogtown.

On any given night, a few thousand photos are snapped inside one of Toronto's clubs. Packs of friends bring their own digital cameras. Professional or semi-professional photographers move from venue to venue, party to party. And other clubs employ their own staff photographers to shoot the action and make their place and its patrons look beautiful. But that massive amount of documentation is also inherently limited: the clubs are rarely captured dormant or off-guard, never shown absent of people or activity. So for In Praise of Shadows, Ryerson photography student Eugen Sakhnenko fought and obtained permission from three different clubs in different areas of the city—Embassy Night Club (117 Peter Street), Loki Lounge (577 King Street West), and Baby Huey (70 Ossington Avenue)—and shot them vacant of almost everything save for light to, as he told Torontoist, "[shine] the light into the shadows, both physically and metaphorically, to show what these spaces really are."

In Praise of Shadows explores, Sakhnenko says, "how artificial atmospheres, music, light effects, crowds, affect our perception of space....Many of the photos feature ridiculous objects that are very unnaturally juxtaposed with their surroundings, [and] most of these environments are beat up and not very pretty at all when looked at in the full light, during the day, when they are empty and the artificial atmosphere is not present." But "when experienced at night, the way most people see them," says Sakhnenko, "they appear beautiful, at times even surreal." He's right: the photos are eerie and vacant, as if a front has come down and exposed the venues for what they really are.

The project itself took three months, from September to November, though the bulk of that time, says Sakhnenko, was spent "calling and trying to get access to various places to shoot." "Permission," he said, "was really difficult to get. In my work I aim to explore places that interest me, which happen to be environments with restricted access, either at certain times or all the time." Sakhnenko wanted to shoot at CiRCA—"just the size and all the objects in it would have been great"—but couldn't get approval. "Often times," Sakhnenko says, "I would have the support of someone in the club and a link in, but the manager or owner wouldn't approve it or just wouldn't reply."

And while he has been introduced to many people who "are either in the industry or really love the culture, [for whom] this is life everyday," Sakhnenko maintains he's "not particularly a club person." His fascination with them isn't over, though—he's hoping to add to In Praise Of Shadows soon, provided the clubs are willing to let their guard down and a bit of light in.

Sakhnenko's photos are above.

Every Saturday morning Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters—good and bad—that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today.

High Park Toboggan Runs, ca. 1906-1910. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 438."

After a month and a half of acrimonious debate, on February 19, 1912, City Council passed a by-law outlawing tobogganing in public parks on Sundays. Many councillors took their cue from the Lord's Day Alliance and similar organizations. They felt that the Sabbath was such a grave moral issue that public engagement in business, sporting activities, and other entertainments needed to be curtailed not only to encourage church-going but also to ensure workers had a day's rest. The city's labour movement, however, took exception to religious groups speaking for them and rallied to vigorously defend Sunday tobogganing. Despite a massive public outcry, however, the Sunday sledding ban was passed by a large majority at City Council with only Mayor George Reginald Geary and six aldermen dissenting. The controversy surrounding the issue reflected how, at the turn of the twentieth century, Toronto's social and religious establishment felt under siege in the rapidly growing city by the forces of industrialization and immigration and by the growing strength of the labour movement.
High Park Toboggan Runs, 1914. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 441A."

In the late Victorian era, an immigration-fuelled population boom dumped most newcomers and industrial workers into the city's crowded, squalid slums. Reformers raised concerns that a lack of recreational opportunities for residents of these districts might breed disorder, vice, and delinquency. From the late 1890s, city-run recreational programs and leisure facilities became important public issues.

With the two hundred yard drop to the valley floor in Riverdale Park and the massive hill in the undeveloped wilderness of High Park, tobogganing had been a favoured winter pastime for Torontonians since private operators had begun running toboggan slides at both locations in the 1880s. By the turn of the century, overcrowding had raised concerns about safety. Even after lights were added when the city assumed responsibility for the toboggan slides in the winter of 1906, some reformers still questioned whether the city was doing enough. When, in 1907, thousands of resourceful kids began to use the slopes just west of Queen's Park for sledding, they were chased away by University of Toronto officials. This prompted newspaperman and social reformer J.J. Kelso to call for an expansion of city-run free sliding facilities for children. In response to this and The Star's 1909 criticisms about safety at the park slides, the municipal government upgraded the slides and assigned police to supervise. As historian Gene Homel writes in his October 1981 article in the Urban History Review, by 1912 "Toronto now had a fancy new system of public tobogganing, and its residents flocked to the slides seven days a week."

The Beginning of the Toboggan Run, High Park, ca. 1906-1910. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 439."

In January 1912, the Ministerial Association took exception to the Sunday crowds on the snowy slopes and issued a proclamation condemning city officials for encouraging the desecration of the Sabbath by keeping the toboggan slides open. Initially, Mayor Geary and the Board of Control paid little notice, and the public continued to flock to the hills of Riverdale Park and High Park each week. But, as other religious and moral-reform organizations rushed to defend Toronto's Christian morality, City Council couldn't ignore the barrage of petitions they received demanding that the slides be closed on the Lord's Day.

Sabbatarianism was a well-established political force in Toronto. Based on the notion that, in a Christian society, all people needed one day of rest for their moral and spiritual well-being, Sabbatarianism had gained strength as a movement in the 1880s with the establishment of national church organizations and the Lord's Day Alliance. On a national level, they'd succeeded in petitioning the federal government to pass the Lord's Day Act in 1906, which prevented all non-essential and non-charitable Sunday activity. Locally, the Sabbatarians had led a long, protracted fight in the 1890s against allowing streetcars to run on Sundays, as recounted in Christopher Armstrong and H.V. Nelles's The Revenge of the Methodist Bicycle Company (Peter Martin Associates Limited, 1977). With the support of the working class, the Sabbatarians won civic plebiscites on the streetcar issue in 1892 and 1893. But eventually labour leaders defected because, although a few people might now have to work, Sunday service presented the best opportunity for workingmen and their families to escape their unhygienic and over-crowded neighbourhoods for healthy recreation in the parks and suburbs. In a close referendum vote in 1897, streetcars were finally allowed to run on Sundays.

On the issue of Sunday sledding in 1912, labour and religious groups once again fell into opposing camps. In a January 16 deputation before the Board of Control, Presbyterian clergyman W.H. Rochester expressed the genuine religious sentiment fuelling the Sabbatarian cause. He argued that "the city is secularizing the day and the city enters into direct competition with the church, the Sunday school and the home." He also argued that the sledding could lead to commercial activities and therefore the seven day work week that some of Toronto's larger industries desired. An almost unspoken undercurrent to the Sabbatarian argument, however, was the desire for moral and social control. Newcomers, some felt, needed to be acculturated into developing proper Sabbath habits. Toronto's blue laws, Armstrong and Nelles argue, provided an institutional means for controlling immigrants, workers, and other "unruly elements in the community."

The case in favour of Sunday tobogganing was made before the Board of Control on the same day by prominent labour leader J.D. O'Donoghue. Sunday, the labour argument went, was the only day that workingmen could actually make use of toboggan slides in city parks. Closures would therefore be unfair and harmful for the very group who most required healthy recreational activity. More importantly, union leaders were incisively critical of the hypocrisy of the Sabbatarian position—an indication of the deepening schism between twentieth century labour and moral reformers—whereby the religious folk invoked working men's interests for their cause but thought nothing of engaging their own chauffeurs in Sunday work. The critiques of labour advocates towards Sabbatarians could therefore take a pretty biting tone. Phillips Thompson, a radical, called for workers to unite against "a few noisy fanatics...of this priest and parson-ridden city." A supportive newspaper opined that Sabbatarians had "just enough religion to miss all the fun in this world and get a lot of painful surprises in the next." Union leader L.H. Gibbons was more articulate. He argued that recreation and religion need not be in conflict because people "can worship in the open air or anywhere, as well as inside the four walls of a church."

High Park Toboggan Runs, ca. 1908-1912. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 440."

Newspapers were filled with letters supporting Sunday sledding. The Star reiterated that the safety of sledders was cause enough to keep the slides open because the by-law might drive winter enthusiasts from the specially designed slopes to more dangerous ravines and hills. Even business interests ardently opposed a prohibition on tobogganing—albeit because they didn't want to deepen class cleavages by antagonizing those who worked in their factories and workshops. Business leaders, according to a petition published in the papers, even recognized that the proposed prohibition was merely discriminatory "class legislation." While those against the Sabbatarian proposal were probably more numerous and agitated than during the streetcar debates, Homel argues, they weren't as united and lacked the organization and institutional weight of the church groups. Nor was there a single corporate entity, like the Street Railway Company, backing the opposition as there had been in 1897.

And so where the debate mattered most—in the council chamber—Sabbatarian-influenced councillors were not swayed by the popular outcry. One of the few dissenters, Alderman Samuel McBride twice failed in his attempt to have the city hold a plebiscite on the issue. On February 19, the new by-law was passed. It stated: "No person shall on the Sabbath in any public park, square, garden or place for exhibition in the City, slide upon or use any of the public slides constructed or maintained by the Corporation." Ironically, ever-resourceful Torontonians simply shifted their winter recreational activities to comply with the law. Rather than tobogganing, each Sunday thousands simply availed themselves of Grenadier Pond in High Park and the city's other skating rinks—which had grown in number from one or two in 1890 to over thirty in 1912.

Observance of the Sabbath remained so strong throughout the 1930s and 1940s—although restrictions were slowly diluted to allow the opening of the museum and art gallery—that the quirks of Toronto's notorious blue laws required repeated explanation in guidebooks. Organized games, team sports, and tobogganing in city parks continued to be banned on Sunday. Even after the park slides were phased out of existence in the 1940s and 1950s, the edict against tobogganing remained on the books until December 1961.

Image of Group on Toboggan, ca. 1911. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 478A."