For the second time ever, the Toronto Zoo is hosting pandas. The two cuddly black-and-white bears—Er Shun and Da Mao—will eat shoots and leaves in northeastern Scarborough for the next five years, and will also be the subject of many panda puns. We crunched the numbers on the panda scene.

If you’re riding your bike around Toronto, make sure you have a bell. Or a gong. The Highway Traffic Act, which regulates cyclists, drivers, and all other road users, states that “every motor vehicle, motor-assisted bicycle, and bicycle” requires some sort of “alarm bell” in good working order. The act also states that you can use a gong, which you shall sound “whenever it is reasonably necessary to notify pedestrians or others of [your] approach.” The document doesn’t specify how big the gong can be, and its definition of “reasonably necessary” leaves room for interpretation, so you might as well buy the biggest one possible and bash it liberally.

Gongs aside, the Highway Traffic Act is about as long as the phone book and half as interesting, and even the police admit that it’s impossible to follow. Last Friday, I was explaining my plan to ride my bike while following the law to the letter to Clint Stibbe, a spokesperson for the Toronto Police Service, when he interrupted me.

“I guarantee you can’t do it,” he said, arguing that all road users inevitably make mistakes. “And you know why?” he asked. “Because they’re habitual.”

Stibbe was right, of course. All road users—not just cyclists—have bad habits. Riding west from my apartment near College and Bathurst on a cool, clear morning, I had the requisite bell mounted to my bike’s stem and a brake that was capable of making my rear wheel “skid on dry, level, and clean pavement.” I headed towards the west end, following Annette Street to Jane, past two vehicles blocking the bike lane, and into Baby Point, a wealthy enclave of large family homes. From there, I accelerated down Humbercrest Boulevard to around 35 kilometres an hour, squeezing hard on the brakes when I realized that the posted limit was 30.

I eventually made my way east, following the Harbord bike lane towards the downtown core. As on most mornings in the warmer months, there was a steady stream of cyclists in the lane, and most followed the rules with the exception of minor transgressions. One younger guy was riding just a little too aggressively, passing the other cyclists on their left. But as usual, the many stoplights along Harbord acted as a great equalizer. I got off and walked my bike through the northern end of Queen’s Park. I wasn’t exactly sure what the rule was, but I erred on the side of inconvenience. I noticed, with a bit of envy, a few cyclists riding slowly through the park. About 25 kilometres into my ride, I was dying to bend a rule to save some time.

I signalled all my turns and obeyed all stop signs and red lights. This being Toronto, my own politeness was often in direct conflict with the politeness of others. A driver waved me through a stop in the west end, though she had arrived first. Lots of drivers do this, and I can never decide if it’s condescending or polite—if they’ve resigned themselves to thinking all cyclists would rather blow through stop signs.

When I spoke with Stibbe later, I learned that in some ways I’d been more law-abiding than I thought, while I’d also managed to bend some rules I didn’t know about. For instance, Stibbe said that cyclists can’t technically be ticketed for speeding. So unless I was being particularly reckless, I wasn’t breaking any laws when I zipped down Humbercrest. I was also fairly certain I’d rested my foot on a curb at a stoplight or two—which Stibbe says is okay, as long as you’re not in motion. Like most of what’s in the traffic act, it’s complicated, nitpicky stuff. So here’s a handy rule of thumb: You’re probably breaking the law, but there’s a good chance that no one cares.

Later that weekend, in the early hours of Sunday morning, I’d stopped at a red light where Barton Avenue crosses Bathurst. It was late enough that most people were home sleeping but before the bars had emptied into the streets. Another cyclist was waiting to continue west on Barton, across Bathurst, but the light stayed red for several minutes. Finally, she looked around carefully, and rolled through the red. A tree falling in a deserted forest. She carried on down Barton, her taillight glowing in the dark, and disappeared.

Tuesday night offered yet another community meeting spurred by strong opposition to local development. However, unlike the recent debates about Ossington or The Beach, this one happened in central Etobicoke in the Humber Valley Village neighbourhood. While the rough outline of the plan might be similar to developments across the city, the details are different. With that, here are six things you should know about the Humbertown-development debate:

1. Mega-meetings deserve mega-churches

Typically, community meetings take place in modest church basements or similar settings, but this one was different. The Humber Valley Village Residents Association, which has been rallying opposition to the development, rented out a 3,200-seat church on The Queensway to host the meeting. They didn’t need that much space as the evangelical house of worship was mostly empty. But hey, there was plenty of parking, especially since the church is located across from IKEA.

2. The development details

Developer First Capital Realty hopes to transform the Humbertown shopping plaza site at Royal York and The Kingsway, which, as they point out out, looks like an island of concrete on Google Maps. The original idea was to erect five buildings on the site with retail at ground level and the tallest building being 21 storeys. After a couple of revisions, the developer reduced the tallest building to 12 storeys and promised to increase the local tree canopy by 40 per cent. All told, the development would add 604 residential units, or, roughly, 1,500 people.

3. The local community doesn’t like it

Humber Valley Village residents have been vocal and well-organized in their almost-unanimous opposition to the proposed development. Before last night, 1,600 people came out to the two previous community meetings, a massive number for a development-proposal discussion. One individual last night produced a binder-full of research and said he spent 400 hours on the matter in the past few months. Some residents also hired architects to devise an alternate proposal, which calls for 200 units on the site, a third of what the developer wants. (Some speakers last night conceded that up to 250 would be okay.) The community expressed their concern using the slippery-slope principle, arguing that allowing a 12-storey building would give license to 43 nearby rental buildings to reconstruct to a similar height. One speaker, Joan Canning, compared the effect to “crabgrass,” even though she lives in a 14-storey building across the street from the proposed site. (There’s also a 17-storey building nearby.) Other concerns included increased traffic, a lack of surface parking, crowded schools, and the fear that busing kids out of the community to school would cause psychological damage.

4. Humber Valley Village is not downtown

As residents reminded councillors repeatedly at last night’s meeting, Humber Valley Village is not downtown. Many residents spoke fondly of it as a “village,” even though its planning and demographics are more like that of a conventional suburb. With an average household income of $256,000, Humber Valley Village-Edenbridge (in which the mayor and his brother Doug reside) is very affluent, and with an 18 per cent senior population, it’s one of the oldest communities in Canada. It’s also a community that has experienced a steep population decline of over 20 per cent over the past few years, as there are 5,000 fewer people who now live in the area compared to 2008.

5. Rob Ford will steal the show wherever he goes

The mayor showed up to the event, popped in, and then bolted out to… put Rob Ford magnets on car doors. According to the Toronto Star‘s Daniel Dale, Ford’s staffer (and former high-school football coach) David Price had put the magnets on cars earlier, but His Worship did another round himself. When it was pointed out by Dale that some people might find this strange, the mayor responded with the classic “I know what you are but what am I” defence, saying people find the Star journalist strange. (The mayor, you’ll remember, charged at Dale in a public park behind his house just over a year ago.)

6. Whatever happens will happen at the OMB

This process is just a formality. Etobicoke York community council voted in unanimous opposition to the proposal last night (although councillors Sarah Doucette and Giorgio Mammoliti were absent). But whatever the outcome, the City will likely find itself at the Ontario Municipal Board arguing against the developer. The OMB is the board of appeal for development disputes such as this one, and it has a reputation for favouring the developers. First Capital will point to precedents in the area and studies that show traffic flow will still be within capacity post-development. And then we’ll repeat this story somewhere else in Toronto.

Planting his feet against a muddy slope, Andrew Ramesbottom hauled the front end of his canoe up a steep riverbank, through a tangle of trees, and finally out into a clearing beside Don Mills Road. Motorists rushing by couldn’t have missed the incongruous sight of this tall, bearded young man hoisting a canoe out of the Don Valley.

Ramesbottom was portaging around a particularly sharp bend in the Don River, at the same spot a few hundred others would within the next few hours—about 500 boaters, in 250 canoes and kayaks, paddling from Wilket Creek Park, near Leslie and Eglinton, to Lake Ontario. All were taking part in last Sunday’s Paddle the Don, an annual fundraiser for the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA), now in its 20th year.

They did so almost invisibly. Unlike its ultra-urban English namesake, the River Don (which runs through the city of Sheffield, with buildings butting right up to its brick-enclosed channel), Toronto’s Don is a watery back lane, cutting unseen through the centre of town—making it a great place to get a fresh perspective on the city.

Around 8:30 a.m., before we set off, Ramesbottom managed to get the hang of steering in moving water. It was the only day of the year when Toronto’s most urban waterway is navigable by boat (it’s usually too shallow), during which the city opens the G. Ross Lord Dam reservoir, releasing enough water into the Don’s western branch to raise it around 20 centimetres. “Dammit. Sorry,” said Ramesbottom, as we drifted into a thicket of dead branches. “I’m more of a lake canoer.”

An environmental technologist with the TRCA, he builds wetlands throughout the GTA, including on the Don—especially near the dirty bits, like wastewater outflows. “We wear waders and boots, but you still get wet,” he said. “Guys have gotten ‘swimmer’s itch,’” which is like a skin infection.

Starting uptown, the most visible sign of urbanity was the occasional apartment tower, looming above the treetops. Heading downstream, it was impossible to know exactly where we were until sighting landmarks: Flemingdon Park, the Prince Edward Viaduct, St. James Town.

Downtown, the river was abundant with flotsam—tires, shopping carts, collapsed utility poles, bricks, drywall, and iron rebar snagged between low-hanging tree branches. Swans glided through the murk. Still, it was better than in 1931, when the river’s frozen, oil-slicked surface caught fire, or in 1969, when environmental activists gave it a mock funeral.

Passing below the Eastern Avenue Bridge, we saw the unfinished West Don Lands neighbourhood to the west. Located right in the middle of the Don River’s floodplain, it will be the first downtown community to truly overlook the river, making the TRCA’s re-naturalization efforts that much more important. (The long-term plan is to incorporate wetlands into the river’s mouth, which will clean it and act as natural flood control.)

For now, the river empties, thoroughly uncleaned, into Keating Channel, one of the filthiest places in town—all the sludge, road salt, sewage overflow, and general toxicity from sinks, bathtubs, and storm drains upstream ends in a channel about 60 metres wide and five metres deep. The water was frothy and yellow; the scum thick enough to scoop up with your hand.

Bumping up against a small dock, we disembarked, but after two hours kneeling, my legs were cramped and unsteady. I staggered and windmilled my arms to keep from falling off. “Whoa,” said a volunteer, reaching out to grab me. “Don’t fall in there.”

“No kidding,” I said, smiling. “That’d be bad.” He didn’t smile back. “You’d dissolve.”

Zookeepers, elevator workers, bus drivers, LCBO employees—it seems like everyone is threatening to strike lately. Even if Ontario’s booze-mongers don’t walk out the day before the long weekend (they probably won’t), the prospect is enough to bring back memories of lengthy lines and empty shelves during the last strike threat in the summer of 2009. (The LCBO says they have a contingency plan to keep Victoria Day wet.) But even a worst-case scenario hardly compares to some of Toronto’s most disruptive—and sometimes beneficial—strikes.

Click here to view a larger version of the infographic below

On the Flemington Road bridge overlooking Allen Road, 18-year-old Samuel Sinclair talked about his plans to become a stylist. “I wouldn’t say fashion’s the only thing I know,” said Sinclair, who’ll be attending Fanshawe College in London, Ontario in the fall. “But it’s the only thing I care to know about.”

Sinclair, who was wearing a green H&M jacket, skinny jeans, and Converse All Stars, lives in the part of Lawrence Heights that locals refer to as “under-bridge.” To get to his home from the closest middle school, you follow Flemington Road to Ranee Avenue, which passes under Allen Road. If you live in the opposite direction, you follow Flemington Road to the bridge where we were standing—that’s over-bridge. Sinclair confessed that the delineation is hard to keep straight—the network of streets actually forms a lopsided circle.

I’d been introduced to Sinclair while on a tour of the neighbourhood with Robin Phillips, a 32-year-old teacher who’s producing a documentary about Lawrence Heights entitled Hope Heights. She’s soliciting funding through the crowdfunding website IndieGogo, and because of the pride that locals feel for their homes, she’s named the different donation levels for various streets and cul de sacs.

The area is also the site of a massive planned revitalization that will bring an influx of new housing to the neighbourhood. The initiative has already seen dramatic debate in council and in the community, but Phillips’s film is concerned with what’s going on in the neighbourhood right now. It focuses on the area’s young men and boys, who Phillips believes are too often portrayed as wayward and violent.

That’s an unfair characterization, said Sinclair, who chalked up crime to outsiders coming into the neighbourhood and causing trouble. “We’re usually targeted, but it’s not seen in [the] press,” he said.

In July, I (along with other reporters) flocked to the neighbourhood, not far from where Sinclair was standing, after 27-year-old Daniel Davis was gunned down outside Flemington Public School. A detective held a scrum and Davis’s mother spoke to reporters, then the journalists packed up and headed back downtown. The stories that followed were the kind of portrayal that both Phillips and Sinclair are trying to change.

Since then, the neighbourhood has been back in the headlines, with a man shot dead in October and a boy shot twice in the back last month. Almost invariably, stories about shootings and murders include a quote from a local resident, who insist the neighbourhood is a strong community beset by rare outbursts of violence. As we walked along Flemington Road, past the schoolyard where Davis was murdered, it’s easy to see what they’re talking about. We went past mainstays, like a nest of pathways where kids ride their bikes, a community garden, and a seasonably dry splash pad.

At the community centre, kids ran through the gym and pecked away at desktops in the computer lab. I spoke with Abdi Mohamoud, a community volunteer and father of six. He’s worked as a safety monitor in schools and lived in the area for 20 years, but he had little to say about any particular challenges when working with the area’s young men. “The perception that people might have from outside is totally different from what we have in here,” Mohamoud said.

One of the biggest challenges for planners working on the revitalization is to address the problems created by Allen Road—it cuts the neighbourhood down the middle, making walking and cycling less appealing. And hopefully, the revitalization isn’t just about eliminating obstacles and divisions in the neighbourhood, but rather fostering the community that’s grown in spite of them. There are things in need of fixing, but the people you meet in Lawrence Heights, like the young men in Phillips’s film, suggest there’s a lot there that’s worth preserving.

It’s the worst-case scenario of Toronto cycling, or at least one of them. After a late night spent welcoming spring from a Spadina patio, you walk your bike back to a TTC station, locking it up on the street alongside dozens of others for the night before taking the subway home. Maybe one pint led to nine; it’s only prudent to play it safe, after all. 
But, the following morning, a bleary-eyed stumble back to the ring-and-posts reveals the worst imaginable results of your foresight.

Where your ride once sat, proud and (presumably) secured in place, there now sits nothing but a maimed, severed lock. Or, at best, there’s a quick-release wheel hanging from the post, its spokes bent and brutally warped from the effort of wrenching it free. Your bike, your chariot, was prey for the wolves of Toronto’s streets, and its eviscerated carcass is its last, sad testament—as so many rusting junk piles across the city can attest.

In some cases, local cyclists mark their years traversing the GTA in tallies of such tragedy, accounting for the handfuls, often worse, of bike theft personally encountered. “A few years ago, I lost a bike that I had locked to a curb-facing sign post, with what I thought was a heavy-duty cable,” says Douglas Yardley, a local rider since 1973. “In broad daylight. At Bloor and Yonge. My guess is that someone came by in a van, cut the cable, and was gone in a minute. I had gotten a bit careless.”

Arguably, everything that’s wrong with bike security in Toronto can be gleaned from that one story.

In 2011, Toronto Police reported 2,323 bicycles stolen throughout each Central Field Command (CFC) division—which includes downtown. Fourteen, 51, and 52 divisions—the area roughly bordered by Bloor to the north, Dufferin to the west, and the Don River to the east—topped the list of hot spots, with 412, 323, and 593 reported thefts, respectively, and accounted for over half the bike thefts in the nine-division CFC.

But in spite of those numbers, bike infrastructure, cyclists say, remains in a critically poor state of disrepair—and that’s when it’s even available. 

”There are far too few city posts near TTC stations,” says Tamara Salpeter, cyclist and co-owner of Of a Kind, a boutique on College Street. “Lansdowne Station literally has two posts, both of which are across the street!”

The result: an increase in use-per-post, with several bikes locked to a single station at once. With the added density and impact, the posts quickly deterioriate, becoming weaker. Throughout the city, rings barely cling to the posts themselves.

 Now, multiply the instances of this by the pedestrian volume common along the Bloor/Danforth line, for example. Given the cumulative impact, it’s all too typical to hear about cyclists locking to street signs by default, ignoring City bike stations altogether. At best, thoroughly checking a post’s structural integrity becomes a part of the daily cycling routine for many.

“I always yank on the city posts before I lock to them,” says cyclist Angela Sweeting. “I have once pulled one up.”

But, in the same year that police reported the discouraging numbers on bike theft, Public Works and Infrastructure received an executive report, recommending ways to “enhance [the] enforcement of the current by-laws regarding illegal cycling on sidewalks.” Across the board, the proposed amendments would punish cyclists for locking to anything but official municipal property expressly intended for that purpose—in other words, those same decaying ring-and-posts, already too scant to accommodate even half the bikes that need them. 

After a less-than-favourable public response, the motion was referred to committee, then de-fanged—it would only apply to bikes in poor condition—before its eventual adoption in July, 2012.

To local cyclists, however, the initial motion was as telling as the against-all-logic removal of the Jarvis bike lane, or the wholesale crackdown on cyclists in summer 2011. 

Rob Ford, these cyclists say, simply wants bikes off his streets. And he’s willing to make it happen—either by proactively paving over lanes, or simply ignoring bikes and their range of required facilities entirely, until they simply vanish. After all, City Hall itself is in division 52, with those 593 reported thefts in 2011. Open, inviting, and highly visible, it’s exactly the sort of place that could benefit from greater bike security. 

Still, when it was recently proposed, Doug Ford predictably maligned the idea as “gravy.”

But the problem isn’t just Rob Ford, says Yvonne Bambrick, cycling consultant and former head of the Toronto Cyclists Union. In terms of urban psychology and city space, he’s only part of a greater theme of indifference.

“I think people aren’t watching out for bikes—that’s the problem,” she says. “It’s a nice idea [to think Ford is the enemy]—you can tell yourself that—but you can look at any number of videos online of people stealing bikes in broad daylight.”

Like Yardley, Bambrick herself can recall personal instances of bike-theft apathy, in places one would think benefit from greater neighbourly vigilance.

“I’ve had my bike seat stolen at Bay and Bloor, and there’s lots of eyes on the street there,” she recalls. “People have done [bike-theft] experiments on purpose to see if anything would happen, if anyone would interfere. If you were black, they interfered. If you’re just some random white guy, or girl, nope.”

Cycling, she suggests, remains at the margins of not only Ford’s executive-level policies, but even public consideration. And the effect of both together, it seems, is what ultimately strips downtown bike racks of their tenants. Going back to the example of Douglas Yardley, it was arguably the absence of city resources—or their solidity, at least—that compelled him to lock his bike to an exposed, curb-facing sign to begin with. But it was the response—or lack thereof—of other Torontonians to the theft in such a highly visible area that actually cost him his ride.

“It’s a false sense of security to think that people are looking out for you and your bike,” Bambrick says. “I hate to say that, but it’s really up to the individual to do everything they can to secure their property.”

Until 2014, however, the political elephant in the room remains. “I mean, if you look at the City management and our elected representatives that are part of the Mayor’s executive, broadly speaking, their whole approach to transportation has been ineffective,” Bambrick says. “If they can’t even handle the broader public transportation concerns that we have, I’m not sure how they can deal with things like cycling transportation.

“They barely understand cycling as transportation, so the notion that they would ever address it effectively at this point seems unrealistic. That’s being generous, I think.”

In short: You’re on your own out there, Toronto.

Ledbury Park, in North York, is a sidewalk-on-one-side-of-the-street kind of neighbourhood. North of Lawrence and west of Avenue, it’s part of an area of Toronto where the average family income in 2005 was $237,828 [PDF], an area that also ranks as one of the city’s least diverse. For better or worse, it’s mostly quiet.

Which is what makes the sign at the corner of Brooke and Kelso Avenues—the blue one with the yellow illustration of a security camera and the letters “CCTV”—look all the more out of place. Mounted on a wooden utility pole, the sign warns: “This area may be monitored by CCTV Cameras.” There’s some boilerplate below that. (“The personal information collected by the use of the CCTV at this site is collected under the authority of the City of Toronto Act, 1997 and the City of Toronto By-law 1120-2004. This information is used for the purpose of promoting public safety and reduction of crime at this site.”) And then there’s the City of Toronto’s logo.

What you won’t see, anywhere, are any cameras. Not up the pole, nor on any other poles a block in any direction, and not hiding up a particularly tall tree or inside the casing of any streetlights. When The Grid knocked on doors in the area, one woman, who didn’t want to give her name, said that the sign just showed up one day, months back. “I have no idea,” she admitted, when we asked if she knew why it was there. And she had no idea where the cameras were, either.

There aren’t supposed to be any cameras in the neighbourhood, at least.

As Susan Campbell, the city’s access and privacy manager, explained in a phone call, “The City of Toronto does not have any jurisdiction to put CCTVs on streets or any other public space that is not city facilities.” The city’s Security Video Surveillance Policy, adopted in 2006 (you can read it here [PDF]) puts it, “city facilities” means “Civic Centres, Social Services facilities, Water facilities, Recreations Centres, etc.” As of that year, 137 of such facilities had a total of 734 cameras. There are thousands more surveillance cameras on Toronto Community Housing property, and on the TTC, but the nearest public housing is a ways away, as is the nearest subway station. That leaves the police as possible culprits. The force has a total of 37 public CCTV cameras up, most downtown. But “we wouldn’t put CCTV” in Ledbury Park, says Brian Kenny, a staff sergeant with 32 Division, which patrols the area. “It’d have to be violent crime before we’d even look at CCTV…It requires a full business case.” If there’s a camera there, another police officer told us, “it’s 100 per cent not ours.”

What Ledbury Park has had a lot of recently, says Sergeant Kenny, are break-ins. ”In that one area there, we got the absolute bejesus pounded out of us”—there’ve been about 120 break-and-enters in the area between Bathurst, Yonge, Lawrence, and Highway 401 since last September. Kenny says that, in response, police stepped up patrols, and used informants (“to be able to identify who was who in the zoo”). ”We were able to move them along,” he says, “but we never did get any arrests out of it.”

And those break-and-enters, it turns out, are why that surveillance-camera sign is there at Brooke and Kelso, and why no one can find the CCTV cameras it says are nearby.

At a community meeting last fall, explains Karen Stintz, the ward councillor, ”the residents were wondering what actions they could take to be more proactive about making sure their neighbourhood was safe.” One idea: neighbourhood-watch signs—one at the corner of Brooke and Kelso, and the other a few blocks south, in a laneway off Brookdale Ave.—that would give passersby the impression that “the community is alert to suspicious activity,” says Stintz. “We were clear at the meeting that we weren’t going to put a camera up, because that location didn’t lend itself to a camera, nobody was going to monitor a camera, and it wasn’t appropriate.”

But someone messed up, and the signs that went up bearing the City of Toronto’s logo ended up being ones saying there were surveillance cameras, rather than just eyes, on the street. There aren’t any cameras, though; there were never any. “That’s not the sign that should be up,” said a surprised Stintz, when we told her about them. “That’s misleading…it shouldn’t say ‘CCTV.’”

Another problem: all city signs notifying of CCTV-camera surveillance are required to include (again, per the city’s policy on them) “the title, business address, and telephone number of someone who can answer questions about the collection.” The Ledbury Park signs didn’t have any, which makes a certain amount of sense given that there wasn’t actually any surveillance going on, but which also meant residents who might have wondered what the signs were doing there in the first place had no easy way to find out. “This is not an approved City of Toronto sign,” said Dwaine Nichol, the city’s director of corporate security, who said he is “investigating” what led to them being put up anyway.

First, though, they have to come down—something both Stintz and Nichol were adamant they’d make happen soon, a disappearance befitting the illusory cameras that the signs promised were watching.

UPDATE (MAY 8, 11:45 A.M.): As promised, the signs have been removed, but not before the City of Toronto workers tasked with taking them down found another six in the neighbourhood, on top of the two we initially knew about. (Here’s what one of the others looked like.)

GOT A MYSTERY THAT YOU WANT THE GRID TO SOLVE? Even if it’s not about surveillance cameras that don’t actually exist, email it to ask@thegridto.com, and we’ll see what we can find.

“Ladies! We’ll give you lines! Whatever you want!” an ambitious young man shouted from a minivan heading along King Street West late last Friday night. A pair of women ignored his offer and snickered. A tired-looking hot dog vendor methodically ripped open packages of buns. A quartet of blondes clad in all black stomped up to the bouncer at F-Stop nightclub and were quickly waved in. And a row of cabs idled beneath a “NO PARKING ANY TIME” sign. King and Spadina Residents Association member Dieter Riedel leaned in to scold a driver. “Don’t you see that sign?”

Riedel was leading us on a late-night tour of the neighbourhood, from Spadina to Bathurst, south to Wellington, and north to Adelaide. Like some residents associations around the city, Riedel’s group focuses primarily on nightlife issues. In his five years living here, he has witnessed a steady influx of club traffic migrating westward from the entertainment district—along with the associated problems of noise and general obnoxiousness. The shooting of a man outside Loki Lounge a few weeks ago has only exacerbated concerns.

Conflicts between residents and nightclub owners are nothing new. Developers wanting to sell units in edgy, trendy neighbourhoods make idyllic projections about downtown living—which often create a set of unrealistic assumptions about how everyone will get along. Riedel has become schooled in the language of liquor licence regulations and city noise bylaws, going so far as to do a walkabout with police to point out the omnipresent drunken whooping, booming bass, honking taxis, and piles of puke. As we traversed the strip, a seemingly endless ribbon of orange cabs wound around the block. As one pulled onto King Street, it nearly bumped into a police horse wearing a riot shield over its eyes.

As we walked past Uniun nightclub, groups of shivering patrons stood around smoking. (Bylaws have corralled smokers into outdoor holding pens, where booze-fuelled conversations waft up to bedrooms nearby.) Within minutes, the club’s general manager, Graham Thompson, made a beeline for Riedel, with whom he’s familiar. “You know we gotta play fair on both sides,” snapped Thompson, who mistook my iPhone for a decibel counter. “You should let us take sound readings up there some day if you’re going to be taking pictures in the laneway. We’ve got to be fair. Because I want to work with you, right? Yeah.”

The smokers puffed and flirted beneath the watchful doorman while Thompson filled in a bit of the neighbourhood’s history: “There’s been a nightclub in here for 16 years,” he said. The first one was called MFN, short for “Middle of F&$#in’ Nowhere,” because at that time, there was virtually nothing around it. When Riedel expressed concerns about the shooting around the corner at the end of March, Thompson got a bit philosophical, lifting his pant leg to show a bullet-wound scar from when he was a bouncer in Edmonton decades ago. “You can have 300 good nights but you have one bad one and everyone always remembers the bad one,” he said. Like reluctant partners at a middle-school dance, they continued the awkward dialogue for a few minutes before we departed.

As the cranes creaked and swayed over the hole where the slew of fancy new Thompson Residences condos will go, visiting clubbers continued their giddy spree. “We Are Young” by fun. warbled out of a bar as a drunken young woman stepped onto the sidewalk, did a little stagger, and then opted to lean against a dirty window.

“We’ve tried very hard to communicate to [club] owners that if we don’t hear you, you’re not a problem to us,” stressed Riedel. “If we can get that impression across, I think everybody can live together quite well.” His optimism stayed with us, at least until we spotted a young man resting his head on the buzzer keypad of an apartment and urinating onto the sidewalk, careful not to pee on his shoes.

1. This celebration was long overdue.

The organizers felt that with so many news stories about missing and murdered Aboriginal women, and dire situations on reserves in Attawapiskat and across Canada, it was time to provide a counterpoint by celebrating the accomplishments and achievements of indigenous women—the “life givers and culture carriers” of their communities. The night doubled as a fundraiser for the Native Women’s Resource Centre on Gerrard Street, which supports over 800 Aboriginal women and their families each year by providing hot meals, employment training, and programs ranging from medicinal plant workshops to hand drumming.

2. High-profile honorees are sometimes the most humble.

One notable recipient was Katherine Hensel, a highly acclaimed litigator for indigenous rights, who’s been heavily involved in such cases as B.C.’s Missing and Murdered Women’s Inquiry and the Ipperwash Inquiry. She did much of this work pro bono, on top of running her own legal practice. Her speech was brief: She simply thanked the hosting territories, her elders, and her community.

3. Throat singing can be super competitive.

Inuit throat singing is primarily performed by women. The ancient practice mimics the sounds of nature (howling wind, panting animals, snapping twigs). During their performance, mother-daughter duo Raigelee & Jennifer clutched each other and swayed from foot to foot while they sang. Standing almost nose-to-nose, they contorted their faces, trying to crack each other up: whoever made the other singer laugh first, won.

4. These awards are the kind that keep on giving.

The Good Path award was presented to Sara Luey. A victim of the ’60s scoop, where young Aboriginal children were forced out of their homes and placed in foster care, Luey struggled with addiction and homelessness for 18 years. The support of Aboriginal midwives during the birth of her youngest son helped solidify her resolve to turn her life around: She’s now clean, living in her first apartment, and plans to enter the addiction and mental health worker support program at George Brown. She wiped away tears as she received her award. “I have no family in the city, so I always felt I was alone. But I received so much support from the Aboriginal community and I’ve come to realize we are all family.”