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Help ID this location - 1970s Downtown East

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You've got me there smartypants. Unsubstantiated internet forum comment > official Toronto Police page.

"Unsubstantiated internet forum comment", yeah right. If you watch old news clip from City TV circa 1986 & 87 on Youtube e.g. Retrontario. There is a book which the title that I think it is called "Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Metro's Finest"at their gift shop in their HQ, it said mentions the white cars started to appear in late 1987. There are pictures of prototype car painted in white livery taken in 1986 on the website policecanada.ca. You will see pictures of four proposed colour schemes when the police was switching to white cars. Toronto police were still using the yellow livery during 1986. Sorry I mixed up about the years when they first appear. Yes, I got you there and official Toronto Police page is contradicting what they said in their book.


Yellow cop cars still in service in December of 1988 in this City TV clip from Retrontario.
http://www.youtube.com/v/BwFa85gIXlE?fs
 
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Yellow cop cars still in service in December of 1988 in this City TV clip from Retrontario.
[video=youtube;BwFa85gIXlE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwFa85gIXlE[/video]

When DID City TV move from Queen Street East?! Early 1980's? My Dad was part owner of Arkon Electronics (when IT was on Queen Street East) near Mutual.
 
I'm kind of new to this, but I just checked a couple of old streetcar slides I have which were taken on Parliament south of Gerrard and north of Queen in 1970. Parliament had big heavy-duty wooden poles, three storeys high, with the wooden box frames at the top on both sides of the street in 1970. At the very right edge of the photo we're studying there is a streetlight pole that doesn't resemble the ones in the slides on Parliament, and it's unlikely that those big wooden poles went anywhere before Hydro started its upgrade projects in the 1990s. The one in the picture looks like a standard concrete streetlight pole with a peaked top and the streetlight bracket appears to be just visible. I also looked in the distance of the slide taken above Queen and I couldn't see anything resembling the building at the right, so ít's unlikely that this is Parliament St.

Also, the police car is a Plymouth Gran Fury as it has the distinctive rear bumper which housed the horizontal tail lights. These were everywhere in the mid-1970s as police cars and taxis. But, is this a real Metro Police car or a movie car??? The font for "METRO POLICE" and the cruiser number don't look legit. Metro Police was in a narrow font, while this looks wide, and the crest on the door doesn't look quite right either, so I think the cruiser number is bogus and doesn't help.

Sorry not to have any definitive leads, but thought I'd add a couple of observations to the discussion.

Yes, the cruiser is a 1976 or '77 Plymouth Gran Fury, and I agree regarding the font and markings being off and that this is likely a movie car.
 
WEKid: That MPD car caught my eye also-it looks to me like a Ford LTD or similar type...
When I first saw this pic I thought it was a Plymouth Fury or a similar Chrysler product-common police cars back then
but upon enlarging this pic I noticed the car difference...

I never knew that MPD assigned cars by divisions noting the numbers...
Those yellow MPD cars took some getting used to for me-especially being from the NYC area in which that color was a taxicab color...

Back in the early 80s era particularly there was a taxi company in Toronto that had medium blue cars with a white side stripe that looked to me just like the NYPD car color scheme of the same time...the only thing missing would have been the NYPD patch logo...

I remember being told that one reason the MPD stopped using yellow paint is that car painters were coming down with some sickness from something that was part of the paint pigment...

Does anyone know exactly when in the 80s MPD made the color change away from yellow on their police cars?

LI MIKE

I think "Able-Atlantic" was the cab company with that blue/white livery. Yellow police cars were used municipally across Ontario - I seem to recall that it was mandated by the province about 1973. There were issues with lead in yellow automotive paints, but I don't think this is why they stopped - it was probably more a matter that they didn't look "right", and I also recall some anecdotal stories that they were being mistaken for taxis by tourists.
 

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