I miss the days when this was all railroad lands. The lines used to come down the Esplanade, and cover the whole area that the CBC sits on today. No condos, no offices, just some long, dank brink warehouses with nobody round them but an old Irish hand out on the loading dock, pacing under the lamplight after dark. There were always yellowed, peeling signs warning us to keep off, but half of the spurs were grown over with weeds by then, and we figured they were safe for smoking and rambling.
The smell of creosote would mix with the whiff of hot dogs wafting over from King; the clang of PCC cars would fall in with the whine of little shunting engines as they revved up and down. Once Jimmy Tailese bet me a quarter I couldn't throw one of those railbed rocks clear across the top of a single-storey warehouse that night. I lost a quarter and from the sound of things, the warehouse lost a skylight, but Jimmy, doubled over laughing, was the only one left when the watchman came running around from the back, bleeding from the head and waving a length of two-by-four like a maniac. Jimmy wasn't laughing for long. They put him on one of the last juvie trains headed for Kenora, just before the Liberals got back into power and thought better of the things. When he finally got back, he never really said much.
Anyway, Toronto was better in those days.
