Arms Up! and Sparky: Chapter Seven

Readers know I enjoy the visual arts, both establishment and guerrilla. Here are two examples, showing a mix of both schools, found just south of Carlton Street and across Church Street from one another. 

The bottom one - which I call "The Drag Queen Did It" - commemorates the bath house raids in the early 80's in Toronto. The one on top is the artist's view from a rain puddle of a helmeted woman throwing her umbrella at an unseen assailant who has just stolen her pants. 

Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery
Chapter Seven 

Sparky here. This is Chapter Seven of my story about how Gerry Ringbold met his untimely end. The story starts here.

The ink on the final judgment throwing Gerry's frivolous lawsuit out of court had barely dried when Gerry put his name forward for election as a city councillor. Municipal politics is just the place for a guy like Gerry. Ringbold's was the only recognizable name on the ballot in a ward where 17% of eligible voters showed up at the polls. He began his career as a city councillor with a jaw dropping 764 votes.

Ringbold wasn't representing his clients anymore, but he was still at war with Pea. From his seat on council he fought everything that had anything to do with the Peony MacDonald Chester Foundation for the Public Enjoyment of the Thompson Gardens. When council had to consider the nominations of members of the Foundation board, Bob Harrison - the reporter who followed Ringbold like a stalker - quoted Ringbold verbatim in the news: “Taxpayers throughout this great city should shudder at the waste, the excess, and the needless appointment of these parasites to this useless board.”

When the parks department submitted a joint report to council proposing a long term management plan for the trees in the gardens, Gerry said: "Ice storms and wind storms turn trees into instruments of destruction. Cut them down and save the taxpayer the costs that are guaranteed to come from these trees." 

You might be able to guess what Gerry had to say about the children's playground.

Some people ate this stuff up. There were letters to the editor, tweets, some guy even had a "Stuff Gerry Says" blog for a while, all rooting for Ringbold as the champion of the little guy. 

Gerry's fans got a special treat when their gladiator took up the battle over the public washrooms. Pea insisted in the conditions of the endowment that proper washrooms be made available 24/7 in the park. All that needed to happen was for someone to find a spot to put them.

This time, Ringbold wasn't alone. If you read all the deputations made to the parks committee you would think that there was not a single square inch of the park that was not sacred, historic or endangered in some way and no building, least of all a public washroom, could possibly be built there. 

Lots of people warned that public washrooms would lure the homeless and other undesirable elements to a location already too heavily populated with the scum of the earth. 

Here’s an excerpt from Ringbold's contribution to the debate, his speech before the committee when deputations had already been heard for more than eight hours:

“The despotic heirs of the MacDonald Chester estate have conspired to bring a blight upon the face of this fair city. They will not rest, with the creation of this foundation and the evil that it stands for, until every vermin on two legs has found a nesting space in the Thompson Gardens. People who should be in jail; people who should be forcibly put to work, will find comfort and accommodation in the corrupt, vile, rotten vision of the future as imagined by the MacDonald Chester consortium.”

This speech went on for almost an hour. 

Gerry never won any of these battles, by the way. His poor grasp of the facts -- made obvious in the battle for the will -- always came back to bite him on the ass. For example, his constant harping about taxpayer's dollars was just dumb. No taxpayer money was ever involved in any of the Thompson Garden projects brought to council. The park was still public property, so the Foundation had to share its plans with council, but the city never paid for any of them. It’s a testament to the appeal of performance artists like Ringbold that his ardent fans were as unconcerned about the facts as he was.

True to form, Gerry was the only combatant who was completely ignored in the battle of the washroom. Just about everybody else got their wish. For the environmentalists, the Foundation agreed to build the washrooms to something called LEED Platinum standards. For the historians, archeologists swooped into the first cut holes to check for artifacts. Hydrogeologists inspected for ground water. Entomologists from universities and the local museum peered at ants, sow bugs, spiders, worms, wasps, bees, earwigs and millipedes in case there was something undiscovered that might be lost forever with the laid foundation of the washroom. 

The facade from the crappy old asbestos-ridden former public washroom - unusable because of the asbestos and the fact that it was not wheelchair accessible - was lovingly preserved as a "rare example of late nineteenth century public architecture" as the rest of the building was demolished.

You can imagine how much time all this took. Between Gerry's tactics at council - where he never stopped anything but delayed just about everything - and the painstaking attention to every conceivable detail by the Foundation, building the public washroom took almost five years.

The last concession made to the dozens of deputations to come into play was that there would be attendants in the washroom 24/7. 

And this is about where I came in. I started my first summer on the job just after construction was complete and after about a hundred and fifty people, including a fat, puffy and obviously enraged Gerry Ringbold, witnessed the opening ceremonies to the beautifully restored Thompson Gardens.

You can read Chapter Eight here.