Last night was game six of the NBA championships. Throughout the series, I keep telling myself I’ll go down at night to photograph people going mental in and around Jurassic Park, but I keep playing mind games with myself, inventing reasons why I should stay at home, put up my feet and read a book or watch Netflix. Afterwards, I hate myself for failing to get out, and I visit on myself all sorts of negative self-talk: I’m a failure as a photographer, I’ve missed a precious opportunity, I’m getting old, I’m turning into a couch potato, I’m a loser, I’m useless, etc. I know well enough how these habits of mind can be precursors to depression. I also know well enough that, in broad terms, there are only two ways to answer these habits: either change/eliminate my expectations, or get off my butt and meet them.
Last night, I took the latter course. As it grew dark, I put together a little kit for nighttime work in crowds i.e. I brought my 5DS with 85 mm f/1.2 lens—great for low light and bokeh, along with a small bag for spare battery and 24 mm f/1.4 Sigma Art lens—great for low light and in-close work. I set out down Yonge to Front, over to York, then down to Bremner where police were keeping everything cordoned off. The walk down was uneventful. Where bars had windows open to the street, I sometimes heard shouting or cheering depending on the play. Otherwise the streets were quiet—until I got to the Bremner/York intersection sometime during the 3rd quarter. As the end of the game approached, more and more people crowded into the intersection. Police ordered people to hurry through the intersection, but it became pointless; there were too many people.
When the game was over and it was confirmed that the Raptors had won, the crowd exploded with joy and the Bremner/York intersection almost turned into a mosh pit. I squeezed out of the crowd to a space apart on the south side where I could safely swap lenses. Now, the 85mm was useless; I needed the 24mm for in-close work. Once I’d made the swap, I dove back into the crowd. I could hardly move. People were yelling. There were air horns and fireworks. Someone set off smoke bombs and the air filled with red haze. And held above it all, a sea of cell phones recording the scene from a thousand thousand different points of view. It seems, now, the only way we can authenticate our experience is to photograph it.
It took me at least 20 minutes, maybe more, to squeeze from the south side of Bremner to the north side. I continued up York through the tunnel beside Union Station. It was an echo chamber. More smoke bombs turned it into a fog chamber. People ran up and down the length of it, sharing high fives, carrying “We The North” banners, hugging one another, screaming for joy.
Out the other end of the tunnel at Front Street, the Front/York intersection was now as impassable as the Bremner/York intersection. People had climbed each of the street light poles and were sitting on top of the lights. The people crowding below made each light pole look like a scene from Iwo Jima. I saw people lighting massive doobies while others lay blissed out on the wide walls in front of Union Station. I saw people carrying babies through the screaming crowds. I saw a food delivery guy trying to force his bicycle through the intersection, giving up at last and joining the celebration.
I took the subway from Union and got out at Bloor around one o’clock. People were using the all-way signal as a 20 second dance party. Cars would honk north-south through the Bloor/Yonge intersection while passengers hung out the sun roofs and windows waving banners and screaming. When the lights changed, cars would do the same thing east-west. Then the lights would change again to the all-way pedestrian signal. Crowds waiting on each of the corners rushed into the middle of the intersection and had a dance party during the countdown, then retreated to the corners again to let the cars through. It was so compulsively civil, it was funny. Onlookers saw the humour of it and laughed.
There is something fundamentally different about Toronto when held up to other large cities. I was in Paris when Paris-St. Germain F.C. won the Ligue 1 championship in 2013. The mood was radically different. With my wife and daughter, I had enjoyed a pleasant dinner near the Eiffel Tower, then wandered through the gardens on the south side. But as it turned dark, it also turned ugly. Although Paris had won, that didn’t seem to matter. The hooligans were out in force and they were bent on smashing things. They smashed the windows in tourist buses. In a taxi circling the Arc de Triomphe, we could see fires down the Champs Elysée. Walking the next morning, workers were boarding up the burned-out front of the Louis Vuitton store. Last night in Toronto, there were no incidents of note and no arrests.
I think it’s worth noting a couple other things about the Toronto crowd last night. I was one of the oldest people there. Overwhelmingly, the crowd comprised young people. Also, I was a visible minority. This is as it should be. To those middle-aged white men who might look like me but feel threatened by or hostile to the major demographic experiment which is Toronto, I have only one thing to say: go fuck yourselves. Last night was wonderful and I’m glad I refused to heed the negative self-talk rattling around inside my head.
