No reason, just wondering

[commodorified]

Poll #17126 Asking for a friend

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 31

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You wish to engage in criminal activity of a magical nature in Toronto[1]. It is summer. Pick a location:

View Answers

CN Tower
4 (13.3%)

Casa Loma
7 (23.3%)

Hart House
2 (6.7%)

Leslie Spit
2 (6.7%)

Atrium
0 (0.0%)

Eaton's Centre
2 (6.7%)

Union Station
2 (6.7%)

Other TTC station (specified in comments)
0 (0.0%)

Pearson Airport
3 (10.0%)

City Airport
1 (3.3%)

Elsewhere on Toronto Island
3 (10.0%)

Nathan Phillips Square/City Hall
3 (10.0%)

Regent Park Armory
2 (6.7%)

Queen Street West
2 (6.7%)

Queen Street East
0 (0.0%)

40 College
1 (3.3%)

Flatiron Building, Front Street East
0 (0.0%)

Don Valley (specifics in comments)
1 (3.3%)

Robarts Library/Majestic Turkey
4 (13.3%)

Public Library (specify branch in comments)
0 (0.0%)

Skydome
6 (20.0%)

ROM
7 (23.3%)

AGO
3 (10.0%)

On a streetcar
3 (10.0%)

Ontario Legislature
2 (6.7%)

Horseshoe Tavern
0 (0.0%)

Annex
0 (0.0%)

High Park
3 (10.0%)

Bloor Viaduct
6 (20.0%)

This other location:

View Answers

Please speculate freely on tactical, logistical, and other considerations in comments.
No, I am not going to blow up the location in question. Not even if it's the extension on the ROM.

[1] South of Finch, East of Kipling, West of Kennedy. Amalgamation can bite me.

Comments

[graydon]

The type of criminal activity really matters; are we talking "make a sacrifice to dread Cthulu" here, or "cloud the perceptions of the security system at a place where something valuable might be"?

Because High Park is a terrible choice for "something valuable" but pretty good for "sacrifice to Dread Cthulu" (fossil river! open space! tiny slice of original regional biome! surface water! lots of exit routes!).

[commodorified]

Ah, see, I am that weirdo who decides *where* and uses that to work out *what*.

Ideally, mind you, it should be a slightly bad choice of venue in some way, as, whatever it is, we only get to see it after it All Goes Horribly Wrong.

More the second than the first, though, largely.

ETA also I don't mind if I end up with a location suitable for a standoff which is NEAR a suitable crime scene...

[legionseagle]

When I lived on Westminister Ave, between Roncesvalles and High Park, there was quite enough criminal activity of a non-magical nature to keen me entertained (alarmed) especially when I turned out to have been walking past a house behind which a corpse had been concealed for the best part of a fortnight.

[chickenfeet]

A fortnight? We had a corpse concealed behind our mum's place for... oh never mind

[commodorified]

I keep having to restrain myself from doing a Four Yorkshiremen thing about how when *I* lived in Toronto the corpses lay right out there on the street, but ... it would get not-funny very rapidly, I think.

[commodorified]

... and my curiosity as to how you knew what "40 College" is is appeased.

Still impressive, mind you.

[graydon]

Well, hurm.

"magical crime" is still a really broad category, so I'm going to consider trying to either get away or prevent pursuit via magic. And there's no point to stealing physical money with magic, so it'd be an artifact of some kind.

So I'm going to say "Queen's Park"; you can wind up there after something goes wrong at the legislative building "Queen's Park", you can wind up there from the ROM, you can wind up there from the BATA shoe museum, you can wind up there from anywhere in UofT and most of the research hospitals, and the reason you'd run there could be the original oak trees or the equestrian statue of the King-Emperor Edward VII, originally placed in India and subsequently moved to Canada. (Seven is a lucky number; "edward" means "wealthy guardian" if you squint. Oaks are defensive... And the statue is part of an annually observed ritual on the part of UofT students, so it'd have lots of mana.)

And, wow, the weirdness associated with the Ontario Parliamentary Mace would be a great set of hooks for some sort of magical crime. So I'd be tempted to use that, and have them in the park part of Queen's Park trying to whomp up a rescue from Wide Edward when things all went wrong.

[commodorified]

It would appear that an attempt to kidnap the personification of the Don is going to go pear-shaped.

I mean. Or the Humber.

[graydon]

Well, the Humber has an arboretum and a relatively intact tributary structure and a nice new park structure at its mouth and a general increase in ducks in Humber Bay. Along with actual fish trying to swim in it and sandbars and gravel banks and acting like a river.

The Don has lots of post-industrial issues including garbage dumps, had its lower course straightened, has dead bridges, and the former thousand-acre marsh (a world important wildlife region if it hadn't been 1953...) at the mouth of the Don is gone under industrial fill (now to go under condos and other profit-maximizing development) and the straightened lower course makes a right angle into the Keating Channel so the Don's much more prone to flooding than it used to be. (And there is some discussion of constructing distributaries, but it hasn't happened yet.)

So I suspect that the personification of the Don would be much crankier than the personification of the Humber.

[commodorified]

Crankier, or weaker... or both.

[random]

Evergreen Brick Works.

It's got everything.

Semi-decayed industrial landscape. Old tailing ponds now full of unknown horrors. Yuppies with farmers' markets. A sculpture of all the Rivers of Toronto. And close enough to the DVP for things to go really wrong.

[commodorified]

... Don River.

[welcomingsong]

I totally think it has to be the Great Library, just so the co-conspirators can get distracted by the general gorgeousness. The fact that it's attached to the court house also works well for Really Bad Complications.

[chickenfeet]

Leslie Street spit is terraformed so it is its own weirdness. Also mink and cormorants. There must be something one can do with both of those.

[chickenfeet]

Also, precedent demands that anything weird on the Bloor Street viaduct involve nuns and gravity.

[commodorified]

I can guarantee the gravity. Harder to leave it OUT, really ... :-)

[sexy_romulan]

Personally I'd vote for either the ravines or the depths of the subway tunnels.

[curgoth]

Ooh, or the various buried rivers, some of which cross into the basements of old houses in spots.

[graydon]

Well, there's the rivers people buried -- Garrison Creek, etc. -- and there's the rivers the Lady of the Ice filled under the new shape of the land.

The Laurentide River -- the carver's river, the thing that cut the thousand-plus kilometers of the Niagara Escarpment, before it had a name or the Ice ground it down from four hundred metres high -- is down there, and the old river mouth is under High Park, right where the ur-basin of the ancient lake was, two and a half million years ago.

Ever wondered why the subway isn't, west of Dundas West? Or why the Eglinton LRT stops being in a tunnel when it does? The engineers know the river's down there. A Victorian valve failed in 2003 and mud and rocks and water went 10 metres in the air from Spring Ponds in High Park. There was much panic when it was realized there wasn't a water main there to break.

The flow rate's slow -- the river bed is full of sand and other glacial till -- but ten metres of artesian water at Bloor is nothing to mess with. Especially since the connection to Lake Huron via Georgian Bay is nigh-certainly still in place; you wouldn't want to find yourself trying to pump out your diggings once you'd woken the river.

[graydon]

Oh look, information not filtered through my defective recollections, complete with maps --

http://www.highparknature.org/wiki/wiki.php?n=Explore.LaurentianRiver

[cxcvi]

Stuff like this on my reading page makes me wish I knew Toronto a little better. Or at all...

[commodorified]

I am currently deeply regretting that I haven't been to the Brickworks...

[curgoth]

Things I can find in Mount Pleasant cemetary; a grave marker with a pentacle on it, the Eaton family mausoleum that has a stained glass image of Lucifer on the back wall, and a crypt that is chained shut, as if to keep something *in*.

[curgoth]

Also, a footpath that eventually leads to... The brickworks.

[commodorified]

Ooooooh.... Buried rivers, also relevant to my interests.

[curgoth]

Look into Taddle Creek and Garrison Creek especially.

Friends of mine bought a house in Parkdale, and the baement had a bricked up archway in the basement. It looks like the top three feet of a doorway. Best guess is that a covered buried river once ran through their basement, but was bricked up later.

Garrison Creek still periodically rises up into the basements of the west end of the city.See here: http://www.blogto.com/city/2015/07/crooked_house_on_shaw_st_for_sale_for_700k/

BlogTO has a summary of 5 buried waterways here: http://www.blogto.com/city/2014/02/5_lost_rivers_that_run_under_toronto/

[aris_tgd]

All of my answers are based on what locations I remember from the Arrogant Worms' song about Toronto, so they may be a bit biased.

[ccommack]

I'm always a fan of a location being explained by some supernatural mishap in its *past*. For instance, saying that City Airport is where it is because if you put anything heavier than an airport on that island, it would tip over and sink into Lake Ontario. Or that some previous government embedded a ring of protection into the Gardiner Expressway (among other highways), which now prevents it from being removed. (The latter story can also be used quite unkindly to explain why so much weird shit happens north of the 401, or why Mississauga works at all.)