The night the lights went out too early

For the last several Christmas seasons, a three-kilometre-long Trail of Lights has been installed at Downsview Park in northwestern Toronto.

The trail is set up mostly for driving, although one night a week it's closed to cars and only pedestrians are allowed in. The advantage of staying in a car (apart from the obvious protection from inclement weather) is that you can tune your car radio to an unused frequency and listen to the music that is provided by the former Canadian Forces Base.

Through 2 January this season, the spectacular trail — incorporating more than 400,000 LED bulbs into themeed light displays, more than half of which are animated — has been open five nights a week, until 11pm. That was supposed to be the case even on New Year's Eve, when I, somewhat belatedly, decided to take in the trail.



Throughout the drive, at a maximum allowed speed of 20 km/hour, the closed-circuit radio station urges you to take pictures, but not to stop or get out of your vehicle. Everyone ignores the no-stopping rule. However, there are several small displays at the end of the trail where you are encouraged to get out of your car and take pictures.

As I said, we were there on New Year's Eve. The trail was supposed to be open (and lighted) until 11pm, with the entrance gate closed at 10.45pm. So we were a bit surprised when we completed the trail at 10.30pm, and just as we were getting out of the car, cameras in hand, the lights went out. At the end of the trail! The gate was closed and I guess the attendants decided they'd had enough and it was time to find a New Year's party.

It was rather less shocking for us than it was for people who were already taking pictures of the end-of-the-trail displays. The lights just went out. In the dim light, I saw one man look down at his feet, apparently thinking he'd tripped over a power cord and de-lighted the whole park. But all that was under his feet was mud and muck left after the rain and unseasonably warm temperatures we'd been having.

I sympathize with people who work on holidays, but it was so close to quitting time anyway, couldn't they have stuck it out for another 30 minutes?

If we have time tonight, we're going to go back and try to shoot some of the end-of-trail lights, without having to pay the $25 entrance fee again.

Mia, the young friend we had brought along with us, began composing her letter of complaint on the drive home. The Downsview Park management should brace themselves for her letter. Last year, President's Choice cheated her and came in for a stern letter. A package of PC Christmas crackers we'd bought promised that none of the prizes would be duplicated, and Mia had her eye on a little wooden penguin ornament. We had to pull all of the crackers so she could get her penguin — but there was no penguin. Instead, there were two candy cane ornaments. She wrote to PC asking for a penguin ornament, but was sent only a $10 coupon for PC products instead.

Sitting on top of the world!

Okay, more like standing. And as for it being the top of the world, it's only the top of Toronto's Old City Hall. This picture was taken in 2003 when the Ventin Group, the restoration architects working on the building, allowed me to come up on the scaffolding of the 103.6-metre tower to take pictures of the gargoyles that were being replaced.

Happy 2011!

Happy new year, everybody! Wishing you all good things in 2011!

Getting closer...

...to 2011!

2010 slips away...

... or drips away.

Murray Christmas!

“ ‘I think the Christmas card was one of my best inventions,’ [the Devil] said. ‘Yes, I think the Christmas card has done as much to put Christmas to the bad as any other single thing. And I began it so cleverly; just a few pretty Victorian printed greetings, and then – well, you know what it is today.”

Robertson Davies
When Satan Goes Home for Christmas

Lute Lady

My mother died 19 years ago tonight, far from her Chicago home. At about the time she died, my sisters and I discovered a nifty way to memorialize her in her old North Side neighbourhood.

The Mid-North Association, a Lincoln Park area civic group, began selling personalized bricks with which to repave a park known variously as Mid-North Park and the Belden Triangle, and to rehabilitate it somewhat. For U.S.$60, we had two lines engraved that said, simply, "Maggie Murray" and "I Miss Chicago."

On my next trips to Chicago after ordering our brick, I would visit Mid-North Park to see whether it had been installed yet. I finally found it - quite near bricks bought by local businesses she used to patronize, as well as Bill Kurtis, the TV newsman she so admired.

Whenever I'm in Chicago, I still make a little pilgrimage to that park.



But in the intervening years, the park has changed. At the time of the brick-laying, it featured a beautiful sculpture of a veiled woman playing the lute, with two children on either side of her. A few years ago, I noticed that the sculpture was gone - replaced by a (forgive me) rather uninspiring fountain. It was installed as part of a beautification project to renovate or construct 18 fountains in parks, triangles formed by some of the city's weird intersections of three streets, plazas and other open spaces.

I think Mid-North Park/Belden Triangle got one of the more pedestrian fountains. But I always wondered what happened to the sculpture.

I decided to seize the moment, probably prompted by the anniversary of my mother's death, and contacted Chicago Park District (CPD) historian Julia Bachrach. She directed the years of research that resulted in the Chicago Park District Guide to Fountains, Monuments and Sculptures, an impressive online resource providing the histories of those features in CPD parks.

Julia told me that the sculpture I was interested in, known as "Lute Lady" or "Seated Woman With Children," was originally part of a bandstand in Lincoln Park designed by Chicago architects Pond & Pond, and sculpted by Lorado Taft in 1915.

The Lute Lady has had a rough ride. In 1983, she and other sculptures were found along Lake Michigan, north of 39th Street, where they were waiting to be used as landfill! Julia sent me a story from the Chicago Tribune (6 May 1983) describing the find, which included columns from the city's old federal courthouse building and the bas relief backdrop to "The Spirit of Music," a memorial to Theodore Thomas, founder of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

The Trib article quoted Ben Bentley, then the CPD's director of public information, saying that the CPD warehouse had become too crowded with materials that no one had asked about. The sculptures were going to be used as part of a landfill to help retard lakefront erosion.

"What we have done is a perfectly legitimate thing," Bentley is reported to have said at the time.

Since then, the Federal Building columns and the conserved "Spirit of Music" have been installed in Grant Park, Julia said.

And what of the Lute Lady and her children? "They are currently in storage, which is probably a good thing, because they are marble and really shouldn't be outside in the Chicago climate," she added. "We really need to find a good indoor location for the Lute Lady."


As to the photos in this post: I'm not sure whether they're mine or were taken by my sister Roxe Murray. We shared our prints back then - at least the ones relating to our mother's memorial and family history. Somewhere in my cluttered home office, I have a full photographic study of the Lute Lady, shot from a variety of angles. I'd like to think I was prescient when I took those photographs, but I probably just wanted to fully document my mother's memorial. When I find those prints, I'll scan and post them.