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The building was hassled by city health & building inspectors right from the beginning, but an article in the Toronto Star Weekend Magazine in June 1970 really brought the city into the fray. The story was about a dealer commune that was on the 6th floor in the East wing that included the Gnostic, Kafka and Ashram apartments. The dealers were bragging that they had armed security at their door in the elevator lobby. They said they were protected and invincible because of their fearless leader. The first police raid came about a week later. The armed guard dropped his shotgun and ran as the police charged off the elevators. By the time they had smashed through the unlocked glass fire door leading to the hall way their element of surprise was gone. As the police came in from the elevator lobby most of the dealers ran down the fire escapes at the ends of the halls. Nobody got caught, no pounds of pot were found, so they decided to bust the place up. They started smashing every door in sight with sledge hammers, fire axes and themselves. This was before the SWAT teams. The officers were mostly new cadets with a few older boys leading the parade. None of them really knew how to go about it. They came into the building with as much organization as a gang of hooligans crashing a house party. Hell bent on doing damage and that they did smashing doors and walls. This was the beginning of the raids and the start of the expanding maintenance crew which hit a high of 35 people in the summer of 1973. Most residential buildings this size, in the city of Toronto, were maintained by one or two people as cleaning staff only. It was cheaper and more effective for Rochdale to have specialists on staff than to hire out when we needed repairs. Outside contractors would come to the building and get caught up in the partying. They also had problems getting their jobs done in the building. Normally a building the size of Rochdale is taken care of by two people. The extra mechanical work was sub-contracted out. Rochdale started out this way. But a free-spirited experimental living space with double basement parking and 18 stories above ground that is a constant party was very unique. The building was never at rest. It was quiet for perhaps 1 or 2 hours a day but the internal systems were never at rest. The elevators ran all the time. As one group was going to bed another group was going to work then the kids were waking up getting ready for school. There was always water flowing in the building, the restaurants ran almost all the time. As did the booze cans, dealers and card games. The building never really slept. The doors inside the building as well as the entrances & exits were always opening & closing & breaking down. The building required its own internal specialists. The heating was always breaking down in the middle of winter. On the coldest night of the year pipes would burst draining the boiler & tanks shutting down the whole system. These breakdowns were caused by both tenant abuse and bad original installation strategy. Some tenants were not well house trained or got too stoned and wanted either revenge or attention. They would let us know this by trashing different areas of the building and letting their animals’ shit in the hallways. Some trashings were in public areas like the lounges, library, public toilets, stair wells, fire escape routes, lobbies, garbage shuts, elevators, etc. Before the police raids there was no concern about the building in the city by-law department so not much was said. But after the profile of the building was raised there was a movement in City Hall to close the building by condemning it. Where that order came from is still not known to me. In the late fall of 1970, the Building Inspector and the Health Inspector were sent to find enough violations to shut the building down. They came up with a “list of 52” items and gave the building the weekend to comply or they were going to condemn it, bring in the sheriff, and close the building down. The orders were for area cleanups, paint the stairwells, door repairs, window replacement, vomit and animal feces in apartment hallways, doors missing in communes, plumbing and electrical repairs, Fire Marshall deficiencies. The residents rallied and the list was completed. From that point on the Maintenance Department grew. And the city health and buildings department kept coming back on a weekly basis. I got to know all of them. It got to the point where they would take me out for lunch and pay for it themselves. They told me to my face the building would never get a clean bill of health or clean building inspection. The city wanted Rochdale gone and invested a lot of unnecessary energy trying to do it. But they did admire the job we were doing. Their reports showed the problems were always cleaned up but there was a new one every week. The inspectors were ordered by their supervisors to not pass the building under any circumstances. We needed a 3rd class engineer to run the boilers and take care of the plumbing. The only person willing to take on the job was a man who was making a change in his life. He had learned his trade and got his 3rd class engineering papers in prison. Harvey was a great person to have on our team and one of the best things that happened to that building. Our elevators were used so much that we needed constant maintenance and Otis Elevator quickly refused to service us, as did all the other elevator companies in the city. We had to get our own elevator technician. An Australian mechanic showed up; Elevator Al kept the elevators running with anything he could find, make or steal. In many ways the TV character “McIver” is a copy of Al. He also helped Harvey and kept the building systems running. The same went for all our maintenance problems. I was trained as a carpenter so I ended up being the carpenter and general repair guy. We had to figure it out for ourselves as the party went on around us. When I joined maintenance, as a cleaner, in January 1971 there were about 15 of us keeping the building together. We were working against both the tenants and the city. Because it was a constant party there was also constant garbage. Maintenance literally took control of an elevator every day. We loaded it twice each day with trash from the garbage rooms on each floor. It took about 6 hours to do this. The trash ranged from over full bags that wouldn’t fit down the garbage shoot to furniture and motor parts. Some of the trashings in the Ashrams took weeks to clean up. Previous Exit Next |