A mystery man stuck between eras

Lodged between two buildings for eight hours

The mystery landed in a crack between two eras of Toronto and settled there, stuck for hours, until the wall caved in. When it was gone, finally, the gap left behind looked impossibly small — a handspan, a notebook, an iPhone and a half. And yet, for eight hours, it contained a man.

Daniel Lee’s son heard him first. He was in his father’s restaurant, closed now for 14 years, when the voice — faint, pleading, and difficult to place — leaked in. He thought at first it was coming from the kitchen, then perhaps the back lane. But both were empty. So, perplexed, he looked where it seemed no person could be.

Tom’s Restaurant, a lunch counter on the eastern edge of Toronto’s downtown, opened in 1956, according to city licensing records. In 1968, Lee, a native of Tai Shan, China, bought the restaurant from Tom himself, kept the name and started serving what he describes now as “Canadian food.” In about 1980, Lee switched gears, rebranded the restaurant — kept the original decor — and started selling Chinese.

Lee and his wife raised three children in the apartment above Tom’s. They watched the neighbourhood shift and tremble around them for decades. In 2003, Lee’s heart nearly gave out. He underwent a bypass— you can still see the pale scar — and closed the restaurant. He couldn’t work the necessary hours anymore.

But the Lees stayed in their apartment. They left the lunch counter downstairs unchanged. Family pictures — the boys playing hockey, Daniel and his wife over the years — now line the walls.

Today, Tom’s stands between colliding ideas of what Toronto is and will become. The modest two-storey building looks boarded up and almost abandoned from the front.

Half a block north lies perhaps the last sliver of Toronto’s ungentrified downtown, a warren of shelters, and a public haven for the homeless. Directly south, separated from the restaurant by a 20-cm gap, is a large, expensive condominium complex.

On Tuesday, Lee’s son followed the voice out to the back lane, found nothing, then climbed the fire escape and peered down into the dark sliver between the condo and the restaurant. Remarkably, wedged inside, in obvious distress, was a man.

The man would later tell firefighters he had fallen off the roof and slid between the buildings. He couldn’t pull himself out, and, the firefighters, 24 of them in all, couldn’t either. They reached him with ropes, but he was too weak from the squeeze — the gap really is crushingly small. So they lowered him some water and regrouped.

Eventually, they came up with another plan. The firefighters entered Lee’s kitchen. They pulled equipment, unused in more than a decade, away from the wall, and they started chipping away at the triple brick and concrete exterior, being careful not to spray debris onto the man on the other side, according to Capt. Michael Westwood from the Toronto Fire Services.

By 11:02 Tuesday night, the man was free, three hours after the firefighters arrived and about eight hours after he originally slipped into the narrow lane. He was assessed on the scene and taken to hospital in serious but non-lifethreatening condition. His identity has not been released.

The whole incident left the firefighters feeling slightly perplexed. “Honestly, I’ve never heard of this before,” Westwood said. “Why he was up there, and what he was doing, I have no idea.”

It also left Lee with a major problem. On Wednesday morning, he sat in his back lane, wearing a blue jumpsuit, cleaning brick dust off his belongings. He was up all night scrubbing the kitchen, he said, but that’s not what’s bothering him.

The firefighters left behind a large, jagged hole in the restaurant’s southern wall. They dumped the brick, concrete and wood in the back lane. “I want to know who is going to pay for this,” Lee said.

For now, though, that man is gone. The gap remains, dark from the outside, though brighter for a moment when Lee pulls back the plywood and light from the kitchen filters in.