Reason The Sum Of Its Grounding: The Lansdowne Tower

in the early 199os, a family excursion to explore the coast of Lake Ontario, seeing how far we could walk along the shore, brought us to our first detour at Bathurst Street. there, we encountered something that'd been called The Adventure Playground. basically, a coupla guys who owned a chunk of land there, lamenting the loss of vacant lot playgrounds in the inner city where, as they had done when young, kids could build stuff & play freeformally, gave it over to whoever wanted to come & wreak havoc. a coupla telephone poles were sunk into the ground, a trailer full of tools brought in – along with barrels of nails – & random supervision was available (you had to bring yr own tools if you were going to play when they weren't around). we only noticed it because of the Gaudiësque spires that were protruding above the conifers planted atop the surrounding berm, climbing over for a look & fascinatedly spending the rest of our outing there. inspired, we started whacking together the scrap littering our own yard (& surrounding alleys), to the amusement of our landlord & assorted neighbours, but to the chagrin of others who called in the city building permits folks, who were annoyed to find that we needed no permit for anything under 1oo square feet of floor space. they eventually succeeded in finding another excuse to make us dismantle the thing – unfortunate in that we never did get to finish it. the eventual intention was to swathe it in vines (from the ground & added planters), which would have text as a trellis built from found treebranches, winding around the tower from the top down into the ground (though we did have a minipumpkin growing up one of the legs for awhile).
while this was going on, i was drafted into the crew working on Brian Nash's film on bpNichol, bp (pushing the boundaries). Brian wanted to shoot the disassembly of the tower in order to run the film backwards & see the thing grow but things didn't quite work out that way &, dedicated to wanting to include the tower in the film, he found a friend who was willing to let us rebuild it on an island she owned in Georgia Bay. we only got to put in one weekend's work on Myrtle Island & it was still pretty stunted when it came down in a storm & that was that; Brian got enough footage for his film & i began scheming toward a 3rd try, initially thinking to use the freights to transport loads of scrap to some indetermined remote locale.
the 3rd tower, not remote as i'd thought & not using trains but rafts as lumber-bearers, was finally constructed on Île Yvette-Naubert in the Ottawa River at the mouth of Squaw Bay in Hull (see www.flickr.com/photos/48593922@N04/sets/72157647570808977) but was accidentally burnt to the ground by a bunch of yahoos incautious with their candles. its replacement is still up & standing & always under development (7th year now!) at an undisclosed location.