Debacle and despair on Dalewood as student throngs take over street
A sudden crashing sound behind me (and an ensuing roar of approval) jolted me from my conversation with partying students in front of a house on Dalewood Avenue.
When I turned to see what happened, Superman was lying on his back grinning with accomplishment. He’d just split the beer pong table in two, just inches from me.
I don’t know how he vaulted himself into it, maybe from the porch steps. But the force of the impact made me wonder if he’d been dropped from an airplane.
I call him Superman because, while he did agree to share his name, I had come by this point not to trust everything I was hearing at Saturday’s McMaster Homecoming weekend.
It drew more than a thousand young people into an enormous congestion of youthful pub-
lic drinking and noisy revelry along the whole length of this hub street of student rentals —Dalewood Avenue, south of Main Street.
There were young people with beer cans in the trees — and on the roof of at least one house.
Some urinated on the walls of houses.
But most were packed thickly into the middle of the street, along the sidewalks, over the front lawns and up the porch stairs.
Four or five student rental houses, by most reports, pooled together to throw this enormous bash which, according to virtually every one I talked to, was the biggest — by far — ever thrown at McMaster University, and really the first of its kind. The word went out on social media and however else word gets out these days.
There is a concentration of student rentals on the street but the housing is not exclusively so. And one non-student resident — who asked that his name not be published out of concern for student reactions — was out on his lawn, overwhelmed, trying to keep students and partiers off his property.
“They’ve been urinating on the walls!” he told me. He’s been at the house for 25 years but he’s never seen anything like Saturday.
As we talked he hollered to one student to get out of his backyard. The young man, on his cellphone, never acknowledged him, and just went on with his phone conversation, and shambled off in his own good time.
“Where are the police?!” he asked me rhetorically. He called them, as well as campus security — who, he says, told him they could do nothing as it didn’t happen on university property.
Police did respond. There were two very visible horse-mounted officers, just off Dalewood where it intersects with Westwood Avenue, and earlier, someone told me (I got there around 1:30 p.m.) that cops took away alcohol from someone drinking on the street.
But, due to the sheer mass, I’m not sure there was anything anyone could have done.
The crowd seemed to be an organism unto itself, with its own implacably fun-hungry energy, its own party logic and answerable onof ly to itself.
Having said that, I witnessed no sign of fighting or mean-spiritedness.
Just differing degrees of joyful inebriation and uninhibited, indifferent stupor, which could sometimes result in what could be interpreted as disrespect.
“I feel bad, for sure,” said one student, who’d seen me talking to the man chasing partiers away from his house.
But the student made no effort to leave and was clearly enjoying himself. “Mac has never been like this before. Guelph (University of Guelph) is way worse.”
“Good times. Good vibes,” said another partier. Many, most, were wearing Mac maroon.
“You should see Laurier (University) on St. Patrick’s Day. It’s triple this size,” another partier told me. Some wished not to be named; others unsure. But some gave me what friends later told me were wrong names so I’m using names only when I’m certain.
I caught up with the aforementioned Superman a little bit after the table incident. Now he was diving from the slope of a lawn onto a plastic lawn chair on the sidewalk, landing on his side and back with such force that the chair shattered.
His friend, bleeding quite visibly, did the same.
“What hurt the most was jumping off a roof onto a table,” Superman, 20, told me. “But the only time I ever broke a bone was playing hockey.” I tell him he’s bleeding. “No, that’s my friend’s blood.”
And what program is he in? “Oh, I don’t go to Mac.” Does he worry about injuring himself or how he’ll feel tomorrow. “Nah. I eat nails for breakfast.”
I managed to track down, among the throngs, one of the party organizers, an engineering student who co-rents a house on Dalewood but didn’t want to be named.
“Have you ever seen Project X? That’s kind of the model for it. I want as many people to have as much fun as possible. It’ll probably ease up around 5 p.m. and we’ll take a break.”
They’ve got cleanup crews planned for the day after, he insisted. “That’s what Sunday’s for.”
The street was absolutely littered with cans, debris and broken glass but no one seemed to be getting hurt.
“It’s a lot of fun and I’m loving it,” Leah Birkby told me. She and friends were on a side street in front
a house where one of them rents. “Everyone’s wearing Mac colours. It’s not an inherently bad thing. It’s team spirit.”
But the resident I talked to was having none of it.
“I’m sending a letter to the president of the university.”
The chaotic spectacle did elicit reaction from others too.
One driver angrily waded through knots of dawdling partiers in the middle of the street, shouting at them to move.
And Sam Weisbrod, who was coming back with his family from a Yom Kippur Day service at a nearby synagogue, told me he’s seen many student parties in the area but “I’ve never seen anything quite like this.”