A lament for the endangered newspaper box

At age 10, friends and I ran along Bloor Street after school looking for change in newspaper boxes’ coin-return slots. We raced box to box, pushing each other away, trying to get hands on the thing first. We were entrepreneurs!

I stuck my finger in the square metal opening to feel for money. Each day I thought I might find some — and frequently, magically, did. The quarters and dimes kept appearing throughout my childhood.

Today, the newspaper box is an endangered species. There were more than 15,000 in Toronto in 2006. By 2018, the number had dropped to 3,624.

I had a favourite Star box in the Dupont-Christie area, next to a

Russian Orthodox cathedral. It was chained to a cement pole. Many mornings I bought a paper there on my way to the subway.

Earlier this year it was removed. I saw a broken piece of chain link on the ground. Now I walk past the cathedral and there’s a space where the box once stood. The familiar neighbourhood is less familiar, less colourful. It lacks Toronto Star blue.

Yet my fascination and affection persist.

These boxes brought the world to our corner. As a university student in the 1980s, I lived near one at Markham and Dundas streets. I associate it with the fall of communism. I saw a headline there about the death of the Romanian dictator and his wife. Also at that time Toronto bid for the 1996 Olympics. At

Markham and Dundas I found out we lost.

But most important, the boxes have long symbolized the city’s high level of trust.

When I was a kid in the ’70s, our boxes had no locking device. Such was the state of local honesty, papers sat there unguarded. You were expected to put coins in the collection box without coercion. What protected the Star or Globe or Telegram against theft was social cohesion. Why would you cheat? In that period one might have said, “I don’t understand: how could you take the paper without paying? That’s not who we are.”

Then they brought in boxes with locks. This showed trust as well. After you paid you had access to the entire stack of papers. You could clean it out if you wished. But the publishers believed you wouldn’t. They thought you’d only take one — and generally were correct.

When I became an adult, this is how we lived here: not quite the lockless days of my youth but still reasonable. Why would you take more than you needed? It wouldn’t make sense.

If you found the pile gone, you were allowed to take the paper in the window. It was common knowledge: “Take the display copy if that’s all that’s left.” If that were gone, the container was empty and you knew not to insert coins.

Our newspaper boxes didn’t trick you into paying for something that wasn’t there. They had an integrity that mirrored Torontonians’.