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The Toronto and East York Community Council has recommended that Ryerson University be released from its contractual obligations concerning the Sam the Record Man sign. ThePost’s Chris Selley andNOW’s Jonathan Goldsbie discuss the power dynamics at play.

Selley: I’m not one generally given to gnashing my teeth over Toronto’s fraught relationship with its own physical heritage. We have never been a particularly beautiful city, after all, and I think our tendency to wipe streetscapes clean and start over is actually a reflection of our practical nature, which in turn accounts in large part for our overall success. But the fracas over the Sam the Record Man sign is a weird case: It made little sense to me to strap that magnificently tacky thing on to Ryerson’s student centre, as opposed to a record store called Sam’s. And yet that’s what the university agreed to do. By allowing it to welsh on said agreement, and find another place to put it, Toronto and East York Community Council seems to have found the worst of all worlds: It knuckles under for laughable reasons (Ryerson claims, inter alia, a dearth of neon sign specialists), thereby inviting further poor behaviour; and it invites Ryerson to hang the sign in a place that makes no sense historical or otherwise. I’m on record that the best place for the Sam’s sign, and many other signs too, is a Toronto Historical Museum. In absence of said option, what’s the best one? And what, if anything, does this debate say about Toronto’s “heritage problem”?