Happy holidays Roncy! If you’ve been strolling Roncesvalles Ave in the last week or so, you’ll have noticed we have been working on installing festive lights along our Main Street.

Typically, adding lights to City and TTC owned posts and poles is very costly and fraught with permit requirements and permissions.  And, lights can be removed with no notice to BIAs and with no compensation.  This meant we had to get creative about where we could add lights (and at what expense) to Roncesvalles if we wanted to accomplish this.

Last year we implemented a pilot to see how adding lights to our tree cages might work at lighting up the street for the holidays.   Since the cages and lamp posts are maintained by and ‘belong’ to the BIA, we opted to try adding lights to those street assets to see how we could accomplish brightening up the Village, with the addition of the lamp posts this year.  Also new this year, are fir trees with lights that will be affixed to poles on spots on the street that have neither cages nor lamp posts.

Unfortunately, we’ve had some ongoing challenges, such as people touching or even turning off some of the lights on cages.  Bikes being locked up without trying to avoid the wires and some issues with just vandalism.

We hope to continue to add lights for the holidays in future; If you’d like to see us continue this tradition, let us know by emailing the BIA office.

Our thanks to Hypitch for their work on this project.