 On Sunday Jan 3rd 2010, Dumpdiggers toured downtown Toronto with Abel DaSilva, one of Canada's foremost heritage hunters. It was a knowledge filled day spent listening to a wise man, and someone that’s a remarkably forward thinker, perhaps because he spends so much time dreaming about the past. Loved by many, hated by some, Abel DaSilva has a strong personality that's coloured by his passion to protect and preserve Toronto's history.
 For the last quater century DaSilva has filled a niche, and some would say his own pockets by buying and selling antique glass bottles, stoneware and period advertising. A middleman, he buys from pickers and then sells the stuff to more sophisticated collectors. He's a remarkable 'collectibles conduit'. He buys goods at yard sales, estate auctions and from junk store dealers, and salvage merchants. But Abel's most important sources are the authorized representatives of downtown Toronto excavation projects.
For thirty years Abel has been that guy people call when they have bottles to sell. One of the things that makes DaSilva so remarkable, is how he has embraced online social networking and uses it to connect with buyers and sellers of antiques.
 On that snowy Sunday morning, Abel gave me a guided tour through three specific areas of Toronto. First around 18 York St, then across Yonge St and down the Esplanade to 1 Scott Street, and he at 85 Esplanade.
Sightseeing with Abel DaSilva
Before I went Shopping at the Sunday Market with Abel DaSilva, we drove around in wide circles orbiting Yonge St where it meets Lakeshore Blvd at the base of Toronto. The downtown core of the city is relatively new compared to everything else. And for anyone not aware of Toronto’s history and geography, let me explain, There’s Treasure Under Toronto.
 In the last three decades, over twenty large excavation projects have removed truckloads of century old trash filled with collectible treasure. Every condominium, office tower and especially the Skydome (Rogers Centre) and the Air Canada Centre excavations have unearthed large sections of the 1800’s and early 1900s shoreline. So what, you ask? Well think about it, what did people do at the water's edge in the 1880s? They drank and pitched their alcohol and soda bottles into the lake.
 The lake was also the city’s most convenient garbage dump and indeed the harbour was expanded and improved several times by becoming an official city dump for almost three decades between 1890 and 1920 and there’s evidence that the lake was a dumpsite long before that, especially on the eastern shoreline as it was already very marshy there and the railroad and other industrial enterprises really needed the land in the 1850s. Toronto expanded outward so rapidly in the early 1900s that the Lakeshore became a very convenient and indeed essential landfill site. The photograph above is the view from the fence at 18 York St, just ten months ago. The white ash and bricks visible behind the bulldozer proved to be a very rich source of ink bottles, whisky, soda bottles, stoneware ginger beers and crocks. All the wood is the docks, wharves and boardwalks from the 1800s.
 Abel showed me pictures of excavation sites as we explored both sides of Yonge St at Lakeshore Blvd. He parked in front of three different lots, and on each property there was a condominium building or a major sports venue or office tower. He plans to get web development Toronto to chronicle the real estate development and tell the stories buried under each and every condo.
Abel pointed to the ground and told me what’s under the buildings. He knows what’s down there under the sidewalks behind the cement of the parking garage because he was there too. This land is like Brigadoon, the window opens once every hundred years.
 Abel DaSilva is one of the few people alive who can tell you exactly what history lies under each building. He knows where the rubble from Toronto's Great Fire of 1904 ended up, and he knows which sites were bonafide dumps and which sites had wharves and docks, and even where the HMS Royal Princess, Royal Mail Packet steamer docked, and where the insulators for Toronto’s first telegraph office were found.
  While digging on the Esplanade Ave years ago Abel uncovered a bottle by P.C. Foy, a Toronto grocer that once operated from the Daniel Brooke Bldg on the northeast corner of King and Jarvis. There is a historic plaque at the site today. The bottle is one of the only remaining artifacts of this early business. This bottle is blank on the sides as it carried a paper label on which was advertised the name and flavour of an early carbonated beverage.
 How do you make contact with the excavation site managers, and get them to cooperate? Abel answers, ‘You get to know them by phone calls and site visits.’ And then it became clear to me that this storyteller wins their respect by educating them in person on the specifics of what they are excavating. He shares his knowledge and passion with these people, and his charisma carries the day. A great many backhoe operators and especially the professionals that own their equipment probably also have bottle collections at home, and they are hungry for this unique information. In downtown excavations however, nobody collects heritage material because it’s so prevalent, and there is no time to stop the machines – it’s a race against time to get the hole dug and the building erected.
I asked Abel, how much do you pay for a bushel of bottles? How does it work? And then he described how he determines a fair price; he roots through the container and finds one or two valuable bottles that he wants to keep for himself. Then the rest go to the top collectors in their particular field of collecting. What they pay is the fair price given to the site foreman. What remains are the common bottles go out to the public for sale. Some go into storage to be cleaned in the future when he has time. Much of the lower priced pieces that are hard to sell end up in storage. Abel has over 10,000 bottles, pottery and stoneware along with 5,000 comic books and cases of sport cards from his sport card business that he closed down in 1992. He has storage space in many locations around toronto. That’s the most important thing, Abel stresses, his advantage is the fact that he buys all of the bottles, and their absence brings satisfaction to excavation site workers and managers. Should he discover that someone else has been buying the choice bottles he no longer buys from them. This leaves the workers with a lot of common bottles that no one wants.
Sometimes diggers will find a location north of the city where ‘clean fill’ taken from downtown Toronto construction sites is being dumped and spread about by bulldozers. Bottle diggers have been known to hike these properties and pick up old bottles and pottery like new potatoes. The small round objects will often float to the surface of moving earth, and collect in troughs at the base of each pile. It’s remarkable how some of the best pieces can survive such rough transport completely undamaged. Even when there is a bulldozer on the site leveling the piles, Abel says he can still wander about and find bags full of undamaged specimens.
A Car Chase in King County?
It’s competitive among Canadian bottle collectors, and Abel has some good stories about how the word of a good site carries across the subculture. He remarked how once he was probing through a landfill site and noticed that it had been picked over since his last visit, and so he left to probe another fresh site nearby… On the way out, he encountered other diggers coming in, and they wheeled around to follow him, and so discover his next destination. A high speed car chase ensued. Abel endeavored to lose the pursuers in the dirt roads and made turns and backtracked in loops. Actually the story doesn’t have an ending, and it’s just as likely he didn’t lose them. But I was laughing and thinking to myself, all this drama for a bushel full of antique glass bottles and early Canadian pottery? You bet, when it looks like the stuff seen below. 
Abel remembers the excavation under Hotel Novotel on the Esplanade as being especially bountiful. All the bottles there dated from the 1850's to the late 1870's. A full case of long rifles were dug up by American Excavating co. According to Abel, all the workers took one rifle home. The Toronto Historical Society went to thier homes with the police to recover them. The majority of sodas had dates on them. 1862, 1866 , 1867, 1868, 1869, 1873, That was the trend at the time. Just like in the 1890's all soda makers put a logo on the soda's and trademarked them. Abel
also remembers seeing a sedimentary bottle layer that was distinct in the strata of the dig. This ribbon of glass was the lake bottom in the 1860s directly under the wharf. This foot thick blanket of glass became a ribbon of rich treasure that threaded its way throughout the walls of the site.
The Hotel Novatel excavation was also remarkable because there was a misunderstanding between parties. As the dig wore on all, amateur diggers were expelled from the excavation site because one fellow jumped the fence and risked his life to save a blue paneled soda from the bucket of a backhoe. To make matters worse he ran away with the treasure in a hurry. After other mix-ups, rip off rumours and false allegations, and because of safety concerns, Abel says the excavators refused to deal with him or anyone else individually, but rather took the unusual step of setting up a table on the sidewalk to sell the bottles directly to the public. That was a worst case scenario.
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