The ignoble end of “the world’s worst McDonald’s”

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Jordan Heath Rawlings When you are just one among more than 40,000, it’s difficult to stand out. It’s hard to be labeled the best in that crowded afield. It’s also hard to be labeled the worst among so many, and yet, somehow one Ottawa area business managed to secure that dubious honor. The notorious McDonald’s restaurant on Rideau Street is closing its doors. A regular stop for police most weekend nights. It’s now set to close permanently in April after 38 years in business. If you would like a sense of how the Rideau Street McDonald’s earned its title as the worst McDonald’s in the world, just search for it in YouTube and gaze upon the scroll of handheld cell phone videos of incidents, some viral, some legendary, others just chaotic and scary over nearly 40 years. This location became a national punchline, but also a local problem, and now it’s closed forever. But as notorious a legacy as it leaves behind this closure also offers another story. It’s a story about public spaces, neighborhood support, and local policing. Because well your cities may not be as notorious as Rideau Street, every major downtown has at least one of these restaurants open 24 hours, cheap enough to secure a seat and a cup of coffee for almost anybody, neon beacons to all of the street passing them by. The story of the Rideau Street McDonald’s is a darkly amusing tale, but it’s also the story of all of our cities and how they’re changing.

I am Jordan Heath Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Amy Dempsey is a senior writer based in Ottawa with the Toronto Star. Hey Amy.

Amy Dempsey Hello.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Why don’t you set this scene for us just before we get to the McDonald’s itself. For people not from Ottawa who haven’t really visited. What and where is the part of the city, part of Rideau Street it was located on? Describe the area a bit.

Amy Dempsey So it’s right in the heart of downtown Ottawa, down the street from Parliament and the Chateau Laurier, all of the famous historical buildings that people come to visit. It’s also directly across from the Rideau Center, which is Ottawa’s largest shopping mall. Kind of like the Eaton Center or the West Edmonton Mall of Ottawa. And then it’s also Rideau Street, is where the entrance or one of the entrances to the Bywood market is. And the Bywood market is a historical district, a neighborhood that’s a nice area to stroll around vendors. It’s a popular nightlife destination. The McDonald’s is kind of on a direct path between the University of Ottawa’s student housing area and the market, which is a popular place to go at night to have some drinks. So a lot going on around it. A lot going on for sure. And it’s also a place where most of Ottawa’s emergency shelters are located. So most of the services for street involved individuals are in that neighborhood. So the social issues that we are seeing, you know, across the country, post pandemic are really present in that area.

Jordan Heath Rawlings And so in the middle of all of this there is this McDonald’s. What was the McDonald’s like? Have you ever been inside it?

Amy Dempsey I have.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Tell me about it.

Amy Dempsey So I was inside the McDonald’s recently when it, you know, in its calmer days, but I also spent some time there as a graduate student when I lived in Ottawa, say 14 years ago. Few, few late night stops. So I have my own experience. And then, you know what, what people tend to say is it was a different place during the day than it was at night. So during the day, there would be a lot of, just a lot of traffic because it’s a very busy, popular tourist area, especially in the summer, but not you, it would be a completely different scene after midnight. So the after midnight crowd or the after 2:00 AM after bar close crowd was often a large crowd. People described it to me as a very hot and sweaty place. Kind of like imagine going to the gym and the kind of smells that arise when you’re working out at a gym. Or imagine people who have been out dancing all night and drinking and are just kind of coated in sweat gathering together in a restaurant that smells like french fries and, and all that good stuff. And so the, a mingling of smells, a mingling of many smells. People often talked about the floor in that McDonald’s. That’s one thing that that stood out for people. People talked about it being, you know, a place where you wouldn’t wanna wear sandals at any time.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Oh boy.

Amy Dempsey And, you know, the staff were hardworking staff, but…

Jordan Heath Rawlings Sure.

Amy Dempsey It’s, I would imagine it’s really hard to keep up with the cleaning in a place like that that gets, that sees the kinds of crowds It does.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Well, you talked about it in your article and you described a scene, not so much of a lineup, but a mosh pit fighting for cheeseburgers, which I’m gonna remember forever.

Amy Dempsey Yeah, that’s right. You know, you know what it’s like standing in front of a counter at a McDonald’s if you’ve ever been to one, which I just assume everybody has been to a McDonald’s at least once. But rather than lines, just, just crowds. and you can see some of those videos online where it’s just, you don’t, it doesn’t look like there’s a line. It just looks like people are gathered there to watch a concert behind the counter or something.

Jordan Heath Rawlings And it is well known for that vibe you just described. But also for, for various incidents, and I know we’re going to get to some of the serious ones, and this is not entirely a fun conversation, but what are some of the weirder incidents that it was known for? You’ve got a bunch in your piece.

Amy Dempsey Yeah, so the most famous one, of course is the raccoon brawl, or what people call the raccoon brawl. Yeah, raccoons were not involved in the fight, but it’s just become known as the raccoon brawl. So it, it was a night where, and there’s a video of this online. I spoke to the guy who, who shot the video, actually, his name is Sean Stewart, and he showed up that night and had kind of a feeling he, he felt like there was something in the air that suggested to him there was gonna be a fight. And so he went to line up to get some double cheeseburgers and he gave his girlfriend his phone and asked her to record, and she did. When the video opens, it’s just people hitting each other kicking each other, pulling each other down to the ground. I think I counted a dozen punches in the first minute or so. Nobody knows really how or why the fight started, but it’s all, it’s all guys, younger guys, just beating the heck out of each other. And then kind of off to the side in the camera. This man appears, and he’s not part of the fight. He’s just sort of casually watching and that, but then he pulls this raccoon out of his sweater, a baby raccoon, and he holds it up high, almost like that scene in the Lion King, right, where Rafiki holds Simba up and he holds the raccoon up in the air and then he disappears. He’s off camera and it kind of makes you go, wait, what? The guy who recorded the video, Sean told me that he didn’t even know there was a raccoon in the video until after he posted it. He posted the video, then watched it, and him and his girlfriend went wait, what did you see that? And, so then the raccoon appears again a few seconds later. The, the guy standing there and this time he has a cigarette hanging between his lips inside the McDonald’s. He’s not smoking it. It’s just…

Jordan Heath Rawlings Right as you do.

Amy Dempsey Yeah, it’s not lit. He’s, he’s getting it ready and the raccoon is safely tucked back into a sweater, but just looking out, observing the chaos. The fight’s still happening. People are screaming and it’s all very intense, but this guy with the raccoon just looks so casual. So that’s, that’s definitely the most famous story and probably the one that got the McDonald’s the most attention

Jordan Heath Rawlings That one went viral well outside of Ottawa, I believe.

Amy Dempsey Yeah, it was covered in The Daily Mail, and the story kind of once a raccoon gets involved, you know, stories take on a life of their own. So people started calling it the worst McDonald’s in Canada and then eventually there were stories out there calling it the worst McDonald’s in the world, which is, it’s a pretty big title for a little McDonald’s in Ottawa. I don’t know that it’s necessarily true. I haven’t visited enough McDonald’s restaurants to know, but it’s certainly a unique one. There’s also a kind of a brawl that’s, that’s famous where there’s just two guys beating each other with, wet floor signs.

Jordan Heath Rawlings I really don’t wanna make this all sound silly. The restaurant does have a viral reputation, and like you said, once a raccoon gets involved things tend to spiral, but this story evolved into kind of a serious issue. How often were the police called to this restaurant and you know, what kinds of calls did they get because, you know, the wet floor signs are, are kind of funny, but there was a lot of bad stuff going on here.

Amy Dempsey Yeah, the police started to take it really seriously and get pretty fed up at a certain point. So it all came to a head in 2019. They did the tallies and they were getting basically on average, like more than 800 calls a year in the five years prior to 2019, they were getting 800 calls. You know, for help, for police assistance from the restaurant annually, and there were 928 calls in 2017 alone. So if you do the math, it’s more than two calls a day on average. So police felt that this was over the top and, you know, the restaurant was, was requiring a lot of police resources, and something needed to be done is what police felt.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Is this all because just the location and the amount of traffic that it gets, is there something special about the layout of the place. Do we know what’s going on?

Amy Dempsey So I think every city has a fast food restaurant like this. When this story was published, it got a lot of messages from people saying, oh, if you think this is the worst one, you haven’t seen the one in downtown Halifax or you haven’t seen the one, what about the one on Queen and Spadina in Toronto? So, It’s the 24 hour aspect, I think where you’re just getting a different kind of crowd. When, when people are coming in at two in the morning, they’re, a lot of people are coming in drunk and excited and you get a different kind of scene. But this McDonald’s in particular had some design challenges or what police and city council and, and city staffers identified as some design challenges that they wanted the restaurant to address. So one of the issues, one of the things is the main entrance to this McDonald’s was on Rideau Street across from the mall, but there was also a back entrance exit. And that went right into the byword market. So it became a thoroughfare. You’d have people just walking through to get quickly from one place to another. But it also created an easy escape route for anybody wanting to evade police when, when calls were made to police. And then in that back entrance exit. This McDonald’s had bathrooms that were at the end of a long hallway. Some people called this hallway, the hallway to hell because it was really isolated from the rest of the restaurant. And weird things happened there. Weird you know, is maybe putting it lightly. some people say that they witnessed illegal things happening back there. Drug use, you know, sexual behaviour, and which is not necessarily illegal, but not what you normally expect to see at McDonald’s. And that they didn’t feel safe back there. So if you wanted to go to the bathroom, you had to go down this hallway. And if you were a person who was doing something, that was illegal in McDonald’s and police came to the front door. You could, you could run out the back and escape through the byword market. And that was frustrating for police.

Jordan Heath Rawlings So they did the math on this and they added up just how often they’d been called. And you mentioned they got fed up. Tell me about then, police chief Charles Bordeleau. Who was he, what was his background and what happened?

Amy Dempsey So Charles Bordeleau was the chief of police for Ottowa at that time. He’d been the chief for seven years, and he was actually about to retire. You know, normally police chiefs don’t get involved in day-to-day policing issues like this. They’re usually focused on bigger, broader policing efforts. But one of his, his inspectors for the area came to him saying like, this is getting really out of hand. We need to do something about it. So the chief happened to actually be a former McDonald’s employee. He had worked there as a teenager, as a, as a young man in his early twenties. He’d even worked there. When he was first starting out in the Ottawa Police, and so he, he knew from that experience, that McDonald’s, the corporation, was really focused on its public image. And so he decided he would write a letter to McDonald’s headquarters outlining the issue and, you know, saying that something needed to be done about it. And then because they’d had such challenges working with, with the McDonald’s on these issues, he decided to take it a step further and he gave this letter to the media. Which, you know, was a pretty bold move. He knew what would happen as a police chief. He had a lot of experience with what happens when, when journalists get ahold of information. And yeah, the story became a big story and he was hoping that, that drawing attention to it would lead to change.

Jordan Heath Rawlings What was in the letter? Can you just read maybe one or two of the key sentences?

Amy Dempsey The letter is dated March 15th, and he wrote, I’m writing to you to request your immediate attention and action in relation to the ongoing criminal activity and social disorder issues at the McDonald’s franchise located at 99 Street. And he wrote that, police officers attend this location on a daily basis for vagrancy liquor, license violations, illicit drug use, and incidents of violence. He also wrote that McDonald’s community standards were not reflected at this location, which is, it’s, it’s always amusing to hear the, this McDonald’s described it official language. Community standards not reflected. So he sent it and then he gave it to a journalist from CTV and then that move kind of set in motion a chain of events that ultimately led to its permanent closure.

Jordan Heath Rawlings How was that letter received? Do we know how it was received by McDonald’s? And in the media?

Amy Dempsey McDonald’s hasn’t said anything publicly. They don’t really speak publicly about, about things like this, right? So they haven’t, you know, they didn’t reply to any of my emails, my requests for interviews. they didn’t answer my questions neither McDonald’s nor the franchise owner. So we don’t really know what, you know, how they received it, but we know what they did after, which is they made the decision to close the restaurant at 10:00 PM instead of having it be a 24 hour operation. So they cut the night shift.

Jordan Heath Rawlings And what happened when they did that? Because you mentioned it ultimately led to the entire closure of the restaurant, so that couldn’t have been the last move.

Amy Dempsey Yeah, so I don’t think we could say it, it didn’t directly lead to, but it was sort of the first step. And again, we don’t know why McDonald’s closed. They, they won’t say. But many people view the cancellation of the night shift is like the first step toward it ultimately being closed because basically when, when the, when the lease came up for renewal this year. They decided not to renew it. So maybe if the lease had been up for renewal back in 2019 when they first decided they weren’t for safety reasons going to end the overnight shift, maybe they wouldn’t have renew renewed the lease, then maybe the pandemic played a role, who knows. But they did they did this year decide not to renew the lease and close.

Jordan Heath Rawlings And that’s almost where the story ends. But how did the community take the loss of The worst McDonald’s in the world?

Amy Dempsey You know, it’s drawn a lot of different reactions. So the first notable thing that happened is, It’s been interesting to see how people have celebrated this McDonald’s. There’s almost in some corners an excitement about having this wild McDonald’s, because Ottawa doesn’t have a whole lot of wild things happen. You know, Ottawa has a bit of a reputation for being boring. I’m not saying it’s deserved, but it does have that reputation. And so to have this kind of, McDonald’s that’s, the best thing you could say about it is it’s got a lot of character.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Never a dull moment at this McDonald’s.

Amy Dempsey Yeah. And, and especially because I think there was some pride amongst some Ottawans that, you know, that we had the worst McDonald’s and worse than Toronto, McDonald’s even. So some University of Ottawa students banded together and they staged a march, and it wasn’t a march protesting the closure of the McDonald’s. It was a march celebrating the McDonald’s and sort of bidding it farewell, I guess. The organizers dressed up in costume. The person who who led the march was dressed as Ronald McDonald. I was there, it was on a really cold, really cool Sunday in March, and I saw somebody dressed as french fries. There was a, a young guy dressed as a raccoon. He was wearing like a raccoon bodysuit and holding a picture of a raccoon, who he told me was, you know, his brother, the, the raccoon from the sweater, McDonald’s night fame. They marched around the, around the downtown and, and passed the McDonald’s just kind of bidding at farewell. I thought honestly, maybe 10 or 20 people would show up to this thing. But there were about 200, 200 people came out…

Jordan Heath Rawlings Wow.

Amy Dempsey …to bid farewell to this McDonald’s.

Jordan Heath Rawlings What does this restaurant symbolize in terms of its place in Ottawa or maybe just like every restaurant, like this is place in its city?

Amy Dempsey I think that this story is one that illustrates the challenges downtown business districts and communities are facing, mid a national housing crisis, an epidemic of homelessness, mental illness, and drug addiction. People saw it as symbolizing different things. It’s so, it depends on where you’re standing. Some people worried that the closure of the McDonald’s was a canary and a coal mine. You know, a sign of more challenges to come for an area still struggling to recover from the pandemic. And dealing with a lot of challenges brought by addiction and mental illness. Other people didn’t see it that way at all. And they saw, they see the McDonald’s as a symbol of you know, the challenges our, our downtown cores are facing and the challenges of fixing some of those problems. So finding homes for our street involved individuals, making sure everybody has a house, has a place to live, a safe place to sleep. At least one person felt that this McDonald’s was for set of business by bad publicity, unfairly instigated by the city and, and former police chief. That person asked why should McDonald’s be in charge of keeping the streets safe? You know, this person saw it as police blaming a family restaurant for the city’s social problems that shouldn’t be up to McDonald’s to solve. Yeah. And then other people just saw it as something, a quirky, weird thing in our city to, to remember as a good story, I guess.

Jordan Heath Rawlings One last question before you go. When you asked people, your colleagues for their fast food restaurants in other cities, Did anybody tell you about the Harvey’s near what used to be Ryerson University?

Amy Dempsey Oh, I used to live near that Harvey’s and I don’t wanna say the name, I don’t wanna say it’s nickname because it’s rude. But I know about that Harvey’s and I’ve heard lots. I mean, I’ve seen things and I’ve heard things as well. And I used to live near a murder, McDonald’s. Unfortunately. The McDonald’s on the Danforth, a homicide took place there late one night.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Oh yes.

Amy Dempsey And there was also a famous murder McDonald’s in Sydney, Nova Scotia. I grew up in Nova Scotia and that was…

Jordan Heath Rawlings I mean it’s, it’s kind of like you say, you know, every fast food restaurant that’s open late becomes a receptacle for whatever the community around it is struggling with.

Amy Dempsey Exactly. yeah, they’re part of the fabric of the city and, I think they’re fascinating places to look at.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Thank you so much for talking with us about this one.

Amy Dempsey Thanks for having me.

Jordan Heath Rawlings Amy Dempsey writing in the Toronto Star. That was The Big Story for more including a previous episode with Amy, where we discussed rats taking over Toronto. We have a lot of fun on this show when she joins us. You can head to TheBig Storypodcast.ca and search for her name. You can also find us on Twitter @TheBigStoryfpn or you can write to us hello@TheBigStorypodcast.ca. If you feel like using a phone, who does now, but maybe you do, call us, leave a voicemail (416)-935-5935. The Big Story is in every podcast player. Hopefully it’s in your subscriber page. If it’s not make that change. If your friends don’t know about us, make sure they do. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.