A parking lot in Toronto was transformed into a monolithic ice palace on Monday at the behest of the rapper Drake. By Wednesday morning, fire crews were hosing it down.
Since the installation was erected to promote Drake’s upcoming album, “Iceman,” droves of fans, passers-by, social media personalities, news broadcasters and curious residents flocked to the site. But the chaos, which included people climbing the 25-foot-tall structure and others using blowtorches to melt it, also attracted the Toronto Fire Services because of safety concerns.
“Large numbers of individuals have gathered to attempt to melt the ice using flammable liquids and open flames in an uncontrolled environment, which results in an immediate threat to life,” Jim Jessop, the city’s fire chief, said in a statement.
Live television footage on Wednesday morning showed a pressurized stream of water being sprayed from a fire truck’s crane onto the depleted pile of ice blocks.
The crowds came after Drake suggested in an Instagram post that the installation held the release date for “Iceman.” The structure started drawing crowds hours after it was completed on Monday night. Some hacked at the ice blocks with pickaxes, hammers and other sharp tools. The police tried to contain the people at the lot, which is a five-minute walk from a major hospital.
Drake also made an appearance during the construction before the fire crews went into action.
Mayor Olivia Chow told reporters on Wednesday morning that she supported the fire chief’s decision to melt down the ice prism. She also stressed that Drake, who is from Toronto, was “a big supporter of our city” who had generated excitement.
“It’s going to be a great summer,” she said.
This was the second disruption in Toronto in less than a week connected to Drake’s album rollout.
Residents in a north Toronto neighborhood were rattled by a loud explosion in a park that sent a plume of smoke far enough into the sky to be seen from high-rises miles away. Some longtime residents were jittery because they remembered the community’s propane plant explosion in 2008, which prompted the evacuation of thousands of people.
After Drake hinted at his involvement in the explosion, the city of Toronto confirmed the boom was a controlled pyrotechnic blast for a Drake music video shoot.
To build the ice structure, a convoy of transport trucks drove roughly a million pounds of ice from a farming town in rural Ontario to the parking lot in Toronto, where a fleet of 20 forklifts awaited.
Moving that much ice was a logistical whirlwind, said Heidi Bayley, the president of Iceculture Inc., the producer of the ice blocks. Ms. Bayley counts this as one of the company’s largest projects in its nearly four decades in business.
The forklifts were fitted with special equipment to handle the blocks, each bigger than a banker’s box and weighing 300 pounds apiece, Mr. Gingerich said.
“The goal was to maximize the scale,” said Michael Gingerich, the owner of Mawg Design, the experiential design studio in Toronto that led the project. “We wanted it to be big and great.”
The structure was finished on Monday around 3 p.m.
The police were called to the parking lot by around 11 p.m., Ashley Visser, a Toronto police spokeswoman, said in an email.
A streamer known as Kishka found a bag in the ice structure that revealed the album release date: May 15. Drake appeared to confirm the timetable in an Instagram post.
Vjosa Isai is a reporter for The Times based in Toronto, where she covers news from across Canada.
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