friends of dufferin grove park
March Newsletter

In this issue:

RINK SEASON EXTENDED

For years, people have been asking the city to extend the rink season so that kids can go skating during March break. Here's an excerpt from our web site's city rinks diary, showing how this finally came about:

March 4: great confusion reins about whether the rinks will stay open, because the weather has been so warm. The first plan was that Dufferin would stay open until March 7. Then it was decided to keep 20 rinks open until March 21, to let the kids skate through March break. Then it got warm and sunny (sun is much worse than warmth). Yesterday the order came to close all the rinks by the afternoon (for the season). Then we heard, close all the rinks by evening. Then we found out that Dufferin Rink would be allowed to stay open until March 7, as was the original plan.

Then this morning the compressors had been turned off and the electricians had reset the rink lights for summertime. Sigh. It turned out that the mechanics hadn't heard about us staying open until the 7th. They had gone around with lightning speed early in the morning and turned off all the rinks. So then they had to come back and turn us on again. On top of that, one of our compressors had blown a gasket and was overheating. So the mechanics came last night at midnight to work on it (they work during the night so that the ice won't melt when the compressors are turned off for servicing). They stayed until 10.30 the next morning. A lot of overtime charges! But now the ice is perfect, although it's 6 degrees out.

March 5: Today it was 18 degrees in the afternoon. But no sun. So there was half an inch of water all over, but underneath, the ice was smooth and hard. Some people came and skated around, having fun shooting up the water with their skates when they stopped. Late at night the temperature dropped and the ice returned to normal: magic. And then we heard that five rinks - including us! - would stay open to the end of March break.

And the ice has been good most of the time since then. Even so, the rink has often been fairly empty. People walk in and say: What? You're open? We had no idea!

Everyone still thinks the rinks all closed at the end of February, as they did last year and the year before. And the city's rink "hot line" carried no news of the extended season until the end of the second week. However, people will catch on. And these five outdoor artificial ice rinks will remain open until 11 p.m. March 21: Rennie, Dufferin, City Hall, Regent Park South, and Kew Gardens. To find out locations and details, go to sports.

EVENTS IN THE PARK IN MARCH AND APRIL

-- Sunday March 21: Otomi People 8000 Drums Ceremony. At the fire circle just south of the basketball court. A new park friend, Maria Elena Casa, came to the park to book a spot for her group's contribution to a world-wide indigenous-peoples ceremony at 12 noon on the first day of spring. The call to do this ceremony was issued by the Otomi people in Mexico, and it involves fire and drumming. Various indigenous people will be coming to our park to drum for about one hour in the fire circle. Maria Elena emphasized that anyone is welcome to join in. She says, bring a drum if you have one - or if you don't have a drum, you should bring two stones or just "the drum of your heart." The fire will be started at 10.30 a.m. and the drumming will begin just before noon. There is a potluck afterwards, using the zamboni kitchen.

-- Sunday March 21, 8 pm.: the broadcast of Cavan Young's short film about our zamboni and the visit from the inspectors, on CBC's Newsworld. The film is called Citizen Z. This little 10-minute film turned out very well, with lots of fun around the puppets and wonderful shots of the zamboni. Parents and grandparents and friends of little kids: put on a tape and record this, if the kids in your life like to watch the zamboni at the rink. They can add the video to their big-earth-movers collection. And you can send it to your relatives in far-away countries, to show them how truly peculiar your neighborhood is.

Citizen Z will be broadcast together with three other short films in a series called "Democracy." The other films are equally lively, even gripping. This will be a very good evening of television. And if you miss it, we'll have a public showing of Cavan's segment in the park in May, hopefully accompanied by a live performance by Larry Lewis and friends, of the song Larry composed for the film, called "Ice resurfacer" (a term that works wonderfully with a Cuban beat).

-- Saturday March 27: a pre-demonstration pancake breakfast put on by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. Demonstrators will go on to Rexdale by bus after breakfast, to protest the renovation of the Heritage Inn into a larger long-term detention centre, for immigrants whose papers are not in order. Five friends of our park are volunteer cooks for this event. For more information you can call 416 925-6939, or go to their web site at www.ocap.ca.

-- Sunday March 28: the date of the seventh annual matzo making at the park oven. Run by Annie Hurwitz and Ron Paley as always (with park staff support), beginning at 12 noon and ending at 3 p.m. The big oven will be kosher and all the materials and tools for making kosher Passover matzo will be available. This has become a wonderful get-together for families to make unleavened bread and exchange lore about the Passover traditions. (Riddle: how many minutes can elapse between the rolling of the dough and the baking, until the matzo is no longer considered unleavened? Ask Ron.) For more information about March 28, e-mail Annie at annricki@sympatico.ca.

-- April 19-25: Mayor David Miller's "Clean Sweep Challenge Week": an attempt to engage the whole city in litter-picking. In our area, Judy Simutis has co-ordinated a park clean-up with other dog owners in Dufferin Grove Park every spring, for years now. Some of the dog walkers pick up litter every time they go through the park, and the city has maintenance workers who pick park trash twice a week. So the park is not nearly as bad (most of the time) as some of the surrounding lane-ways. Perhaps this year our neighbourhood will rise up and sweep through the lane-ways as well as the parks, removing tons of shredded grocery bags and rusting umbrellas and discarded shoes and dropping them into waiting city trucks. That would be a great day! We would certainly follow up with a celebration pizza lunch at the bake oven.

(At the entry into the Hamburg sewer system in Germany, there is a garbage museum, showing the most outrageous things flushed down the sewer grates - from false teeth to baby carriages. Perhaps we could have a show-and-tell sequel to the clean-up in our neighbourhood, an exhibit of interesting trash laid out on long tables by the rink house….?)

We've created a Cleanup Day Page to give you information about it. If you want to post information on that page about your group's activities in our neighbourhood on that day, you can do that too.

SOCCER

Community soccer times: The park soccer field, which was totally re-levelled and re-sodded the year before last, will be available for open (community) soccer on weekends: from 3 to 9 p.m. on Saturdays and all day on Sundays.

On week nights, the field is permitted to the Toronto Eagles Soccer Club and to the Portugal 2004 Soccer Club.

The Portugal 2004 soccer club can be reached at 416 537-2233. Their registration dates are March 11 and March 25 at St.Raymond's School.

The Toronto Eagles can be reached at 416 588-9355. Their registration dates are every Wednesday evening between 6-9 p.m. at their clubhouse in Christie Pits. You can also find out more about both soccer clubs by clicking on sports.

PARK FOOD

Last June our park got two kitchen grants: $20,000 from the city's Food and Hunger Action Project, and $8000 from the Geoffrey H. Wood Foundation. These grants allowed us to make a little kitchen in the last unused bit of the rink house - a little alcove in the garage. The kitchen got plenty of use even before it was finished. Now it's very nearly done (we just need to instal a hood over the stovetop) and we've just submitted our final report to the city. To read the story of our kitchen, click on bake oven.

One of the unexpected results of the kitchen is that after all these years, we're finally going to have to incorporate and apply for non-profit status for the Friends of Dufferin Grove Park. Even though our food is very cheap, the kitchen made it so much easier to prepare the food, that our net income from food sales in 2003 was $30,980.71. That's enough money that we'll have to start reporting GST and all those things that we were able to avoid in the past. However, the additional paperwork is probably worth the trouble. Of the amount we made from food sales, $29,894.69 was used to pay additional staff (above what the parks department already allocates for park staff). The additional staff hours we were able to pay meant that we could increase other activities in the park too. So we found out a kitchen can support a park, as well as supporting individuals that come to use it.

Such an outcome is important at a time when it seems that parks departments are sometimes too cash-strapped to care for our public resources properly.

TOOKER GOMBERG, in memoriam

Before Tooker Gomberg moved to Halifax (where he recently, tragically, took his own life by jumping off a bridge), he lived in this neighborhood, on Havelock Street. We first met him at a press conference he held in front of the bake-oven, as part of his gutsy campaign for mayor, against Mel Lastman. A few years later, during the garbage strike, Tooker proposed digging some long ditches in the park, for burying food scraps, so they could become compost in the ditches. But the ground in any urban park is very compacted by all those people walking on it, over years, and it's very hard to hand-dig even a little ditch. It seemed unlikely that such a project would succeed.

The last time we saw Tooker in the park was at the Clay and Paper "Night of Dread" parade. Like many people, he had put together some kind of fanciful costume and he seemed to be having a really good time. The ghosts were dancing around the ceremonial bonfire, the band was playing -- and then the roast pig from the Churrasqueira Berreida was carried into the circle, on its ceremonial tray. Tooker looked aghast. He yelled, "WHO brought THAT?" But the noise and the dancing went right on and nobody answered him.

No doubt there were other vegetarians in the crowd who didn't like the dead pig with an apple in its mouth. But Tooker looked as though he had been cut with a knife. So our park has the unenviable status of having contributed one bead to the string of Tooker Gomberg's great sadness.

PARK HEROES OF THE MONTH

-- Mike Bruggeman works for the City Property Department. He was asked to put up some protective window screens on the east side of the rink house, where night-time shinny games had put several pucks through the windows. We were bracing ourselves for some depressing prison-style window grilles like the ones on so many park buildings in the city, but we got a nice surprise. The new window screens have crossed metal "hockey sticks" as their reinforcement. Mike said he didn't want to just have ugly bars to strengthen the screens, so he and the welder decided on a hockey theme. The screens look wonderful - random acts of nice design, by city trades staff.

-- Mark Culligan is the park maintenance worker who often drives the big case loader that moves the snow off the rink after a snowstorm. In early February, Mark used the loader's heavy weight to make a snow road that connected the two ends of Gladstone Avenue through the park, so people would have an easier time walking there. At the end of February we asked him back to get some of the big snow "mountains" shifted away from the rink and the ovens. Otherwise, when the weather turns warm and all that snow starts the melt, the whole area changes into a giant muddy bog. Mark used the loader's huge bucket to carry the biggest snow mountain away by the giant shovel-load. With this snow he created a long snow climbing-wall to the west of the park oven, where the hill slopes toward the street and the melt-water can drain away. Since then the kids (and dogs!) swarm all over the climbing wall and the bakers get to walk around with dry feet.

Mark, who drives a Harley-Davidson motorbike in his off hours, says he has so much fun using the case loader, that he can't believe the city actually pays him to operate it.

-- Yakos Spiliotopoulos and his friends had the Sunday evening shinny hockey permit. Before he got this permit, Yakos used to come to the rink late at night after he finished his work at a restaurant, and hop the fence. Once he got caught in there by Jutta at 1.30 in the morning. She wanted him to leave, but he explained that he had such long working hours that he could only come and skate in the middle of the night. He promised not to take slap-shots against the boards, so he wouldn't wake the people in the apartment building. So he talked his way out of having to leave.

The following summer, Yakos came by the park and went up to Anna Bekerman, one of our park staff. He talked her into coming for a walk with him after her park shift ended. She did, and now they've gone to Greece together, to stay in Yakos' home village for six months. (The family house has a 200-year-old wood-fired bake-oven in the back, so Anna can carry on baking as she did at our park.)

Before they left, Yakos went over his group's shinny hockey accounts and realized that they had collected more money than they owed the city for their shinny permit. They were over by a lot: $420.50. So Yakos told his team-mates about the money we needed to put a fourth sink in the new park kitchen, as required by the public health inspector. Yakos managed to talk his shinny hockey group into donating their entire surplus to our handwashing-sink account. This man is a very good talker. And a loyal friend of the park, as well.

-- Suchada Promchiri, a friend of the park who comes from Thailand, likes to cook and bake in her spare time. This past winter she got the idea that the rink staff were working too hard, on some of those busy days when the rink was so crowded. So Suchada began to cook special dishes for the staff. Every few weeks she came by with some delicacy - spring rolls draped with fresh mint, or cranberry-brie turnovers, or - most recently - a fruit flan covered with concentric circles of perfectly arranged raspberries, kiwi slices, and tangerine pieces. Sometimes she came and went so quickly that the staff didn't even notice her - only to find another of her platters on the counter.

The staff have now come to the conclusion that regular platters of really good Thai food ought to be part of the next CUPE collective bargaining agreement.

--The secret toy delivery: the reason why there are toys at the rink is that parents with kids of different ages sometimes have a hard time pleasing everybody when the family comes skating. The older kids may want to stay out skating all day, but the little ones, who can't skate as well, get bored sooner and then they want to go home: a tough time for parents, when the arguing starts. The mini-pizzas and the cookies help, but the toy corner helps too, to keep the little ones occupied. However, every year the toy collection dwindles as things get broken from use by many small hands. We've mostly tried to replace toys by going to garage sales, but this year something strange happened: the toys appeared to begin breeding on their own. Toy trucks begat more trucks and new stuffed animals were sitting on top of unfamiliar storybooks when it came time to clean up, along with plastic tool kits and toy medical bags that no one had seen before. We're guessing that the toy corner has acquired a secret toy elf. Thank you, whoever you are. You're helping to keep the peace.

COMING UP IN SPRING AND SUMMER:

-- Baking classes: A very experienced young baker, Jesse Archibald, has approached us, saying that he would like to contribute his skills to the park for a while. Jesse helped start a highly regarded artisan-bread bakery called Pan Chancho in Kingston, ran his own bakery and juice bar for a while, and most recently worked 16-hour days at Ace Bakery, helping them set up a new baguette system that makes 2000 baguettes an hour. Now, Jesse told us, he's ready to take a break from that pace. Among other things, he wants to offer a bread-baking class at the park, probably starting in late April or May. Jesse's concept is to work with sourdough at least part of the time, and to teach the class in two segments: an evening session for setting up the various doughs, and a session the following morning for shaping and baking the slow-risen dough in the park ovens. (Jesse has built an oven himself, and travelled in parts of the world where bake ovens are common.) The exact dates are not final, but it looks as though this class will fill up quickly. If you're interested, please call the park at 416 392-0913 and get on the list, or e-mail us at baking@dufferinpark.ca. Jesse has already begun to bake at the park, and more of his bread will be in evidence at the farmers' market as the weeks go by.

-- Day of Delight: the dreamy, first-day-of-spring opposite number of Dusk Dances, by Clay and Paper Theatre. Actually, this event may not be in our park at all - David Anderson is hoping to stage it on the Philosopher's Walk beside the Royal Ontario Museum this year, but nothing is set yet. At least the rehearsals will be in our park.

-- Festival of outdoor theatre: Five groups from Halifax, New York, and Toronto will be performing a variety of short plays outdoors in the park during the last week of June. Put on by Stranger Theatre, the group that performed East of the Sun last September. Food is an important part of this festival.

-- The Best of Dusk Dances: coming back again, in the week beginning on Canada Day weekend. Five dances in various locations, in and under the trees, out on the basketball court, anywhere they can fit into the park.

-- Lilith: a new version of the very successful outdoor park play by Clay and Paper four years ago, will be performed at the park on at least two weekends beginning in the middle of July (exact schedule not set yet). It will then tour a number of other city parks.

There are a number of other possible events just in the thinking stage (it would be very nice if some of the many musicians who are friends of the park could do music in the park). And Theo Hersch, a children's librarian at the Lillian Smith Toronto Public Library Branch, wrote in the winter that she intends to do an evening song-and-story time in the playground, perhaps in July. Look for more details in the May newsletter.

-- As for registered summer activities for children: these are still being discussed. (To put in your two-cents-worth, e-mail us at kids@dufferinpark.ca, or call the park at 416 392-0913, and the right person will call you back.) Our main emphasis, as in other years, will be drop-in activities around the wading pool/ playground area. This year we hope to have some very fine beading, handweaving, clay-building, and macrame activities, and as much music - singing and instrumental - as we can manage to arrange.

-- It also looks as though we may have the yurt up in the park again for two weeks beginning at the end of June. Ian Small and Michelle Oser bought this yurt when they were in Uzbekistan with Medecins sans Frontieres, and they had a yurt-raising and then various activities in the yurt, including music and films, in our park three years ago. The Spiral Garden program at the Hugh MacMillan Centre used the yurt for its children's day camp over the last two summers, and now it's our turn again. This is a magnificent structure: look for the date of the yurt-raising in the May newsletter, if you would like to feel like a nomad for a day and help lash the tent poles together.

FARMERS' MARKET

The market has been doing well inside all winter but by now everyone is really looking forward to moving outside again. On the first really nice day after winter goes, the tables will move out along the outside wall of the building (Phil Matthewson and Melvin Laidlaw have their tables there already). Then when spring is really there and the ground has dried up a bit, the whole market will move back down along the path, under the trees.

We have gained a few vendors since the fall, and some who dropped out for the winter will soon be returning. To find out more about the market, or to locate a vendor, click on farmers' market. To get on the weekly "market news" e-mail list, send a request to market@dufferinpark.ca. or just come down to the market on Thursdays between 3.30 and 7 and see for yourself - the market is anything but virtual.


Newsletter prepared by: Jutta Mason

Illustrations: Jane LowBeer

Web address: www.dufferinpark.ca

Technical support: John Culbert

Web Site: Joe Adelaars, Henrik Bechmann, Caitlin Shea

E-mail: editor@dufferinpark.ca

Park phone: 416 392-0913

List Serve: Emily Visser, Bernard King

Street address: 875 Dufferin Street