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Journal 2008

April 2008 Journal

posted April 19, 2008

Mayor's clean-up day mini-tour

Saturday April 19 -- sunny and high of 25. No leaves on the trees but people outside everywhere -- it seems like nobody stayed home.

Sterling Road

On Sterling Road, the Sterling Rd. and South Perth Residents Association (led by Phil Share) cleaned up the streets, especially around the empty businesses. They started at 9 a.m. and by 10 a.m. they were already loading old furniture, a barbecue, rain-soaked construction supplies into the city garbage truck that had come for pickup.

Sorauren-Wabash Park

At Sorauren-Wabash Park, there was an Environment Day with all its trucks and oil drums of old computers and police sorting drivers into the right lineups. There was also an open house for the new Wabash field house, which was not quite finished but full of sunlight and enthusiasm.

The field house has a large multi-use second floor with lots of windows, which open to let the breezes cool the room. There will be a kitchen, already roughed in, on the ground floor, for community dinners and special events. There are public washrooms -- almost at the top of the wish-list for all the parents who use the playground or whose kids play soccer. There was a sign on the wall: "maximum allowed use: 25 people," but Cathy Allen of the Wabash Building Society said that's just a formula for the number of washrooms per number of people. The building can hold far more people and it looks very solid. Overheard: the city plans to charge $11 an hour for community use of the building. That sounds very odd, after so many community people put years into raising money and into every detail of getting it open, not to mention paying the taxes that keep it operating. The City may have to rethink that charge.

Near the entrance to the field house there was an information table about a planned farmers' market.

Across the street at the playground, there was a park clean-up, and another information table giving out little sunflower seedlings. Gillian, the organizer of the cleanup, said that they have taken some inspiration from Dufferin Grove Park, which was pleasing to hear.

The garden landscape designer was showing her plans for landscaping around the building. Their planting weekend will be May 24, and they will likely have lots of help -- so many people have been involved in this effort, and their enthusiasm was manifest.

Trinity-Bellwoods

At noon, the clean-up was just finishing. The park in general had not been very littered, since the park crew had been picking up litter the previous day. The HGTV-show greenhouse is a wonderful new addition to the park:

The playground is still drying up after all the snow. By mid-May, the new section of the playground will be installed. The sandpit, on which the Dufferin Grove sandpit was modelled, also has mud remaining from the heavy snows. But when summer arrives, it will once again be full of summer day campers, for the "Art in the Park" program. The program is so excellent, and therefore so popular, that program leader Jane Wells says the waiting list could fill two whole camps.

The park cleanup was announced on the Trinity Bellwoods web site and also on posters. The new community bulletin board at the farmers' market site had not only the Mayor's cleanup posted but also the annual Park Day, the restart of the farmers' market, and some of the community centre programs.

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