In this issue:
- Summer schedule/ special events
- Legacy benches celebration
- Dusk Dances Launch
- Performances of Gold
- "Fate of the Park II" meeting report
- June 18: meet the park managers
Birthday parties:
on the first Sunday afternoon in June there were six sizable birthday parties in the park. It seemed like there was a pinata hanging in every tree! One of the parties was for 80 people, and the birthday-child was only a year old. We asked the mother, why such a big party for such a little kid? She said she had heard that it takes a village to raise a child, and she thought it would be good to get the village in place now. The "presents" at that party were songs performed by some of the guests, and the parents told us afterwards that the birthday baby (and the guests) spent the afternoon in delighted laughter.
Many of the park birthday parties/ large picnics are community events like that. If you want to have a party at the park, here are the rules for parties:
1. No permit is necessary.
2. Extra garbage bags or a folding table are available from the park staff.
3. If you want to have a campfire, you can use the "friends of the park" campfire permit. Arrange a week or so ahead for a fire safety lesson, and the loan of our wood-shed key. The permit costs $10 to cover the preparation by staff. Please bring wood from your shed or your basement or your friends, to replace the wood you use: we’re always a bit short of firewood. You can borrow the park fire stands and the grill if you need them.
4. If you want to have wood-oven pizza at your party, arrange to have your party on Sunday afternoon. Between 2 and 4 the oven is available for public use and your party is welcome to join in, for the usual $2 a person (that covers dough, sauce, and cheese, and you can pick herbs from the park garden). But remember to have lots of other food as well, in case there’s a pizza line-up. THERE IS NO EXTRA BIRTHDAY-PARTY CHARGE FOR THIS.
Newsletter news:
The former arrangements with the city’s print shop, to print the monthly park newsletter, were cancelled in April. At the community park meeting on May 25, Parks director Don Boyle said he was unwilling to use our tax money to print items critical of the Parks Department. In May, 200 copies of the May newsletter were printed by the office of City Councillor Mario Silva. This was a very helpful stopgap, but we ran out of copies early in the month. The G.H. Wood Foundation has given us a small grant to help with newsletter printing for now, and we also have some help from an anonymous neighbour. Therefore, the June-July newsletter will not run out before the end of July.
Park "legacy in our neighbourhood" celebration:
The legacy benches will be unveiled at a park celebration sponsored by the Dufferin Mall on Sunday June 23 at 2.30p.m. This is an Ontario Arts Council project that has allowed local artists Kristen Fahrig and Jeff Chown to work with school children, youth, and many park users of all ages to turn two old and worn park benches into a dazzlingly colourful piece of community art, using paint, clay, and carving tools. The benches will be located across from Arie Kamp’s equally colourful poppy-flowerbed on the much-used park walkway NORTH of the rink. Now people coming back from the mall with their packages can have a rest on the benches and enjoy both the flowers and the bench decorations. At the unveiling celebration there will be pizza (make your own, with dough, sauce and cheese provided free by the Dufferin Mall - thanks to mall marketing manager Mary Thorne - flavoured with herbs you can pick from the park community gardens), still-warm park-oven bread, marimba dance music, a rummage sale, and the first Clay and Paper Theatre giant puppet performance of the season.
The things people have painted on the benches are pretty interesting - pictures from their lives, maps of their home country, inspiring verses, pretty, abstract designs, mementos to their true love. There are also tiles with pictures and messages on the concrete bench ends. These colourful benches will become the background of more neighbourhood gossip and carry-on over the years, as people sit on them and chat and look out over the park landscape.
As if that weren’t enough, the project also turned out 68 ceramic tiles painted by people in the park. The tiles will be installed in the playground. Look for them - they’ll appear in lots of unexpected places. A kind of treasure hunt.
The Uzbeki yurt was up in the park from May 25 to June 2.
That means that the yurt’s owners, Michelle Oser and Ian Small, slept in the park for 8 nights, along with Lola (their daughter) and various friends, as well as one of the park staff. It turns out that sleeping so close to Dufferin Street is the opposite of restful - the traffic never stops. Tough for Michelle and Ian, sometimes, with all the noise and questions and visitors. But a very interesting exhibit for park users. The yurt - the conical, traditional dwelling of nomadic tribespeople in Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and other parts of Central Asia - was a beautiful, functional structure with such remarkable illumination (from the round top opening) that many visitors just sat quietly inside on one of the carpeted platforms, not saying a word. When it rained and the felt walls got damp, the smell was pretty reminiscent of the barnyard (the felt was made of sheep and camel hair). The smell of wet felt was a big hit with the park dogs, who clearly thought it was the best smell ever.
The yurt brought many visitors into the park who don’t usually come here, including people connected to Doctors without Borders, the international medical aid organization. They came to meet with Ian and Michele (who worked with that organization in Uzbekistan for four years), and they had many late-night conversations around the park campfire. On the last day, some of their Afghani friends cooked a giant rice-and-lamb meal over the fire, which they shared out among the yurt visitors - delicious.
Special events:
Thursday June 20 to Saturday, June 22, 7.30 p.m.: "The Woman’s Tongue," featuring dialogues from Shakespeare. Put on by the amateur theatrical troupe, Unruly Women, with actors Cristina Campbell and Philippa Sheppard. By the field house.
Sunday June 23, 2.30 - 4 p.m.: "Legacy in our neighbourhood" project: celebration, including the unveiling of the legacy benches, music, pizza and fresh bread (courtesy of the Dufferin Mall), the season’s first Clay and Paper giant puppet performance.. By the community ovens, and the north walkway.
Also on that day: The Echo Women’s Community Choir annual rummage and bake sale, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. By the community ovens.
Sunday of the long weekend June 30, 4 - 6 p.m. Dusk Dances preview and launch for this year’s dance season. By the basketball court. Live performances by Ayelen Liberona, Pegasus Children’s Dance Company, BackIIBasiks, Turbobonz Dance, Ed Hanley and Pirouz Yousefian. Also a picnic in the park, make-your-own wood-oven pizza.
Tuesday July 16 - Sunday July 21: Dusk Dances. All over the park.
Tuesday July 23 - through to the end of summer (Tuesday - Sundays only), 8 p.m.: Clay and Paper Theatre’s performances of Gold. Script by Larry Lewis, direction by David Anderson, design by Barbara Klunder. Good food from the community oven before performances. All over the park.
Regular events:
WADING POOL: June 28 - August 28: wading pool open seven days a week 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. (extended hours until dusk during heat waves), food cart for snacks, coffee, etc.;
ARTS ACTIVITIES: drop-in crafts at playground 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.; older-child club (includes staff resources and limited supervision for independent children) 10 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. No registration necessary.
PIZZA OVEN, BREAD BAKING: Tuesday: 12 to 1.30 p.m. open oven make-your-own pizza. 6-8 p.m.: open oven "cook your dinner"; park issues can be discussed, meet other friends of the park or neighbours. Fresh bread for sale from oven 2 -8 p.m.
Wednesday: 12 to 1.30 open oven, make-your-own pizza, also available to camps and other groups, if not too large.
Friday: 6 - 8 p.m. open oven, cook your own dinner.
Sunday: 2 - 4 p.m. open oven, make-your-own pizza, birthday parties welcome.
NOTE: OUTDOOR OVEN EVENTS ARE CANCELLED ON RAINY DAYS
SPORTS:
Basketball: anytime. Night lights go off at midnight.
Soccer: the field is used by the Toronto Eagles children’s soccer program on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday daytime. On Thursday, Saturday evening and all day Sunday the soccer field is available for pick-up soccer: first come, first serve.
Volleyball/ badminton: an old net is permanently strung up beside the playground. The area is open for pick-up games all the time.
Tetherball: up during daylight hours, by the playground.
Note: from 10 a.m.-6 p.m. balls can be borrowed from park staff
PLAYGROUND:
The playground is divided into three sections: the little-kid area with swings etc., the wading pool, and the adventure playground area with the sandpit, tipi poles, cooking fire section, water, shovels, play kitchen, etc. All sections are open to everyone all the time. However, the sand pit is an area set up for older children - if your child is quite small but wants to play there, stay nearby and take them out of harm’s way if necessary.
The shovels in the sand pit are paid for with money made at the pizza oven - we can’t afford to have them stolen so please stop anyone you see wandering off with a shovel. We leave them out until evening on purpose because that’s when more parents have time to come to the playground with their kids. Same with the hose and the portable water tap that feeds the sand pit "rivers."
New Books in the park library:
The rink house has a shelf of books for our CELOS library (CELOS: Centre for local research into public space). The newest additions are three books about street food all over the world, and two books (on loan) about the adventure/ farmyard playgrounds of Berlin. Matt Price and Michelle Murphy and their daughter Mika moved to Toronto recently after spending a few years in Berlin, and they brought us these books to look at. Playhouse-building materials, live chickens and ponies, clay bake-ovens, metal-work and wood-working studios, are just some of the resources distributed throughout the almost 100 city playgrounds listed in these books. We also have the May 2002 Dufferin Grove Park Report, full of information about the nitty-gritty of running this park. If you want to have a look at any of these books, speak to the summer staff and they’ll make them available while you’re in the park.
Kyla Dixon-Muir: report on the community park meeting, May 25.
Kyla writes:
I have lived in the neighbourhood for eight years. While I have always walked in the park and played on the swings, it wasn’t until the newsletters appeared that I began to realize the amazing range of life in this park: I began using the ovens during community dinners; Jan Schallert taught me how to bake spelt bread from scratch; I have traded information with Jutta and others about cooking with wood fires; I was trained in firing up the ovens; and, most recently, my writers’ group found a great new home here. Since my participation in the park has been casual, I was not aware of the intense civic passions shared by so many community members, until the meeting.
Don Boyle, whose attendance was confirmed at the last minute, responded to the participants’ challenges very directly. I admired Don’s choices: to admit personal responsibility for his unpopular decision to stop funding this vital newsletter, and to come alone to face a roomful of annoyed and frustrated folks. By the end of the meeting, I could see each side: for the City workers, for whom this park is an anomaly, it means they are often outside of their own familiar ways of doing things when they come to Dufferin Grove. For the friends and neighbours who have proved what caring can do, this park has moved from experiment to fact, and has bred a "yes we can" sense of success. At the end, the decision was reached to invite City staff who are responsible for this park to come to a community "open oven" on Tuesday evening, June 18th, 7 p.m., where we hope they can see how very many people are involved with this unique park’s activities. It is our hope that we, as individuals or collectives in the neighbourhood, can find inviting ways to entice them to share our dreams, plans, and sense of community.
Judy Simutis came by the park clubhouse after the park meeting. She wanted us to emphasize in this newsletter that ours is a "relationship park," not a "bureaucracy park." She said, "what goes on at the park is based on the relations between people, not rules set down by a ‘working group,’ or any other kind of official body." Many other people said something similar, both at the meeting and afterwards.
Andre Carrel, the author of Citizens’ Hall: making local democracy work recently read the on-line report of our community park meeting. He writes:
What your group is working on, in terms of managing the park, appears to be
something totally different from what is generally understood by the term
"management." It looks to me like your neighbourhood does not want to manage
the park, you want it to evolve, sort of like a communal backyard. Your
approach could be compared, in terms of its impact on the status quo of how
things are done, to the sentencing circle in the field of justice. Equally
promising in terms of its potential to allow a community to grow and embrace
all its elements, and equally threatening to the established way of doing
things.
Out here in central B.C., for the second time in three years, the Village of Montrose has successfully prevented the school board from closing its school. Montrose, and many other small towns like it, are split between those who are of the view that we ought to fight the government and do what we can to force "them" to live up to "their" obligations, and those who believe that we should take a "to hell with them" attitude and do our own thing.
Sunday evening in the park:
On the first warm Sunday evening in June, this is what was happening around 8 p.m.: the Sri Lankan volleyball players had set up their nets beside the basketball court, and were watering the ground with the park hose to keep the dust down. At the basketball court, there were two games of three-on-three. All the benches were full of the players’ friends, most but not all originally from Jamaica or Trinidad. Also present were this year’s crop of pit-bull puppies, and two new babies, being shown off by the basketball-player fathers. Near the fire circle there was a large group of Filipino picnickers, extended family and friends. Down by the marsh-fountain there was a couple with their arms around each other, standing watching the water, and another large group of picnickers, a few of them playing soccer. In front of the rinkhouse-clubhouse, close to Arie Kamp’s flowerbeds, the benches were full of older Portuguese people from the neighbouring apartment building. Inside the clubhouse the Darbazi choir was practising their Georgian songs. Back outside, near the central wooded area east of the Gladstone path, there was a group of dog walkers, sitting on benches watching their dogs play. At the playground we counted 47 kids and adults, the kids climbing around, most of the adults sitting and chatting. About a third of the women were in saris. In the sandpit there were another dozen kids excavating a river channel with the park shovels. Some Chinese grandparents were supervising. And in the soccer field there was a large group of soccer players, most from the Sudan but with a few Eastern Europeans.
These are the people who came to the park on that warm Sunday evening. They are not, for the most part, the people who came to the May 30 community meeting. The people who came to the meeting were mainly "anglo" people, people ready to go to a meeting if a crisis comes up, willing to use what influence they have to protect the park as a neighbourhood space.
Each group does their part. The soccer, the picnics, the children, the people at the meeting: all of them shape the park in their season; the sun shines on all of them, equally. How fortunate to have a park, and people to enjoy it and protect it.
Little-known facts about dog owners who use Dufferin Grove Park:
1. A few months ago, one of the dogs that gets walked in the park was hit by a car in front of its house. The dog survived but needed expensive veterinary care. A few nights later, the dog’s owner told us, she heard a knock at her door. The visitor was another dog owner, with an envelope containing $300 - the amount collected by the park dog owners to help her with the medical expenses.
2. Ben, the owner of the dog Boomer, is also a gifted stilt performer. He and three other stilt performers have been practicing their stilt-walking in the park on some evenings: if you’re lucky enough to come across them when they practice, you’ll be amazed. People like that really raise the tone of our neighbourhood..
3. When Mrs. Louisa Samuels was walking her dog Toby in the park one morning last week, she told us she is performing in a play (playing the part of the grandmother) at the Davenport-Perth Neighbourhood Centre on June 16, at their Arts for All Festival. There are 50 people in the cast of this play, and the director is Ruth Howard (friend and consultant to David Anderson’s productions in our park for years now). The play is called More, or the Magic Fish and it includes a three-course meal for the audience, all for $5 a ticket. Ruth says it is "a playful look at local history." (Sadly, tickets are already sold out.)
The occasion of this festival is the opening of the Stop Community Food Centre’s new community bake-oven, located right behind the neighbourhood centre (near Davenport and Symington). They will light their first fire at 3.30 on Sunday afternoon, June 16, and we’ll bring a dozen loaves of fresh bread up from our oven - "sister" ovens connected by bread. (Our oven-builder Nigel Dean built theirs as well.)
Volunteers: want to do something for the park? Have we got a list for you..
After the community park meeting on May 25, Erin George, who is a newer resident of the neighbourhood, suggested it would be good to have a definite time when newcomers (or anyone) can connect with other friends of the park. So Tuesday "open oven" evenings (between 6 and 8 p.m.) have been set as a time when anyone who wants, can bring their own dinner to cook, or make a park pizza, and/ or bring up any park or neighbourhood topic they’d like to discuss, with whoever else is at the oven.
And for those people who want to get their hands dirty at the park, there is also a "job list" inside the clubhouse. You can pick anything that strikes your fancy from the smorgasbord of possible tasks (or add ideas of your own) - gardening, wood chopping, carpentry, sign-making, fence-mending, bench-maintenance, kid projects, scrounging play pots for the sand pit, building kid forts, teaching board games, working on the web site, returning phone calls, helping at special events, on and on. Park summer staff will support you as much as you need, and you’ll get extra stars in your crown when you get to heaven (and free pizza and juice while you’re working in the park, to keep your strength up).
Or you could just come to the park to relax. People can’t work all the time.
List-serve town:
the park web site has a list-serve, which means that anyone who signs up can contact the whole list by e-mail, and tell or ask something. It’s kind of a virtual town square. At the beginning of June a difference of opinion developed about what kinds of questions make sense on such a list. A question about good eaves-trough-cleaners had brought 6 responses (including a few jokes).
Someone suggested that such subjects shouldn’t go on the park list-serve (at least, not more than just once). Same with apartments for rent, babysitter-searches and other such household matters. However, the response from many other list-serve users was strongly in favour of everyday content. Probably the people who feel pressured by too much e-mail already would be happier to skip the list-serve, and just to look up the park web site as they feel inclined. Others, more nosy about the everyday business of the neighbourhood, will find the occasional flurries of neighbourhood news and troubles and jokes more fun, and may want to join the list-serve.
For the park web site: http://dufferinpark.ca/
To subscribe to the park/ neighbourhood list serve, you just have to send an e-mail message to: dufferingrovefriends-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.
IMPORTANT DATE TO REMEMBER: TUESDAY JUNE 18, 7 P.M. AT THE PIZZA OVEN
That’s the day the Parks Department director, Don Boyle, is returning to the park and bringing his management staff: James Dann (manager, west end), Tino DeCastro (recreation supervisor) and Mike Hindle (parks supervisor). We’ll have pizza ingredients available to make your own pizza, as well as oven bread, organic hot dogs, and various other tasty things from the oven and from the park gardens.
The object of this gathering is to show the supervisory staff that this park needs their active support and their understanding - neither of which are fully available at present - if what has grown here is to continue after the end of August. During the last six months, serious differences in outlook have developed, between the park management and neighbourhood people who use the park. Will Tuesday June 18th bring a shift? The only way to find out is to come and let the park management meet lots of people from the neighbourhood. Tell your friends too.
For ongoing updates on Dufferin Grove Park, and to share your views on community issues, join our Friends of Dufferin Grove email listserve. Just click here to join.
Newsletter prepared by: Jutta Mason; Illustrations: Jane LowBeer
Technical support: John Culbert
Web site: Joe Adelaars, Henrik Bechmann, Caitlin Shea
Park phone: 416 392-0913; street address: 875 Dufferin Street
E-mail: dufferinpark@dufferinpark.ca
List Serve: Emily Visser, Bernard King