friends of dufferin grove park
October 2004 Newsletter

In this issue:

posted October 6, 2004

NIGHT OF DREAD PARADE

SATURDAY OCTOBER 30, 5.45 P.M.

This is the month of the community parade, the parade everyone can be in if they wear a costume (black and white encouraged). David Anderson, the director of Clay and Paper Theatre, has this to say about the parade:

"OUR DEVILS, YOUR DEVILS, THEIR DEVILS, DAREDEVILS!" In response to a world filled with fear and doubt, Clay and Paper Theatre presents the fifth annual NIGHT OF DREAD. Preparation for the event begins with an ongoing series of weekend workshops where the general public is invited to help create stunning masks, gigantic puppets and costumes or learn to perform with them. This revelry culminates in a night of pageantry, masquerade and music featuring towering puppet images, stilt walkers and theatrical ritual designed to let people imagine their darkest fears and banish them.

Incorporating international folk and theatrical traditions, and timed to coincide with the dates of many festivals of death and remembrance around the world, the NIGHT OF DREAD includes a fantastical community masked parade through the Dufferin/Bloor/College Street neighbourhood. The procession returns to Dufferin Grove Park for an evening of ceremonial festivities that express our personal and individual fears, then ritually purge them."

The workshops for mask-making and puppet-making leading up to the parade are every Thursday from 3 to 7 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays from 1 to 5 at the rink house. Last year some little shrines, memorializing friends or ancestors, were added to the parade and then set on the candle-lit hillside for the rituals that followed. Organizer Leah Houston says that this year there will be two bigger shrines as well, one for cyclists who have died in accidents, and one for lost stories. She says that people who have mementos they want to add to these shrines should come to the rink house and add them, on one of the weekends preceding the parade.

For people who want to wear the special Night of Dread puppets or walk on stilts, turn up at Dufferin Grove Park any time after 2 p.m. on the parade day - don't be too late, because the whole scene gets a bit hectic later. If you get hungry, the park cooks will have cheap and very delicious food for sale from 3 p.m. until the end of the festivities. There will also be Pan de Muerte (bone-shaped bread of the dead, made with anise and coloured sugar) and the customary Portuguese-style roast piglet. The bonfire will be bright and warm, the music will be energetic, and our fears - we hope - will be shooed away by all the hubbub, at least for one memorable night. The bands will be set to lead the procession out of the park at 5.45 sharp The parade route will be a bit shorter this year (by popular request).

FRIDAY NIGHT SUPPER LINE-UPS

The outdoor, under-the-trees version of Friday Night Supper is over for the season. The indoor, eat-with-your-skates-on version will begin on December 3, the first Friday after the rink opens (it opens on Nov.27). That will be a special supper, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of cooking with fire in Dufferin Grove Park.

Before then, we WILL work out a better way to serve the food. Somehow, during the last 5 or 6 weeks of late summer and early fall, many more people wanted to come to the supper. The final one had a line-up of an hour or more.

Even though some people told us that they were happy to stand in the line and talk with their neighbours, the conversation must have worn thin after such a long wait (and the food was cold!). On the last day, at least we didn't run out of food -- as we had on the four Fridays before. But we can make this be better, if we can figure out how we can take the suspense out of getting food onto the plates. One suggestion so far has been serving food at different tables (e.g. meat main dish, vegetarian main dish, soup and salad, kids' mini-pizzas, dessert, each at a different table). Because we can't afford to staff so many areas, people who come to eat could take 15-minute turns at the serving tables, dishing up for their neighbours. (Serve-yourself doesn't seem to work well for main dishes, and besides, this is friendlier.) Any other suggestions are welcome: talk to the park staff when you see them around or e-mail supper@dufferinpark.ca.

A POW WOW STORY:

This year's Native Child and Family Services Children and Youth Pow Wow was as big and colourful as ever. The tipis were back, the ceremonial fire burned all day, the vendors ringed the dancing circle, and M.C. Steve Teekens, with his friendly chats into the mike, managed to make those of us who come from the north feel like we were right back there.

After the pow wow was done, and all the craft vendors had gone, the rented chairs had been taken away, and the ice cubes from the cooler boxes were slowly thawing in heaps on the grass, it took only about fifteen minutes for the Sudanese taxi drivers and their friends to reclaim the field for their Saturday evening soccer game. But at the side near the field house, a small group of women remained from the pow wow. They drummed and sang (the daytime drumming groups were male). When any of the soccer players scored a goal, the women would interrupt their song to cheer. Then they would resume singing.

After a while the chorus of their song became louder and easier to understand. It was: "give me a double-double," to the beat of the Indian drums. Then the singers would hoot with laughter and carry on singing. Tribal singing, African soccer, and Coffee Time, all at once, in the park.

TEN YEARS OF COOKING FIRES/CAMPFIRES IN THE PARK

This year is the tenth anniversary of the Friends of Dufferin Grove Park community campfire permit. Toronto Fire Safety Chief Ted Scovell helped us get our first permit in 1994. Through him, we found out to our joy that campfires are NOT illegal in city parks (even the city staff were surprised). Isabel Perez started us off, cooking tortillas over the fire, just like her mother did back home in Guatemala - but right here, in the park, cooking with the kids in the playground. From tortillas we went to donuts, from donuts to the first bake oven, from the bake oven to the pizza days and the second bake oven and the farmers' market and Friday Night Supper. Now that it's been ten years, that calls for a celebration. We'll invite some of the people who helped us get started, for the first Friday after the rink opens. There will be torchlight skating, a winter campfire (of course), music, and delicious food. There's a very good chance that park cook Dan DeMatteis will be back from his Italian apprenticeship and will show a bit of what he learned there. Put it in your calendar: Friday suppertime, December 3.

POLICE CATCH FAMILIES TOASTING MARSHMALLOWS

On Saturday evening, September 25, at 10 p.m. two officers from Fourteen Division found several families at the park fire circle having a park campfire. They had a permit but it was in a folder in the (locked) rink house. Rather than offer to look at the permit the next day, the officers wrote out a ticket for $55, and summoned a fire truck to put the campfire out (two fire trucks came, with sirens on).

We contacted City Councillor Adam Giambrone and asked him to please call Police Service Superintendent Jim Dicks of Fourteen Division. We thought they'd both agree that the police have better things to do than catch families having marshmallow roasts, and that those big fire trucks have better things to do than throw cold water on family campfires in the middle of the park. Beyond that, now we have to charge the next 11 campfire groups $5 extra each, to cover the $55 ticket. (We don't want the families who got the ticket to be unfairly penalized.)

We asked Councillor Giambrone, in his chat with the superintendent, to let him know that there is a pretty nice neighbourhood here and that we've had these campfires a lot. It seems that Fourteen Division may be unaware of this, even after ten years. Part of the problem might be that so many police officers live outside of Toronto (reportedly more than 70 per cent). It seems that many of the police officers we see are pretty unfamiliar with the neighbourhood outside of the obvious troublemakers, and so a campfire in the city would seem strange to them.

In the park and e-mail discussions that followed the campfire ticket, some folks wondered why we didn't ask to get the ticket cancelled. The fact is, our experience with Fourteen Division has not given us confidence that a reasonable request would succeed. Police frequently drive through the park at well above the 5 m.p.h. park speed limit, and they frequently conduct searches (of questionable legality) of male youth especially if they're black, Latino or East Indian. At the same time, police are often hard to get hold of if there is a threat by a park user without an actual weapon (even with pit bull threats we've had an hour or longer delays). Attempts to talk with Fourteen Division staff about these issues have generally been rebuffed. We've had to work out most of our problems without police co-operation. So picking up the phone and asking them to cancel a ticket does not come readily to mind. The problem is quite a bit bigger than that.

We therefore asked City Councillor Giambrone to request that Fourteen Division Superintendent Dicks look for ways to acquaint his officers a bit more with the customs of this neighbourhood. Since Supt. Dicks is new to the area as well (the fourth superintendent in seven years) we thought maybe Councillor Giambrone might even invite him to come with him to the park's tenth anniversary cooking fire celebration. That way he could meet some of us ordinary people who live here.

But by the time this newsletter went to print, Councillor Giambrone - sadly - had not found the time to make the personal call we asked for. This is disappointing. But perhaps he will follow up at some point.

CELOS: The CEntre for LOcal Research into Public Space.

This is our park's research arm. Dufferin Grove Park is in many ways a lovely place, an open-air community centre with trees and flowers instead of walls. But there are some puzzles. Why are the paths on one side of the park paved, while down the centre of the park, and on the other side, we have only dirt tracks, alternately muddy or dusty? The fact is, no money has found its way into the park to fix the path, nor to fix much else, in a good long time. Yet there's a park levy by-law (pointed out to us by Andrea Dawber, from Dovercourt Park) that requires every new housing development to contribute a set percentage to be used for improving nearby parks. We've had recent local housing developments in this area. Where did that money go? Kevin Beaulieu at our city councillor's office is looking into it but so far the records seem to have been misfiled.

A different question: How come there's $803,000 to do a repeat parks and recreation facilities-audit, when a thorough facilities-audit was done in 2001 (for $392,448)? $1.2 million spent to make a list and then make the list again - at the same time as there was very little money directed to fixing the problems that even the first audit listed (for example, at our rink). How did that happen?

And yet another question: Why has the city spent over $6 million to tear down some very fine city park playgrounds since 1999 and replace them with frequently quite inferior playgrounds, with almost half of those contracts going to one playground manufacturer (Henderson)? Why has the city justified this on the grounds of new standards which are not law, but are put out by the Canadian Standards Association? The C.S.A. is not only made up of over 90 per cent manufacturers, but - even more remarkably - that association specifically recommended that its new design standards not be applied to already existing playgrounds. So why the big panic, in parks as well as schoolyards?

Any city as big as Toronto is full of such questions. Insofar as the answers may be important to the good order of our public spaces, it's important to track them down. Maybe many of our civic troubles will turn out to be the fault of the giant multi-national insurance companies, which dictate policy with their premiums, and strangle the independent good sense of policymakers. We can't know until we do the research.

But we can't do the research very well either. Despite Mayor Miller's popular election posture with a broom, and his promise to open city hall to the citizens, it's been really hard for our CELOS research group to get answers to our questions. Straight answers from city staff have been rare. When our requests were ignored by staff, we sought help from the city's Corporate Access and Privacy Office. The law says: When citizens seek information from their government, they should be given that information within 30 days or told why not.

Out of nine access for information requests our research group made, one got a response within the required 30 days, and all the rest either got a late response (between one and three months late), or no response at all. That's not very good. So in the last week of September we contacted the Access and Privacy Office again, also Parks and Recreation Acting General Manager Brenda Librecz and our own City Councillor Adam Giambrone. Hopefully they'll straighten it out.

There are several Freedom of Information responses we did get by now that are pretty interesting. To further Mayor David Miller's promise of an open city hall, we've posted the information on this web site. To take a look, go to "research." Secrecy, be gone!

SPECIAL NOTICE: FOUNDING MEETING OF RESIDENTS' ASSOCIATION

Because of some concerns in the neighbourhood, including the proposed addition of another high-rise at Dovercourt and Bloor, Andrew Munger and others are starting a new residents' association. Founding meeting at Bloor-Gladstone Library, on Oct.20 - everyone welcome.

Check our neighbourhood section or watch your mailbox for a flyer.

THE SCIENTOLOGISTS' PARK CALVACADE

When the weather is warm the park is full of picnics. Only the really big ones get formal permits from City Hall, so when park staff got a form saying the Church of Scientology was coming for a "calvacade," they figured there'd be a lot of people. But it turned out this was no picnic. On the day of the event, September 18, a dozen people came and set up a big yellow tent at the Dufferin Street edge of the park, right by the main entrance into the mall, with the opening facing the street. We were puzzled. What was a "calvacade" and why would it be set up right where all the traffic was?

The tent had messages on the part that faced the street, asking questions along the lines of "are you worried about what the future will bring?" But it didn't say "Church of Scientology" on it. Although the permit had mentioned food, the tent seemed to be just tables with booklets and pamphlets laid out on them, and information people who welcomed anyone going in to take a look. Then a sound system was set up between the tent and the bus shelter, and a small band, including - to our amazement - one of the city parks managers, started to play and sing golden oldies like "The lion sleeps tonight." They had very good voices and they sang for hours -facing toward the street and the bus shelter, which was always crowded with shoppers from the mall. Then at the end of the afternoon they all packed up the tent and left.

It seems that this event, which turned its back on the park, was not really a park event as such. It was more like a crusade or an ad campaign targeting a busy street. Except that there is a by-law against promoting religions in parks.

Maybe that by-law is outdated. At a time when ad campaigns are more and more being invited into public space, if Pepsi and Nike can promote their wares in parks, why not have an ad for a brand of religion? Now the fact is, there's also a provincial law against making a pitch too near a bus stop (the "Safe Streets Act," to prevent panhandling to a captive audience). But then again, TTC passengers already have no choice about looking at ads (for jeans or mouthwash) on every inch of sellable TTC space. The Scientology people have just taken it the next logical step: a religion ad, pitched from under the maple trees.

NEWSLETTER SPONSORS

Since our unsettling experience in August, when we ran out of park money to pay staff, we've resolved to be extra careful not to get into that situation again. One of the recurring expenses is the monthly printing of the newsletter (now in its fifth year) at Quality Control Printing, right next door to the Bata Shoe Museum. The kind and careful people at Quality Control charge just 3 cents a page. At that price, the first print run of 200 copies costs just $46, and usually we only have to do two printings a month, since many people read the newsletter on the park web site. But even that small cost mounts up.

One solution: over a year ago, friend of the park Bill Wright let us know that he would pay for a print run here and there, and he helped that way a number of times when park money was short. Lately, when someone has asked how they can help the park, we've asked if they wanted to take Bill's idea, and sponsor a part of a newsletter issue. This idea seems to be working. Last month the first run of the newsletter was paid for by Ted England, the second by Andre and Kelly Rosenbaum, and part of the third by Robert Fones and Elke Town. This month the first printing was paid for by Lena Ford, aged five. Lena had her birthday party at the park. Beforehand, she had told her parents, Gail Glatt and Bill Ford, that she wanted to give something to the park. The three of them hatched a plan. Lena made a slit in a shoebox and decorated it, and she put it on the picnic table when her party began. Guests had been asked to cut back on the birthday presents and make a donation to the park when they came to the party. With the money that Lena collected in the shoebox, she was able to not only sponsor the October newsletter, but also to give us a little fund for buying kids' skates at garage sales, to lend out at the rink in the winter. Six pairs so far, and we'll get more. Way to go, Lena.


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

Webmasters:Henrik Bechmann, Joe Adelaars, Caitlin Shea

Park phone: 416 392-0913; street address: 875 Dufferin Street

E-mail: dufferinpark@dufferinpark.ca

List Serve: Emily Visser, Bernard King

Park photographer: Wallie Seto