friends of dufferin grove park
April 2006 Newsletter
posted April 7, 2006
 

Archives

Masthead

Newsletter prepared by:
Jutta Mason

Illustrations:
Jane LowBeer

Technical support:
John Culbert

Webmasters:
Henrik Bechmann,
Joe Adelaars

Park phone:
416 392-0913

street address:
875 Dufferin Street

E-mail: mail@dufferinpark.ca

Park photographer: Wallie Seto

Printing:
Quality Control Printing at Bloor and St. George

Volume 7, Number 4, April 2006

Comments? editor@dufferinpark.ca

EVENTS IN APRIL

Friday April 7: Easter egg decorating at the rink house, 4.30 to 6 p.m. Park friend Belinda Cole will be hosting this. Tables will be set up in the rink house, with a good supply of hard-boiled eggs, paints, Easter-egg dyes, drying racks, tongs, and magic markers. Park staff will help, by providing mini-pizzas, juice, and cookies to keep the egg-decoraters’  strength up. Donations are welcome to cover the cost of materials. This event is early this year, but the eggs will keep very well in the fridge until Easter Sunday. For more information call the park at 416 392-0913.

Sunday April 9: Eighth annual Matzo bake at the park outdoor bake oven, 2 – 5 p.m. Park friends Emily Paradis, Sarah Fowlie and Zio Hersh will be hosting this. From Emily:  “Celebrate Freedom! Bake Matzo! Bring the whole family to a celebration of liberation!

We provide: koshered wood fire oven, kosher matzo flour all the way from Montreal, implements used only for Passover baking, and 18 minutes to make your matzo. You provide: elbow grease, joy. Pay What You Can – suggested donation $10 per family. Games! Crafts! Freedom Stories! Queer! Straight! Jewish! Jew-ish! For info call or email Sarah and Emily at 416-588-4025 or sfowlie@sympatico.ca.”  Park staff will help at the ovens, keeping them very hot. A huge thanks also to Alan Carlisle for bringing the park its oven wood (unpainted, untreated skids) donated by Downtown Lumber on Ossington.

EVENTS-PREVIEW FOR SPRING AND SUMMER

Sunday May 7: “The Grove’s Clothes” clothing swap at the park, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.This is hosted by Bruce Whitaker, at Dufferin Rink house. Brian writes: “Clean your closet of those clothes that are perfectly fine but never get worn, and do your part for the environment through swap rather than purchase. Find some really groovy clothes, support those in need, and meet your neighbors.” The drop-off (for laundered clothes in good condition, with hangers) is at the rink house on Saturday May 6, between 11am-3pm. “One swap ticket will be given for each item donated. Maximum of 10 tickets but no limit to donations. A note attached indicating size and perhaps any other info (i.e. story of its travels) is welcome. Direct donations to are accepted. All clothes left at end will be donated to a women's shelter.” The swap and neighbourhood BBQ are on Sunday May 7, 11am-3pm.

Saturday May 13th: Norwegian Constitution Day parade and picnic, 12 noon to 3 p.m. Hosted by Arne Nes and Robin Crombie. Arne and Robin and their kids moved to Canada from Norway the year before last – intentionally near Dufferin Grove Park, because Robin had heard about it from her father.  Arne says that about 200 Norwegians living in Toronto celebrate Norway’s biggest holiday, Norwegian Constitution Day, every May. But the location they had last year wasn’t so good.  So this year Arne thought they’d like to try having their parade and picnic in Dufferin Grove Park. They’ll make hot dogs but also Norwegian waffles; non-Norwegian participants welcome! The picnic starts at 12 noon. Arne writes: “At 1230 Hrs: Speech by invited person, at the moment we are trying to get the ambassador or an Olympian to do this. In Norway it’s a big honor to be asked. 1300 Hrs: Parade from the park up Gladstone to Bloor east to Rushholme and down to Dewson and west to park, nice and short, expecting small kids and some seniors. We hope to get a marching band for this. 1400 Hrs: Games for kids.”

Wednesday June 14 to Sunday June 18: Third Annual Cooking Fire Theatre Festival From festival director Kate Cayley: "The Third Annual Cooking Fire Theatre Festival will be held again this year in the park. There is a fantastic group of companies in this year's festival, particularly a theatre group called New International Encounter, with members from Norway, the Czech Republic, England, and Poland, and Drama of Works, a puppet company from New York City. Both of these groups need friendly people who would be willing to give one or two of them a place to sleep in the two weeks leading up to the festival and during the festival itself. If you have an extra bed or couch or are planning on being away, and are willing to put up an interesting foreign artist even for a few nights around the festival, please get in touch with us at strangertheatre@gmail.com.”

Sunday June 18, Clay and Paper Theatre “Day of Delight.” No information yet except for the date. A celebration of spring going into summer. Usually has music, acrobats, puppets, combined with park pizza at the wood oven.

July 19 to Aug.20, Clay and Paper Theatre: Luis de Camoes in Dufferin Grove Park From director David Anderson: “On the northwest corner of College and Crawford stands a sculpture of Luis Vas de Camoes. Many local Torontonians know and remember that statue, but few who are not Portuguese know that he is the national poet of a nation of poets, the greatest and most beloved poet of Portugal. We hope to correct this omission. Narrated by the one-eyed adventurer, soldier and poet himself, Luis de Camoes in Dufferin Grove Park will sing the praises of the Portuguese who have come to our community. It will fill the air with the songs of the Fado.  Gigantones and Cabecudos (giant puppets and big head puppets) will recall and connect the Portuguese parade tradition with ours, and the smell of the barbecued sardines will mingle with the smell of fresh corn bread baked in the Dufferin Grove Park bake oven, inspired by the village ovens in Portugal.  This will be a collaboration between David Anderson, Nuno Cristo, Aida Jordao and Larry Lewis.”

NEW FRIENDS AT OTHER PARKS

Eglinton Flats Park: In January, the Mount St.Dennis Residents’ Association invited Georgie Donais to a meeting at the Legion Hall on Weston Road, so their members could find out more about the cob courtyard that was built at the park playground last summer. The group also wanted to know what else happens at Dufferin Grove Park. Georgie couldn’t go but Jutta Mason went in her place, and found a big group of people who have been active near Jane and Eglinton for some years. The large park radiating out from that intersection used to be a market garden in the fifties. Now it has a lot of sports fields and a naturalized area with a good-size pond. The pond attracts over a hundred different bird species (including blue herons!) and dragonflies. The pond’s friends from the residents’ association got the pond stocked with fish and started an anglers’ club, where Toronto kids can fish. The group told Jutta that they have a street sale, park-clean-up and interpretive morning on May 13, with a local naturalist giving tours. They invited anyone from Dufferin Grove to take part. There will be more information in the May newsletter. Also, their residents’ association wants to come to Dufferin Grove for pizza and show-and-tell in June.

MacGregor Park: This is our sister park, on Lansdowne just north of College (next to West Toronto Collegiate). We became “sisters” last summer when Anna Galati, who lives across the street from MacGregor, approached local recreation supervisor Tino DeCastro. She wanted the park to wake up a bit. Tino introduced her to Dufferin Grove staff. He also assigned Alice Canego-Neves, one of his best parent-child staff people, to MacGregor Park for the summer, for enriched children’s programming by the wading pool. At the same time, local artist Kristen Fahrig received an artist-in-residence grant for MacGregor Park from the Toronto Arts Council. Anne, Alice, and Kristen collaborated to make that park better. They made a wonderful summer, and in the fall Kristen and Anna ran a kids’ art club that culminated in a community costume parade.

Meantime, Dufferin Grove staff persuaded Tino to hire Anna Galati, and she began to work at Dufferin Grove. She became a mainstay during the rink season. This spring and summer, beginning in May, Anna will divide her time between Dufferin Grove and MacGregor Park, making the connection even stronger. Here are their May programs:

MacGregor Park Saturday Art Club starting May 1, 2 –5p.m. with Kristen Fahrig and Anna Galati. A drop-in art club open to anyone in the neighbourhood. From Kristen: “Last fall we made huge paper mache puppets for our costume parade and bonfire party. This spring the theme is “Flags.” We will experiment with methods of printing onto paper and textiles – beginning with block printing and progressing to silk screen printing. We will work on a flag design for MacGregor park. Free. Everyone welcome.”

MacGregor Park Brazilian drumming, Sundays in May, 12.30 to 2.30. From Kristen: “This neighborhood group of accomplished drummers first came together in 2004 under the tutelage of master percussionist Maninho Costa from Rio de Janeiro. Since his return to Brazil last fall they continue to practice together weekly and play for community events.”

In June, MacGregor Park will be the site of some of the Cooking Fire Theatre Festival’s pre-performance workshops, and in July, Alice will return for her poolside kids’ programs. All of these events are free, and the mood is friendly.

PARK GARDEN NEWS

During April, volunteer gardeners will work with park staff person Jenny Cook on Friday afternoons from 1 p.m.  There’s plenty of scope for a green thumb, since the park has eleven community garden beds, five of them native-species gardens and two of them food gardens for kids, connected to the community bake oven program. Community gardener Chris Buxton decentralized the compost last year, putting small compost bins into many different locations. In March, Gene Threndyle  pruned most of the trees in the little tree nurseries that he planted ten years ago. Soon the wild plums will be in bloom. Maybe this year there will be even more walnuts and hazelnuts than last year, at the southwest corner “Memory of Garrison Creek” garden. Reema Tarzi and park staff volunteers Mary Sylwester and Corey Chivers worked with Jenny the week after the rink closed, to plant seeds in flats inside the rink house. Long-time park friend Kyla Dixon-Muir brought over four pots of asparagus plants, with instructions (“don’t start harvesting for four years!”). The sugar snap pea seeds have gone into the ground. The tulips donated last year have come up in the new garden near the cob courtyard, and the red maples planted by volunteer gardeners last October, south of the wading pool, are showing buds.

And other good news about trees in the park: Uyen Dias, from the City’s Tree Advocacy Planting Program, says: “we will be planting 25 trees at Dufferin Grove Park...we are waiting to finalize details on who our contractor will be.  Ideally the trees will be planted by the end of April, or early May. These are the species: Freeman Maple, Red Maple, Sugar Maple, White Oak, Bur Oak and Red Oak.”  After ten years with only one new tree planted by the City, this is wonderful news.

If you like to grow things (or want to learn how) and want to help out in the park, Jenny Cook would love to hear from you. Call her at the rink house at 416 392-0913 or e-mail her at gardens@dufferinpark.ca

ICE RINK END-OF-SEASON REPORT:

The human zamboni meets the Dufferin glacier
This last rink season, Dufferin Rink was even busier than last year (a bit too crowded for a neighbourhood rink) but people said they had lots of fun anyway – and a lot of new kids and some grown-ups, learned to skate with those yellow-painted skates we got last year from the NHL Players’ Association.

Rink board of management: On-site staff and rink users disagreed considerably with the zamboni drivers, this past winter, about optimum ice thickness and other aspects of their ice maintenance. No resolution was ever found. In February there was a public meeting to look into forming a board of management to run the rink.  Representatives of the zamboni drivers’ union, Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Local 416, told the meeting that no matter who manages the rink, their existing collective agreement stands. However, introducing more hands-on rink management could help a lot. A list was circulated at the meeting to get volunteers who would work on finding out more about boards of management. Several of them attended a meeting of the McCormick Arena board of management, to see how they function. Now one of the park’s legal  researchers is going through the City’s proposed new board of management legislation and also the union’s collective agreement. Check the “City Rinks” page of the park web site for new information as it’s posted. To get on the rink information e-list, e-mail rinks@dufferinpark.ca. To get on rink phone list, leave your name and number at the park: 416 392-0913, and staff will pass along your message.

Human zamboni: After the public rink meeting, City Recreation Director Don Boyle directed the zamboni drivers to cut the ice thinner. Extra ice scrapes occurred on five occasions, but the ice was still between 3 and 8 inches thick (depending on where it was measured) by the end of the season. Once it gets too thick, ice is hard to reduce.

During the final two weeks of the season, on-site staff and rink users tried scraping the ice with the green rink shovels when the sun made it mushy, hand-flooding (with a big black hose), and mopping the ice after flooding to get it smooth (a tip learned from curling arenas’ web sites). The human zamboni! Rink staff also painted one of the hockey boards black to see if that would reduce the melt on the sunny side of the rink. It helped, so next year all the board on that side should be painted a dark colour.

Now that the rink season is done, the on-site park staff are writing a little booklet about all the details of running outdoor rinks, for other City rink staff and rink users. Rink friend Sylvie Varone has donated $75 to help with the printing.

Ice thickness at other rinks: The park’s research group checked out ice thickness in outdoor rinks all over the city at the end of the season. Almost all the rinks had ice between 4 and 7 inches thick. Our researchers found a chart from Manitoba arenas that showed a 20% increase in energy costs when indoor arena ice thickness went from 1 inch to two inches. We consulted CIMCO, the ice rink compressor company, to find out what ice thickness is optimal in outdoor rinks. The person we talked to said that our rink compressors could not possibly cool four or more inches of ice and that any ice that thick had been turned into a natural ice rink. He told us he’d talk to the CIMCO engineers to see if they had an energy-cost formula. But he never did get back to us or return our phone calls after that. Now we’ll try to write to the president, who has been helpful in the past.

Meantime, two weeks after the compressors had been turned off, the last little sections of ice, still over three inches thick, were almost done melting. The ice sheet was like a retreating glacier, staying hard on top even when the temperature rose to 18 degrees.

Rink cluster: The “rink cluster” experiment did well for two months and then the wheels fell off in the third month. The idea had started as Dufferin Rink staff helping staff at Wallace Rink and Campbell Rink making their rinks work better, and thereby spreading out rink users and making Dufferin Rink less crowded. But the conflict between Dufferin on-site staff and the ice maintenance crew removed the support that was needed, and Wallace Rink in particular reverted to its former ways. The ice was often poor there and the strongest youth dominated the ice and the rink house in the evenings. This summer, Wallace Rink will be torn down and replaced, at a cost of $1.2 million. It appears that there may after all be some minor improvements inside the rink house as well. So next season we’ll try again.

FARMERS’ MARKET NEWS

Now is the time when the market wraps around the outside of the rink house as well as being inside.  It won’t move back down the hill under the trees until the grass is green down there. But farmers are starting to bring their greenhouse produce, and soon we’ll see the first outdoor greens too.

Market manager Anne Freeman says that the market has been chosen to receive a Green Toronto Award of Excellence in the Health Category. Paula Vosni, from Fun Guy Farms (the mushroom growers), applied for the award on behalf of the whole market. On March 29, Paula and Mary Lou Dolan from Beretta’s went down to City Hall with Anne for a photo/video shoot in preparation for the awards ceremony on May 2. The group there included many children (for school-related environmental awards). The winners were all posed in different groupings for an hour and a half. They had to shout “hurray for Green Toronto!”  on cue and hold up signs, and then shout it again but with bigger smiles, or louder, or wait until the Old City Hall clock stopped gonging and then repeat it again. Then the groups were filmed for the City’s award video. Paula, Anne, and Mary Lou had to join other health category winners and hold up signs and shout out “Health!” That group needed a lot re-takes because it sounded like they were shouting “Hell!” unless they pronounced the “th” at the end of the word very sibilantly.

There are nine categories of “Green Toronto” awards, with three honorees in each On May 2, at City Hall, one winner from each category will receive $5,000 to donate to the environmental organization of their choice. Anne Freeman says “We invite you, loyal market fans, to join in the discussion and send along your suggestions for who should receive this money if we win!”  Contact Anne at market@dufferinpark.ca, or call the park at 416 392-0913 and leave her a message.

PARK MONEY

Counterfeit twenties:
In the last six weeks of the rink season, the rink snack bar took in almost $200 of counterfeit twenties. It took a long time to notice that this was a pattern and not just bad luck. The farmers at the market didn’t get any bad bills, and the CIBC bank manager at Dufferin and Bloor said they hadn’t noticed an unusual number of bad twenties there. That led to the conclusion that one or several of the Dufferin Rink rats have diversified into a new line of business, and that the rink snack bar was an easy mark, because no one examined the money until after it got deposited in the bank account.

But now the Bank of Canada is sending the park a lot of coloured pictures of bank note security features. The rink season is over, but the bakers and everyone else will be looking for fakes during the market and when the playground outdoor snack bar starts up. (It’s actually pretty easy, once you’re suspicious.) It’s our hunch that there won’t be counterfeit twenties again until next winter. With a little help from the RCMP, maybe never.

Where your cookie money went:
During the winter, a lot of the snack bar and park bread money went to buy more food supplies, of course, but what was left over went into paying for extra youth workers, web site maintenance, and some special projects. For example: $250 went to rent a bus so the Jimmie Simpson Rink “Hockey in the Neighbourhood” program could bring all their kids over for a shinny hockey tournament. $40 went to rent sound equipment from Long and McQuade, so that park staff (and DJ) Ted Carlisle could spin his disks at the first-ever rink DJ night on the last Friday in February. (That was so much fun that Ted and park staff/ dancer Eroca Nicols are planning a few summertime DJ and line-dancing evenings in the park for the summer.) $300 went to MacGregor Park to help them buy paints and ink for Kristen Fahrig’s Tibetan-flag-making project this spring. More details are posted on the “about us” page of the park web site.

Snack bar food prices for the playground:
When the water gets turned on again at the outdoor kitchen and the food cart returns to the playground, the same pricing rules apply as in the wintertime at the rink’s zamboni snack bar. The price list reflects how much money is needed to pay for the materials that went into the food, plus a bit extra for other park uses. But if your grocery money is tight, and you and your kids are hungry because of all that fresh air, even the cheap snack bar food prices may add up too fast. If you’re hungry, but you can’t pay as much for the snack bar food, pay less. Park staff also like to do trades – if you can do something for the park (help pick up litter at the playground, water the gardens, wash dishes, sort tools in the tool cupboard, break up wooden skids for the bread ovens) the park staff will tell you your money won’t work at the snack bar, and you eat for free. That goes for kids too. On the other hand, if you find the food very cheap and good, and think it should cost more, go ahead and pay more. Every penny goes to the park.

But nobody has to pay a set amount for the food, nor does anyone have to show proof that they can’t pay. The snack bar money is a collective gift to the park from park users, a pooling of resources that can then be used to make the park even nicer. For details on how that pool of money has been used, go to the park web site (www.dufferinpark.ca) and click on “about us.” To give more suggestions for good ways to use the food money, talk to any of the park staff. Good ideas are also gifts that shape the park. 

The park staffing budget and cost recovery by the City of Toronto:
For some years now, friends of the park have been asking the City’s Parks and Recreation Division to recognize Dufferin Grove Park as a kind of neighborhood laboratory of public space, a community centre without walls.  Noting that most of the City’s community centres with walls cost upwards of $600,000 a year to run, and that this park has become at least as busy, we asked for a staffing budget of $164,000, for Dufferin Grove. This request was never taken seriously. But in 2005, the local recreation supervisor, Tino DeCastro, was willing to try an experiment. He had enough money from user fees (from programs at Mary McCormick Community Centre and Wallace-Emerson Community Centre), that he could assign almost as much as we asked, for staff working at Dufferin Grove Park. (His total area budget was about $1.6 million, and user fees for those centres brought in another $1.1 million – in this area there are the two community centres, and Dufferin Grove is the main park).

Dufferin Grove Park worked much better as a result of the improved staffing. But the Parks and Recreation management was not pleased, and in February Recreation Director Don Boyle said the park would have to return to a recreation budget of only $65,600 a year.  

What do our taxes pay for?
Numerous difficult discussions with management since then have circled around the idea of “cost recovery.” Dufferin Grove Park is a problem, because it does not charge user fees for most of what goes on there. The costs of paying staff – to make the park work well – are thus un-recovered, and counted as a loss.
This is a puzzle. After all, people do pay taxes to run the parks. $141 million of our taxes will go to the Parks and Recreation Division to look after public space in 2006. User fees bring in many millions more.
If the goal is total “cost recovery” for parks and recreation staffing costs, what are the $141 million in taxes for?


Multiplying managers:
One big cost is the ever-increasing bulk of management. Besides the general manager (called a “commissioner” in many cities), Parks and Recreation now has six directors and 36 managers, who in turn have many supervisors working under them. Five of the managers are “managers of management services.” There’s a director of “divisional coordination and compliance” and under her there is a “manager of agenda coordination and service integration.”  The jobs of some of these managers are so broad it’s hard to know how they could ever become practical. For instance, the “manager of community development” says her job is “rolling out a community engagement plan for the entire division…..to create Parks, Forestry and Recreation Teams in geographical regions….These teams will ensure all staff …. are engaging and rolling out community development initiatives i.e. volunteer management plan, advisory councils, crisis management, special events….”

The people who are assigned to manage public space in this way cost quite a lot. The salaries of two managers are the same as the total City wages of all the recreation staff who run Dufferin Grove Park year-round.

New managers are still being added, not always billed as such. For instance, Parks and Recreation just hired 19 new staff whose job is explicitly not direct service but rather to track down “youth with a disability, newcomer youth, youth from at-risk neighborhoods, aboriginal youth, and youth from racially diverse, culturally diverse, sexually diverse, and gender diverse communities,” to go to meetings about such youth and to monitor/educate  Parks and Recreation staff in how they deal with them, to do liaison with other agencies about them, and to write a large number of administrative reports. The jobs are permanent, the wages are good, and insiders at City Hall warned right away that this group was simply a new layer of management. Direct recreation programs for youth remain understaffed.

A different template for neighborhood public space
Dufferin Grove Park is a laboratory for a different approach to staffing neighbourhood public space than is the norm in Toronto. The norm is that the City hires mainly young people, often under 20, as recreation “casual staff” for neighborhood community centres and parks. Most of them are paid minimum wage or a few dollars more, and slotted into narrowly defined tasks without much direct guidance. There’s a pretty big chasm between them and the managers developing policies and procedures in meetings downtown.

But Dufferin Grove Park tries to provide chances for staff with a greater range of ages and gifts to try new things. Although the pay is still well below that of the park maintenance workers who cut the grass, it’s a bit closer to what a single person can live on (cheap). Supervision and collegial help are strong. What’s more, the boundary between park staff and park friends is very permeable, so that almost all park projects involve both.

Besides keeping the park in good order, a big part of this staff’s task is to remove the barriers that stop people from trying new things in public space (like building a cob courtyard or setting up a neighborhood pick-up soccer game). At the same time, the staff have to keep a close eye and friendly hand on projects as they develop.

The other big part of their task is to address public conflict with energy and intelligence. Parks can be places of friendship, surprising beauty, and excitement, but they can also become a stage for ugly intimidation. Park staff have to subvert people who enjoy making trouble. Setting safety policies in meetings at City Hall doesn’t help the park without experienced on-site staff paying good attention, maybe in the rink house, or in the playground, or while picking litter, or making coffee at the food cart. Trouble is addressed by park staff who are in the park day after day, until their knowledge of the park and the people there becomes very solid, and follow-up is fast and sustained.

If this Dufferin Grove “template” finds no application in Toronto’s public space (including other parks) parks will become poorer, sadder places and decreasingly useful to their neighborhoods. That’s why park friends are pretty steadfast in their resistance to dismantling what’s developed at this park.

PARK SUPPORT FROM CITY COUNCILLOR ADAM GIAMBRONE

When Councillor Giambrone heard that Parks and Recreation management wanted to cut back park staffing, he promised to protect what has been built up there. He asked for a list of what the staff do when working in the park. After the staff and some park friends went through the park log books (and the archived newsletters on the park web site), the Councillor got a list that ran to eight pages.

Jutta Mason bound it into a booklet, along with some relevant newsletter excerpts, numbers, and front and back cover picture-collages of the park. The booklet is available at the rink house for anyone interested, and it will be useful for people visiting from elsewhere, curious to find out how a neighborhood park such as Dufferin Grove works. There is certainly an interest – from Germany (lots!), Britain, South Africa, the U.S., other parts of Canada, and six other neighborhoods across town (in the past year).

In early March the park’s research group (CELOS) applied to the Ontario Trillium Foundation for a small grant to put on a conference at the park in September, to be called “Cheap Parks/ community centres without walls.” It’s meant to be an occasion when interested people in Toronto can swap experiences and come up with some good, practical, ready-to-do solutions to their own park problems.

Park friends who approve of Councillor Giambrone’s support for Dufferin Grove might want to let him know – it’s always nice to find out people like what you’re doing – his phone number at City Hall is 416 392-7012.

COB COURTYARD NEWS

Last summer, while people were squishing clay with their feet beside the playground and forming it into lumps, helping the cob courtyard wall rise slowly out of the ground, there was lots of speculation about how winter would treat the structure. Now the first winter is over, and we know a bit more. The wall is still as solid as a mountain, but sections of the plaster have crumbled off in places. Nature got some help there, from people. On Hallowe’en night an angry young fellow not only smashed all the taps on the outdoor kitchen sinks, but also made many holes in the plaster all over the courtyard wall, using a big rock. (See the “restorative justice” story in this newsletter.) Someone else broke many of the glass bottles embedded in the cob. Some lunchtime students from St.Mary’s yanked half the shingles off the top. (The school principal made a strong case to his students after that, and St.Mary’s lunchtime stopped being as much of a hazard for the park.)

Nature – rain, snow, freeze/thaw – took over from there, and so did people who like to peel off bits of crumbling mosaic, and little kids who like to climb all over the wall, and parents who don’t stop them.

This spring, as soon as there’s no more risk of frost (in mid-May), Georgie Donais and Heidrun Gabel-Koepff and other park friends, with some help from the park staff, will begin repairs. Georgie says that they’ll try a different formula for the plaster, and they’ll whitewash the wall as well, to make it as bright as at the beginning. The shingles will be embedded more securely, or replaced by a better kind of protection.

But what’s more important: little signs will go up asking people not to climb the wall (some adults do it as well – the innate human impulse to climb is strong). The earth on the green roof will be replenished (it got trampled so badly by the climbers’ little feet that nothing green could grow there now). The part of the wall that makes it easy to get up there will be removed. Climbers on the wall do more damage than vandals, over time.

The taps on the outdoor kitchen will be replaced with new ones, with the young person who smashed them working alongside the City plumber. (The plumbers’ union has a “youth incentive” program that allows them to do mentoring.) Little fences will be put around the two new gardens near the cob courtyard, with more signs asking people not to step on the plants or yank the flowers. Two sugar maples will be planted in one of the gardens by park friend Mary Wigle, in memory of her dear husband Ziggy.

The cob courtyard is kind of a cross between a building and a plant, and it needs looking-after like a garden does. Many of the world’s traditional buildings are like that – how nice that the park has one for people to learn on.
    Meantime, if anyone sees a person damaging the cob courtyard, please ask them to stop, and call either of these two numbers, day or night, 24/7: 416 533-0153 or 416 709-0573. Park staff and park friends will be there fast. We'd like to follow up with those people – they need to learn something too.

THE JUSTICE SYSTEM VISITS THE PARK

Last Hallowe’en, at 2 a.m., park friend Bruce Whitaker woke to hear loud smashing at the cob courtyard beside the playground. He called the police, and they arrested a young man, who had by then done a lot of damage to the wall and the outdoor kitchen plumbing. After some months of park staff trying to connect with the courts about this incident, a probation officer contacted the staff. She assigned an agency called Peacebuilders to set up a “restorative justice circle” with the young man, his friends, and some of the people affected by his action. At 6 p.m. on March 28, a big circle of people involved in building the cob courtyard set up in the rink house. The discussion of the event, explanations, context, results, etc. lasted for over four hours. Two police officers from Fourteen Division were there for the first half, and a retired juvenile court judge came for the whole time, as well as the probation officer and the facilitators from Peacebuilders. Park staff had set out soup, bread, and sweets, so people could keep their strength up – an important consideration!

Peacebuilders had already been working with the young man for many months, and even before the circle took place, they had sent him to the park to work alongside park staff for community service hours. The decision of the meeting has the binding effect of a court sentence, only it’s a diversion from the regular court stream. Now, if the young man successfully completes 42 additional hours of park work, there will be no mark on his record and he can start fresh. This is one of the provisions of the new Young Offenders’ Act. Park staff also learned that under the new Act, police can divert an offender directly. In other words, they could have brought him together with park staff the day after Hallowe’en, and the young man could have begun to make his amends right then (he was willing).

This seems like a very uncomplicated approach to a good deal of the damage that gets done in parks. It may also be the only approach, since the City of Toronto legal department has a policy of not following up on vandalism arrests. (Park friends invited the City legal department to send a city lawyer to the justice circle, just to see how it works, but no one came.)

The park staff are very interested in using the provisions of the Young Offenders’ Act to follow up quickly on damage or intimidation. For that reason, staff are asking anyone who calls the police for incidents in the park, to call the staff as well, at 416 709-0573. The back-up (park friends) number is 416 533-0153. This includes night-time arrests – making a direct connection with the arresting police officer is worth getting out of bed for.


NEWSLETTER SPONSORED BY: This special double issue has a double sponsor.

1. Tere Oulette, the owner of a wonderful toy store called Scooter Girl Toys at 187 Roncesvalles, and a very loyal friend of the park, and

2. Suchada Promsiri, who brought in $100 from her tip jar at her Osogood sandwich and pastry shop (“pastry from scratch”), on College Street a block east of the Dovercourt Y. Suchada has been spoiling the park staff for years with her care packages of delicious snacks “to keep their spirits up,” and this newsletter is not the first one she funded so generously.