Comments?

playground@ dufferinpark.ca


For the basics, see
- Website & Privacy Policies
- How To Get Involved
- The Role of the Park

Search options:

up to a month to index new postings
Google
Playground
dufferinpark.ca
web search

Search Playground:
local & up to date but simpler
See Search Page

Department Site Map
 

Custodians:

posted October 15, 2002

How the summer went at the park:

This was one of the hottest, driest summers Toronto has had in a very long time. The sunny spots in the park were empty until the evening, but the shady spots were often packed. The wading pool and the playground got heavy use. On many evenings (whenever the temperature was over 30 celsius) the wading pool had extended hours until 8 p.m.. So many parents and caregivers told us that the shady, breezy wading pool area rescued them this summer. Good! That's what parks are for!

The sandpit was the most popular spot for the kids older than toddlers. This year tipi building gave way to river construction. Our Lee Valley Company movable faucet was a waterfall, a fountain, a river source, a lake spring. And we noticed that the turf battles that used to happen when tipis were built in the sand pit ("you can't come in here, this is MY tipi!") gave way to much more cooperative play. Children who didn't know each other before collaborated on creating miniature water landscapes that extended far beyond the sand pit, throughout the whole Big Back Yard play area.

Our oven builder, Nigel Dean, kindly brought an old styrofoam "Sunfish" boat down from Muskoka, in his truck. Some of the time the boat was in the wading pool, full of children. The rest of the time it was in the sand pit, where the children would often dig a little lake, to float the boat. By the end of the summer the boat finally broke, but it had a good run.

The park has become ever more of a picnic / birthday party/ prenatal-class-reunion/ etc. spot. Some weekends this past summer, the Indonesian hibachi smells mingled with the Sudanese braziers, and with the park pizza oven and the KFC bags at the basketball court, in such a way that the park smelled like a street market. Other times it seemed like every third tree held a birthday pinata. All this sociability was made easier by the plentiful picnic tables we got this year from the Parks Department, so that no one had trouble finding a place to sit. Thank you to park supervisor Mike Hindle and his maintenance crew.


hosted by parkcommons.ca | powered by pmwiki-2.2.83. Content last modified on September 05, 2006, at 05:46 PM EST