North End community creates eco-parking lot
The North End keeps adapting, evolving, tuning itself to new circumstances, with its unique mix of poverty, affluence, history, opportunity, waterfront and train tracks, gentrification and resistance.
And now, it boasts, thanks to the Welcome Inn Community Centre and its New Horizons Thrift Store, the first eco-parking lot of its kind in Canada.
The community centre and the thrift store have long been an axis of sharing and mutual help in often challenged neighbourhoods (51 years in the centre’s case), a kind of constant through great change.
But part of their constancy is leadership into and through change. And so, when you roll up to the thrift store these days and park in their reconstituted lot, you feel a pang of strangeness, perhaps even guilt. Or at least I do. You’re driving over green, which seems unusual. But it’s change. For the better.
“We’re the first parking lot in Canada to go completely green, removing the asphalt and replacing it with micro-greens planted in ecoraster tiles that we can drive and park on,” says New Horizons Thrift Store manager Suzanne Foreman.
The parking lot is a parable, of sorts, of community esprit de corps. Dozens from the neighbourhood helped tear out the paving.
“People came out and were ripping the asphalt out by hand,” says Suzanne. “They looked like Buster Keaton coming out of the mine shaft. Is that a tan on your face or dirt? The store stayed open throughout.
“The lengths to which people will go if you just call for help.” From the affluent to those who fall into the more blue-collar and Code Red community profile.
So how does it work and what did they replace the pavement with?
A company in Listowel manufactures eco-rasters, hard interlocking paving grids or tiles made entirely of recycled materials, in the case of the New Horizons lot, recycled garbage bags. The tiles can receive many kinds of fill; gravel, soil, rubber crumb, grass. At the New Horizon lot, the fill is a planting of hardy micro-greens, namely, clover and fescue. In the spring, they’ll put in sedum and moss.
This new parking surface is durable, ecologically sound and doesn’t crack and pit and require digging up and replacement like pavement.
“When we dug out the old, we went down nine inches and there were three layers, so rutted and gouged,” says Suzanne. “Now we’ll never have to do that again,” and nothing has to go in the landfill any more. It’s also better for drainage.
The whole project cost about $30,000 but part of that was covered by assistance from Green Venture. There has also been help from the Hamilton Tool Library, which supplied planter boxes, and Candy Venning, who helped with gardening and landscaping.
The Listowel company that makes the eco-rasters bought lunch for everyone who helped with digging out and the installation.
“North Enders are fiercely proud of their community and their thrift,” says Suzanne. “They are thrilled to be taking the lead in making our neighbourhood greener and cleaner.”
It’s part of a wider Welcome Inn Community Centre philosophy of “deep community,” as centre executive director Jennifer Kellner puts it. The building next door to New Horizons is being torn down and replaced by affordable housing, sponsored by the Hughson Baptist Church and Indwell.
“With gentrification, we need affordable housing in the North End,” says Jennifer, and this ties in with the use of the thrift store, not only for shopping but for social connection, all linked back to other efforts by Welcome Inn to provide food cupboards, clothes and education opportunities for the North End.
And now in the middle of it shines an example of how all this can happen in an environmentally responsible way. A lesson of durability and sustainability right under people’s feet. A lesson they can park their vision for the future on.