REGENT PARK MEMORIES CAN’T BE RAZED
‘I don’t think a lot of us realized how much we would miss it,’ says 18-year-old resident Nejat Khalid
Nejat Khalid stands where she once played as a child in Regent Park. A revitalization plan has forced her and others to bid the area a fond farewell.
Bigfoot Park Nejat Khalid spent summers splashing around in the shadow of south Regent’s most signature highrises. Remembered as Bigfoot Park, the splash pad in All Saints Place was packed from the time the housing authority switched on the water in spring, she said.
Khalid would ride her bike over to meet friends and wait beneath the tipping bucket (similar to the one at Ontario Place, she remembered).
“When everybody realized that Blevins and Whiteside and all the buildings . . . were going down, everybody realized, ‘ Oh damn, (the park’s) going down, ’ ” she said.
“I don’t think a lot of us realized how much we would miss it.” 203 Teen Centre Before it was the South Regent Park Community Centre and before it was torn down last year, 203 Sackville Green was home to the 203 Teen Centre.
For Jim Stoner, it was a refuge from a lot of what was happening in the park when he was a teenager in the early ’70s.
He would spend his days after school playing shuffle board and ping pong in the basement.
On weekends, the centre hosted dances played by the likes of Rush and Max Webster on occasion, he said.
“Had they not been there at that time, who knows which way I might have taken in life.” St. Bart’s Church There were once milestones: his childhood home on Sackville Green, the 51 Division police station, the 203 Teen Centre.
But with them all since razed, Dominique Boucher has a little trouble finding his way to St. Bartholomew’s Anglican Church today.
Unlike so much around it, the building still stands, at Dundas and Regent Sts., where it has since 1910. Nearly six decades later, Boucher followed his brothers’ lead, joining the boys choir in 1967.
“Out of the seven boys in my family, six of us, we were the choir,” he said. “It was really a discipline for us.”