ONCE UPON A PARK
A ravine with fearsome fables is getting a happy ending,
“We don’t have office space, we don’t have money, we just have passion to do things in the community.” SABINA ALI CHAIR OF THE THORNCLIFFE WOMEN’S COMMITTEE
The stream of parents and children moving through R.V. Burgess Park on this Friday afternoon is like a kaleidoscope of shifting colour and scenes. It’s one of few public spaces in the Thorncliffe Park neighbourhood.
Mothers in gem-coloured saris set against others in dark veils push children in strollers towards the highrises that ring the park and the library, an end-of-day migration to apartments that have more than 30,000 residents, double the capacity they were built for.
Some go against the flow, heading back toward R.V. Burgess to set up for the last of the seasonal Friday markets on an unseasonably warm fall day.
Just beyond the towers lies one of the city’s most beautiful public spaces, and it’s so quiet you can hear a leaf drop. The E.T. Seton Park, part of the Don Valley ravine, is little used by the predominantly South Asian immigrant community that lives above it.
Part of the problem may be separation from the ravine, which has one main entrance from Thorncliffe Park Dr. and is otherwise cut off from the apartments that ring it. Entrances from the grounds of a couple of buildings were closed off. Another may be trust. Kids fear animals they’ve heard live in the ravine, or the people they think could be down there. It’s isolated, so they may go into the park for a barbecue with their family but might not go with friends. At any rate, most of the residents have a distant connection to the ravine despite being a stone’s throw away.
“They come from the countries where they’re not used to the forest life,” explains Sabina Ali, chair of the Thorncliffe Women’s Committee, the grassroots group that transformed R.V. Burgess into an awardwinning park.
Since 2010, the committee has been trying to improve the community’s understanding of the ravine, organizing walks for all ages. Ali’s group has run a youth stewardship program for the past three years.
A cleanup with mountain bikers and U of T students yields two tonnes of garbage each spring. “We found out most of the residents living in these highrises throw the garbage in the ravines,” Ali says — often from their balconies.
A walk down into E.T. Seton Park with Ali and some of the youth she has mentored during the summer shows the benefits of familiarity.
The teenagers talk and laugh easily despite the isolation, leading the way down the steep paved entrance to an unmarked mountain-bike trail under a deep canopy of trees.
Along for the walk is Sufia Ali, Sabina’s daughter, who was one of the youth leaders in the summer stewardship program. The kids spent two weeks in the ravine learning about plants and animals. They got lost occasionally exploring the dirt trails.
Some of the younger kids didn’t realize there was a ravine out their back door, although they studied the system in school, says Aashir Vahiey, another youth leader.
“They want to know if this place is safe for them to bike or walk around,” he says, and if they can “come with their families or play around with their friends.” The women’s committee was founded in 2008 by six residents who wanted to revitalize R.V. Burgess after unsafe playground equipment was torn down. The group is already doing the type of work in E.T. Seton that is part of the focus of a new city ravine strategy.
City staff are looking at how to manage capital and environmental projects and create partnerships with academic institutions or the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority to study recreational usage and ravine health. But they are also considering concrete improvements such as better gateways into the ravine, navigation once there and how to publicize historic places.
Those are many of the barriers di- viding the Thorncliffe community and the ravine. Sparse signage at the park’s entrance doesn’t give any indication that the wide, paved road it marks leads to the ravine. Or that Seton, an immigrant himself, was a famed author and illustrator who eventually helped found the Boy Scouts of America.
The steep asphalt slope leads to a parking lot and is more suited to cars than to parents with small children.
In the summer, Sabina Ali and her crew painted the park sign to show it leads to the Don Valley. Last year, they hiked the off-road mountainbiking trails and mapped a walking route, turning their work into a handy brochure that also identifies native plants and animals. And Ali has organized annual park cleanups.
“We’re cleaning it because it’s for the whole community. They need to realize that it’s their park as well,” Sufia says.
Her mother thinks putting posters in the lobbies of apartment buildings to show the group’s work will be a good reminder. And the women’s committee dreams that someday they’ll have an outdoor learning centre with a pop-up science centre near the entrance to E.T. Seton.
Ali has been recognized for her work, winning the Jane Jacobs Prize for city builders in 2014. And R.V. Burgess was the first Canadian park to win an award from the City Parks Alliance, a U.S.-based non-profit, which applauded the committee for the revitalization.
The city eventually put in new swings, a path and, this summer, new trees. But what confounds Ali, who has gone to the U.S. to speak about the park’s revitalization, is the absence of core funding for the committee. The group has received support piecemeal since it began eight years ago, with funding for its ravine and gardening programs from organizations such as the Weston Family Parks Challenge and TD Friends of Environment. The Metcalf Foundation is helping the committee with its governance structure.
Everything else is volunteer — the women’s sewing instruction, the tandoor bread oven that brings people to the Friday market and the market itself. Since 2010, the committee has held an annual Arts in the Park event that they pay for themselves.
“We don’t have office space, we don’t have money, we just have passion to do things in the community,” Ali says.
This summer Ali managed to get a salary for some of the youth leaders, who had volunteered for years through the Toronto District School Board’s Focus on Youth Toronto, which supports programming for inner-city youth.
Years ago, an outing in a ravine organized by the TDSB had a profound effect on a young immigrant. Denise Pinto, who’s from Dubai, grew up in an immigrant community at Yonge St. and Steeles Ave. on the Don Valley ravine but never explored it.
“I’d never been on a farm and I’d never stuck my hands in dirt,” Pinto says in a phone interview.
She says her parents, unfamiliar with the ravine, instilled a sense of mistrust.
“I had cautiousness around the ravine system and the inappropriateness of the urban wild for a young girl,” Pinto says.
Adogwood planting program in the ravine during elementary school changed her outlook.
Initially grossed out at the notion of planting a sapling in mud, she says once the tree was in the ground she “felt the awe and the wonder of having shaped the natural environment in some way.”
Pinto went on to study landscape architecture and is the executive director of Jane’s Walk, which organizes neighbourhood walking tours during the first weekend of May.
She says programs such as Ali’s can have a similar impact on kids and on their families, as the parents understand how to use the ravine system and begin to feel it’s part of their community.
“And with that comes a sense of safety,” says Pinto. “The more people that use the trails, the safer they become for everyone.”