GATEWAY TO NATURE
Extra efforts to restore park
Something unexpected and lovely happens when you descend the dirt path to Gateway Public Park off University Avenue West. The city falls away. Buildings disappear behind the cherry blossoms and treed embankments. The noise from traffic fades and birdsong rises. But volunteers filled garbage bags with litter and hauled out old furniture and tires on Monday. A mattress remained at the top of an embankment, and a chair was partly submerged in a pool of water. The wood slats on the benches are missing or broken. The paint has peeled, replaced by graffiti.
It’s forgotten and shabby. People don’t feel safe here.
Yet, oh the potential.
The top of the rail tunnel that runs from Riverside Drive to Elliott Street is a quirky, cool ribbon of ravine in a bleak stretch of the west end.
“It’s an awesome, awesome space,” Coun. Fabio Costante says.
A visionary and civic-minded group of volunteers led by real-estate agent Jack Renner saw this 15 years ago. They transformed it and dubbed it Gateway Public Park. They hauled out abandoned cars, cleared weeds, planted the cherry trees and a garden at Riverside Drive, created the trail and tiered stone paths and installed the benches. They even roughed in a stage for an amphitheatre.
They poured $1.2 million in donations of money, materials and labour into it.
But they couldn’t get a longterm lease for the property, owned by the Detroit River Tunnel Company and Canadian Pacific Railway. Five years later, the volunteers and donations stopped.
It should be part of the fabric of the west end. It should be something that’s sought after and recognized.
The city also tried, unsuccessfully, to reach an agreement for surface rights.
The park hasn’t been tended since then. Homeless people squatted there last summer. But negotiations between the city and company were rekindled several months ago during different negotiations to build a pedestrian tunnel beneath the rail bridge over Dougall Avenue. “We’re looking at it,” city lawyer Patrick Brode said. “I’d like to think we’d be optimistic.” Meanwhile, Costante, who represents Ward 2, and Ward 3 Coun. Rino Bortolin want to spend $50,000 each from their ward funds on new gardens, benches, lights and garbage cans. There are two things to note about this. The first is the renewed vision. The second is the teamwork.
The land can’t be developed because of the rail tunnel underneath it. But there are a lot of complaints about dumping. So this should be a win for both sides.
But it might not be easy. The city needs a long-term lease. If it’s going to invest in a park, it needs to know the park will be there for a long time. Cost, liability and control of the land are also factors.
Still, Costante and Bortolin understand how critical this strip is, in concert with University Avenue West. University is vast — four lanes plus bike lanes, parking and sidewalks. There isn’t much traffic. Swaths of it are barren and drab. But this is a key corridor connecting downtown, Sandwich and the University of Windsor’s two campuses. The residential streets off University are full of character and close to the river. It’s prime for an extreme makeover and is undergoing an environmental assessment now to prepare for reconstruction. Gateway and an abandoned rail cut west of Caron Avenue could connect a new University Avenue to the riverfront.
“I really believe that the way we reconstruct University Avenue and what we do with Gateway park — those are two critical elements that could really bring new life into this very important corridor,” Costante said. A narrower, landscaped road that encourages cyclists and pedestrians — and a unique, signature linear park connecting to the riverfront — could bring people and businesses and transform surrounding residential streets into sought-after neighbourhoods.
“All you have to do is ride the Dequindre Cut to see what the possibilities are,” Bortolin said, referring to the former railway cut now a popular trail in Detroit. It takes cyclists and pedestrians from the river past Eastern Market and has spawned development all along it. Bortolin envisions people walking from Riverside Drive through the park, with native grasses and trees and butterfly gardens, traversing a painted crosswalk over a two-lane University Avenue and descending back down to the park on the other side.
Now, most people don’t even know about Gateway anymore. “It should be part of the fabric of the west end,” Costante said. “It should be something that’s sought after and recognized.”