[URBAN NOTE] On Coronation Park, Toronto

[rfmcdonald]

The photo of a painted image of a heart on the pavement I took in May was selected for Torontoist's Vandalist post this week.



It's one of a few different photo posts drawing from time I spent on the waterfront of Toronto's Coronation Park earlier this year, like this one of the duck and ducklings paddling in the harbour, or this one of a treed scene. This park at the foot of Bathurst Street is attractive, and may soon take on a higher profile as its neighbourhood becomes populated. The website for a condo development in the area hosts an essay describing the park's genesis in the twin traumas of the Great Depression's mass unemployment and the psychological aftereffects of the First World War.

[I]n 1917, Fort York was still close to the lake. Over the next number of years, however, the land beneath today’s Fleet Street, Lakeshore Boulevard, and Coronation Park rose from the sandy depths. In a detailed and well-researched article, “A Living Memorial: The History of Coronation Park” (published in Urban History Review in February 1991), John Bacher has documented the subsequent history of the site. What is now Coronation Park remained sandy, and not much more, into the 1930s. The Great Depression then inspired change. Infrastructure projects offering “relief ” pay for otherwise unemployed men became the equivalent of today’s federal infrastructure funds dedicated to keeping some of us at work. Within shouting distance from the Fort, restored as one relief project, other desperate men worked through the summer of 1935 to complete a sea wall that still stands along Coronation Park’s southern edge. (The sea wall, its worth noting, did not expand the earlier filled area, but actually allowed for the dredging of a deeper basin at land’s edge for a new marina.) While steam shovels did the dredging, men with shovels moved most of the dry land, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow. In the midst of a heat wave, and without any shade on the site, at least one man collapsed, and three horses died.

But by August 1935, the glittering new concrete sea wall and leveled land were complete at less than its projected cost. The park itself would come nearly two years later. In the wake of the death of King George V in January of 1936, the coming coronation of a new king sent officials in a then-still-very-British minded Toronto into planning for celebrations. Thomas Hobbs and Andrew Gillespie, members of the Toronto Ex-Servicemen’s Coronation Committee, joined forces with the Toronto Chapter of Men of the Trees to propose a “Coronation Park” dominated by ceremonial tree plantings. The Men of the Trees, an organization formed by war veteran Richard St. Barbe Barker, rode the rising wave of conservationism in the interwar period to preach reforestation as “the most constructive and peaceable enterprise in which nations could cooperate.” It had appealed particularly well to veterans. And in Toronto, where 90,000 veterans of WWI had held a three day reunion in 1934, veterans apparently carried weight. City Council approved the proposed concept, and left a Coronation Park Advisory Committee, dominated by veterans, to finalize the design and planting details. In short, they created a park that was part avenue of trees, part war memorial. In the centre of the park still stands a Royal oak, planted in honour of King George VI. Around it are maple trees symbolizing the strength and loyalty of the Empire, and of the Canadians who fought to defend it during WWI. The Royal oak itself is ringed by a wide circle of seven maple trees representing parts of the British Empire. Beyond that circle, other trees were planted to represent the four divisions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, with each tree representing a unit of a division. Trees were also added to represent the veterans of the Fenian raids of 1866, the 1885 Northwest Rebellion, and the Boer War. In all, nearly 150 trees were planted along gently curving pathways during a mass ceremony on 12 May 1937–Coronation Day, and a public holiday in Toronto.