Construction work of Museum station's secondary entrance at Queen's Park in Toronto on May 31.Abhijit Alka Anil /The Globe and Mail
Queen’s Park is everyone’s shorthand for the government of Ontario, which has its headquarters in the grand Legislative Building there. Queen’s Park did this, Queen’s Park said that. But Queen’s Park is also, well, a park, and a lovely one at that.
When a young Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) declared it officially open on Sept. 11, 1860, it was one of Canada’s first public parks, named in honour of the prince’s mother, Queen Victoria. Today it is split into two sections by the pink-hued mass of the legislature.
The south end, maintained by the provincial government, is in splendid shape. Close-cropped green lawns. Carefully tended gardens. Imposing monuments to the war dead and statues of figures from Ontario’s past.
The north end, maintained by the City of Toronto, is another story. The lawns are weedy and patchy. The stately old trees need pruning, with dead branches that threaten to come down in the next storm. Several saplings, planted to increase the tree cover, stand dead and bare. Trash from a recent homeless encampment is scattered about. A fountain overlooked by the legislature is empty and abandoned.
Frank Piddisi showed me around on a beautiful spring afternoon. Mr. Piddisi is a retired school official who has lived nearby for years and has watched the park’s sad decline. “It just gets worse and worse,” he told me on our walk. “The politicians say this is a world-class city, but we can’t even cut the grass in our parks.”
He’s right. It’s a crying shame that a historic park in the very heart of the city – within clear sight of the province’s leaders – should suffer from such neglect. What makes it doubly disappointing is that, only five years ago, the city completed a lengthy and expensive do-over of Queen’s Park. It had become rundown after years of poor upkeep and heavy traffic from University of Toronto students, who traverse it when they shuttle back and forth to classes on the surrounding campus.
The city brought in architects to draw up a plan. Construction fences went up. Contractors installed a paved oval around the statue of a mounted Edward VII at the park’s centre and a paved north-south walkway along its spine. They put in lots of new park benches and picnic tables. They built handsome new pedestrian entrances on its flanks.
It was a good plan, but the follow-up has been lousy. Mr. Piddisi points out the bedraggled plantings and loose paving stones on the podium for the prince’s statue and the weeds that have sprouted around the war memorial at the north end, where the Toronto Transit Commission is building a new subway entrance.
It’s a sadly typical story in Toronto. Build something nice, then let it go to seed. The same thing happened when a developer paid for a new park, Canoe Landing, down by the waterfront. It was a striking addition to the cityscape when it opened in 2010, with a huge red canoe and colourful, oversized fishing floats designed by artist Douglas Coupland.
It didn’t take long before things started going downhill. A city worker ran his mower over the rose bushes. A water feature stopped working. The developer complained and complained but nothing seemed to happen.
The city parks department, a big, industrial operation with more than 1,500 parks to tend, can’t seem to cope with anything more sophisticated than a simple park with lawns and baseball diamonds.
When Mr. Piddisi and I visited Queen’s Park, the only parks worker was a guy driving one of those big ride-on mowers with a glassed-in cab. He did half the park, then trundled away, leaving the other half overgrown.
Healthy, functional cities maintain their great public spaces. It’s unimaginable that London would be so negligent about Hyde Park or Madrid about its magnificent El Retiro. New York long ago handed off the care of its most famous park to a private, non-profit group, the Central Park Conservancy.
Queen’s Park is still a delightful place. When Mr. Piddisi and I visited, couples were lounging in the grass, families eating their lunch at the picnic tables and joggers panting their way around the gravelled circular track. It just needs a little TLC. A city with Toronto’s resources should be able to do something as straightforward as maintaining one of its premier public parks.