Decked out toque-to-toe in the red, white and blue of les Canadiens, the author (right) in 1958 with her father, Russ, and neighbour, Jimmy, at the community skating rink.Courtesy Nancy Dorrance
Nancy Dorrance is a Kingston-based writer.
Buried in a box of Kodak slides from the 1950s, I found an image of six-year-old me posing proudly on the edge of our neighbourhood outdoor ice rink, next to my father and my friend Jimmy, who lived two streets over. The guys are wearing winter parkas and pants, but I’m decked out toque-to-toe in the red, white and blue of les Canadiens, with a puck poised on my sawed-off stick just like my hero, the Pocket Rocket Henri Richard. Jimmy and I both sport big, wide grins.
Those were the glory days: not only for the Habs, but for all of us kids who were lucky enough to grow up in Kingston’s Grenville Park in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. It was a magical time of skating, tobogganing and tree-climbing in a world that seemed limitless, but safe. Like Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, we were “Young and easy under the apple boughs … and happy as the grass was green.” Grenville Park was our Fern Hill.
That’s why more than 70 of us grown-up “kids” – now in our 50s, 60s and 70s – returned to the park recently from across Canada, the U.S. and U.K. for a two-day reunion. Exploring old pathways together, we relived childhood escapades that had stayed fresh in our memories for decades. On the second day, we joined with current residents to celebrate a unique, 78-year experiment in Canadian co-operative housing that’s still thriving.
It all began in October, 1944, when four Kingston families met at the home of Ruth and Stanley Lash to discuss a possible solution to their housing woes. The Lashes had been inspired by the vision of urban planner Ebenezer Howard; they’d motorcycled through several “Garden Cities” in Great Britain that were based on his unorthodox principles for good housing. These included: communal ownership of land; well-designed homes with plenty of open space and parkland; a high level of community engagement; green infrastructure to enhance the natural environment; and abundant cultural and recreational facilities.
Essie and Max Epplett, owners of the first house built in the Park, survey the excavation in 1946.Courtesy Nancy Dorrance
That 1944 meeting of friends spawned the Grenville Society, whose charter members – university professors, a high-school teacher and an industrial physicist – soon recruited others. Within a year, the group had cobbled together $12,000 to purchase a 66-acre farm two kilometres west of the city, in what was then called Kingston Township. An article in the Oct. 19, 1945, Kingston Whig-Standard announced: “Grenville Park is a new approach to Kingston’s housing problem,” noting that other “garden city” communities existed in England and the U.S.
Incorporated in 1946 as the Grenville Park Co-operative Housing Association (GPCHA), the fledgling group had a lot of work to do. Converting the farm fields into a functioning subdivision with roads, drainage systems, sewers and a water supply was a daunting challenge – made worse by postwar shortages of labour and materials. Fortunately, two of the park founders were civil engineers, and others volunteered their own expertise and muscle power to get the job done. “Owners joined forces to dig ditches for the installation of sewers,” reported another Whig-Standard article. “At least one-third of the price of installation was saved that way, and the savings went right back to the owners.”
As curious city dwellers drove out to inspect the new subdivision, whispers of communism occasionally surfaced. These may have been fuelled by the sensational, but false, allegation that one of our Grenville Park dads (the same kindly man who later taught me how to ride a bike) was part of a Soviet spy ring. Perhaps the neighbourhood’s bulk purchasing of groceries also contributed to this misconception – especially since their arrival each week was signalled by a red flag flapping from the organizer’s clothesline.
Despite shared ownership and maintenance of common land, however, the large lots and distinctive, original designs of the newly built homes would have sent the opposite message. Strong individualists in many ways, Grenville Parkers were united by a common desire to create a community that reflected the “garden city” ideals.
Residents like Gord and Ida Fraser, seen here with their son John, pitched in to build their homes at the Grenville Park co-op in Kingston.Courtesy Nancy Dorrance
Two returning Second World War veterans eager to join this venture were my father, Russ Kennedy, and our next-door neighbour, Elmer Axford. “After seeing huge destruction and chaos in Europe, I think our dads were motivated to create a community as far removed from that as possible,” Elmer’s son, Dave, told me. “Rather than waiting for commercial developers, they took the initiative and built their own neighbourhood, together.”
The Grenville Society's tentative plan for Grenville Park in 1944.
As a civil engineer, my dad joined the volunteer team that designed the park’s roads, water supply and gravity sewers. (When Kingston was still emptying all its raw sewage directly into Lake Ontario, Grenville Park had its own sewage treatment plant.) A 1947 report to the Grenville Park board noted: “Snow removal was effected by means of a horse-drawn plow.”
After the park became part of Kingston in 1952, the city assumed responsibility for roads and services. But oversight of the association’s “common land” remained the responsibility of the co-op community. And it was those commons – set aside for “parks, playground and other community purposes” – that made our Grenville Park childhoods so memorable. The park’s population of kids under the age of 12 peaked in the early sixties, with a total of 132.
Sue Chamberlain, one of our reunion organizers, recalls “roaming freely throughout the 66 acres and getting into mostly innocent adventures. There were lots of communal spaces, like the dads-maintained skating rink, the baseball diamond, the tennis court … And shared events like potluck picnics, fireworks and square dances. We knew every one of those 55 families,” she adds. “It really was like being raised by a village.”
When my mother, Shirley, was struck by debilitating cancer in 1959, our family experienced that wonderful village-raising firsthand. The community rallied around us, and for years after, the park mothers took my siblings and me under their collective wings without my dad ever asking for help. At the time, we kids never questioned that such support would be there. Only later did we realize just how special those bonds were – and still are, according to current GPCHA president Steve Gammon.
“With 12 acres of park, forest and recreational equipment, Grenville Park is a special place to live,” he says. “For many of our residents today, the shared commitment to stewarding our land is what builds community amongst our neighbours. We hope that the original residents would look favourably on what we are doing with our space today. Grenville Park was unique in 1946; it’s still unique in 2024.”
I did wonder how the park founders’ dream of a model community compares with the current state of co-operative housing in Canada, and so I consulted David Gordon, a professor and former director of Queen’s University’s School of Urban and Regional Planning (which Grenville founder Stan Lash helped launch in 1974). Mr. Gordon noted first that Grenville Park is technically a “Garden Suburb” – similar to the Hampstead Garden Suburb in England, a historic planned neighbourhood near Hampstead Heath in London – since its purpose is completely residential.
Mr. Gordon sees parallels between “the friendly social organization of the GPCHA,” which he says is similar to some of the best housing co-operatives that emerged during the 1970s, “and the shared ownership of common spaces, which is characteristic of suburban townhouse condominium projects now.” He suggests, however, that Grenville Park’s large lot sizes and low density are unlikely to be replicated in today’s more compact suburban planning.
All the more reason, then, for us geriatric graduates of the Grenville Park phenomenon to revisit our old haunts and homes, reliving those memories while we still can.
A Grenville Park hula hoop party in 1958.Courtesy Nancy Dorrance