At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, I fired off this letter this morning to the mayor, Toronto's parks department and Councillor Adam Vaughan. What I should have wrote was that I actually enjoy the city's culture of festivals, just not on every square inch of city property.
To Mayor Miller, Councillor Adam Vaughan and the Parks Department,
When HTO Park opened two years ago, I started telling people, “Finally the city gets it. Not every public space has to be overprogrammed. Not every public space has to be full of people selling things. See, they have finally built a public space where you can just sit and talk and read or stare at the water or tan or watch kids play without a constant barrage of commercial messages and programmed activity.”
I spoke too soon.
Over the weekend the Toronto Waterfront Nautical Festival took over HTO park. It totally destroyed the character of the place. Some of the seating had been appropriated for commercial vendors. There was somebody using power tools. There was someone banging metal on an anvil. There was someone shouting about a pirate treasure hunt every five minutes or so. There was Shopsy’s selling BBQ animal parts and drinks. The beer garden—clearly demonstrating this city’s deep abiding love affair with the ugliest kind of temporary fencing—took up a significant chunk of the beach, blaring music at varying volumes throughout the afternoon, powered by a gas or diesel generator. There were 13 non-staff people in the beer garden when I looked, a number dwarfed by the people who were using the park for their own non-festival purposes and who could have certainly lived without the music or the beer garden This was totally a festival without an audience, primarily serving its own participants.
Three questions:
* Is it not possible to provide a public park in this city without filling it up with programming and, worse, obnoxious commercial activity? Is the highest and best use for all our public space always the Yonge-Dundas Square model?
* How much in fees did the city collect renting out HTO to the event organizers and the for-profit businesses who disrupted the vibe of this gem in order to sell their wares?
* Is there some kind of evaluation process that contrasts the city’s material gain (if any) from such events against the degradation of public space and the destruction of “the vibe” citizens have come to expect from a given public space?
Thanks for answering my questions. I’m just wondering, especially following the park’s occupation by Cirque Du Soleil a week earlier (which I had written off as an extra-special occasion), if it’s worth trekking down there any more or recommending HTO to others if loud (and, might I say, badly DJed) music, power tools and retail is now the vision for the park’s use.
Thanks for listening to my complaint and answering my questions.
