Landscapes lost, and found
Garrison Creek; downtown's other streams & ravines: reclaiming the life beneath our feet
Bebout, Rick
http://www.rbebout.com/queen/libtrin/2pcreek.htm
Date Written: 2002-07-01
Publisher: Rick Bebout
Year Published: 2002
Resource Type: Article
A history of the Garrison Creek path in Toronto and how the creek shapes the surrounding landscape and environment, reflecting on the cities relationship with public natural spaces and parks.
Abstract:
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Excerpts:
By big-city standards, this city is wildly rich in parkland. On average, parks cover about 5% of urban land in North America; in Toronto it's 12% -- or maybe 17. These figures have been cited by Toronto Life, the last in its Real Estate Guide maybe counting open spaces not claimed by the City as parks.
Those spaces are likely in, or near, ravines. Few flatland parks are large. But for High Park, some two square kilometres including its Grenadier Pond, most of it the estate of architect John Howard, his 1873 gift to the city; Queen's Park, born of an 1827 university land grant; and the Islands, a gift of nature saved only by civic struggle, most downtown parks are the postage stamps usually alotted by abstemious city fathers.
...
The term "city park" can seem a contradiction: parks have long been seen as places to escape the city. Frederick Law Olmsted planned Central Park as a refuge from the crowded tenements and roaring streets of Manhattan, its purpose ("almost patronizing," as one Toronto architect has put it) met by its massive scale: half a mile wide, more than two miles long; 840 acres called at once "remarkably beautiful and remarkably artificial." It's not nature. It's "Nature" -- consciously contrived by the city around it.
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