Uxbridge Post Office, a symbol of what community can lose without a fight.
I’d overlooked it for years. I think it was back 2006 when a number of us organized a weekend to celebrate the township’s anniversary. We were artists, shop owners, civic workers and town boosters volunteering our time. Leading up to the event, we’d looked for a place to meet. That’s when financial specialist Brian Evans offered us a room at his Toronto Street office. I stepped into his board room for that first meeting and noticed a collage of photographs of a turn-of-the-century building framed on the wall. I’d never seen that Edwardian-era building before.
“What and where was that?” I asked.
“Don’t you know?” someone responded. “That was our original post office.” And when I asked where, they all said right where the new post office is today. “They knocked down the old one and threw up that new one.” (more…)
It served working people. It informed the middle class. It was founded on the notion that acquiring knowledge should not have a price tag, that books and periodicals and public lectures ought to be universal. And its sister facilities functioned successfully all across Canada. But then, came an administration that did not think so highly of this public service.
“The public library has less relevance,” its then administrator seemed to be saying. “It’s an inconvenience.” (more…)
Upright pianos, such as this one, often get relegated to back walls, basements or worse…
First, we got some experts to separate into manageable pieces. Next, we sought advice about how to move its heaviest parts. Then, I rented a cube van to move all the pieces. But we left the toughest challenge to the last – how we were going to move its huge sounding board down a set of stairs, across a floor, onto the front porch of our rental apartment and into the back of the cube van.
We actually found a set of heavy ropes and pillows to try to ease the heart of our upright piano – its the massive interior sounding board – down the stairs gently. Problem was, none of us could keep the hundreds of pounds of Baldwin piano sounding board from rumbling down the stairs. And when it got away on us, it slid down the stairs out of control, until it hit the wall at the base of the staircase with a thundering crash.
“Baaaannnng!” rattled the sounding board. And it resonated in that wall for a good minute after the collision. (more…)
The demolition had been going on for over an hour. Layers of roofing, above the second floor were now caving in. Rafters that hadn’t seen the light of day for over a century and the walls that could tell stories of many of those years came cascading down. It was all quite controlled. With the precision of a surgeon, the excavator operator was bringing my neighbour’s house down piece by piece.
Murray Huntington spots an important clue.
But suddenly the excavator shovel – Murray Huntington’s industrial scalpel – powered down. Huntington opened the excavator door, stepped out of the cab and climbed over the debris that had been the second floor.
“What’ve you got?” I called out to him from ground level.
“Maybe you can use this,” Huntington said.
And he gently tugged at a few of the floorboards atop the pile of rubble to reveal some paper. He’d spotted it in the debris, brought it down and handed it to me. It was a newspaper. (more…)
We sat down on a couple of plain chairs at a wooden table. We both splayed reference papers and notes across the table in front of us. The setting could easily have been his or my summer kitchen. Then, after some casual conversation, he hit the start button on a pocket-sized audio recorder in the middle of the table.
“It’s a warm sunny day,” he started. “I’m seated in a reading room in Port Perry Library overlooking Lake Scugog…”
I couldn’t resist. “… And under normal circumstances, we should be down at the lake enjoying the water,” I interrupted.
“But we’re not,” he continued. “This is the inaugural podcast of ‘Durham Past and Present.’” (more…)
Gerry OIdham stands in front of the “notice of meeting” sign posted on the King Street Parkette property.
During the time it took for her nephew to grow from a child of three to an adult – some 35 years – Gerry Oldham has taken the younger members of her family to the parkette on King Street in the town where I live.
As parks go, it’s always been a pretty modest space. But in its lifetime, the parkette’s simple playground swings, teeter-totter and slide have always provided enough green space for Gerry, her kids and now her grandchildren. This week, at Township Council, she showed councillors a framed photo of her family and passed along their fears.
“Don’t let them sell Grandma’s park,” she repeated to the chamber.
The park, for over an hour the other night, captured the community leaders’ attention. It appears that Township Council is considering whether the space – about the size of a narrow vacant lot – might serve a better purpose if rezoned as a space for potential development as a residence instead of a parkette. Well, when Gerry Oldham and a number of her neighbours learned about the idea they showed up, some 40 or 50 strong, to dissuade councillors from that notion.
King Street Parkette (lot in centre) a public spot in the midst of residential Uxbridge. Courtesy Google Maps.
Part of the parkette’s problem, however, is that it’s small. Only .084 hectares (not even a third of an acre). It’s also not a high priority. Bob Ferguson, township facilities manager (and the nephew whom Gerry remembers being three when she first encountered the parkette) described the space as a “low-use” park. That means it’s one of a handful of parks in town that while functional, doesn’t rate the greater attention that parks containing splash pads, baseball diamonds or soccer pitches do.
It also suffers from an identity problem. It should have had a name, but doesn’t. In a letter to the council, retired Uxbridge Museum and Archives curator Allan McGillivray explained that the lot had sat dormant for years. It was low and wet and until a developer donated the land to the township, pretty much overlooked.
“The Optimist Club brought in fill and leveled the area,” historian McGillivray explained. “They installed swings, teeter-totters and slides … donated in 1970 in the memory of Donald Cowieson, the second president of the Optimist Club.”
Allan McGillivray added there was even a photo in the local newspaper of a local realtor making the presentation to then Mayor Fred Steward. But beyond that, the King Street Parkette kind of disappeared.
“Shouldn’t there have been a plaque?” Gerry Oldham asked.
Moms and dads, kids and dogs gathered on the weekend to illustrate the King Street Parkette is hardly a “low use” facility, but a people place that’s been a neighbourhood refuge.
But in addition to its identity problem, the King Street Parkette kind of languished. Never big enough to enjoy the upgrades and makeovers that higher profile parks demand and yet never an inconvenience to planners or budgeters (it costs less that $1,000 each year), the lot has simply required periodic attention for grass cutting, garbage removal and (when it fell below safety standards) the removal of the playground slide equipment.
And while the township has always viewed it as “low use,” it has never suffered from no use. And the parkette’s neighbours were quick to remind Council of that on Monday night.
Former councillor Susan Self said she wasn’t happy about the trash too often left behind in the parkette or the vandalism. But “when we sit in our kitchen, we can easily see how important the park is to the children of our neighbours. We know it’s used extensively.”
Another speaker pointed out that while the rest of the town has its larger parks, residents near the King Street Parkette used its space to enjoy quality time with their families, build community spirit and encourage a healthy lifestyle for their children. “There’s the big park,” she said, “and then there’s our park.”
Gerry Oldham isn’t just a tree-hugger. She’s done her homework. When presenting her case Monday night, she noted that the township’s notice in the mail to consider rezoning of the park across her back fence referred to the it as “a former parkette.”
“Is the decision already made?” she asked. “An upgrade should be considered. Not a sale. It’s a bad precedent to be selling parkland.”
Gerry Oldham has enjoyed the park for a quarter century. Now she wants to ensure its survival for the next 25 years.
To be fair, township officials haven’t tossed the King Street Parkette to the scrap heap yet. Coun. Jacob Mantle insisted that the exercise of reviewing the parkette’s condition, status and value is not a cash grab. In fact, he noted the township’s laudable record of preserving greenbelt lands, while supporting sustained development of skate parks and splash pads as “destination parks.”
Susan Fumerton was among the last to plea on the parkette’s behalf in front of Council. She applauded the park for its service in providing a sanctuary at different times for her four children and her two grandchildren. But because the parkette had also introduced her to her neighbours, Susan added that, “the park has also brought me my best friend, Gerry Oldham.”
So while the King Street Parkette may be a park without an official name and a tenuous future, it has served generations of neighbours well.
