Riverdale Park’s fur and fun free-for-all makes it one of my favourite places in the city
A few years ago, I moved from the Annex to the near-east-side and took my dog for a first walk to Riverdale Park on the west side of the Don Valley. There were some other small dogs wandering about on the grass near Riverdale Farm and the Sesame Street urbanism was in full effect until two older men started talking loudly. One yelled to the other “Why does Rover bark so much?” The other answered in a Mid-Atlantic accent, “He hates the working class!” I wondered what crazed neighbourhood I had moved to. Is this what happens when a neighourhood gentrifies in the early 1970s and metastasizes for the next 30-some years? Nobody could say that in the Annex and get away with it.
Soon after witnessing this event, I discovered Riverdale Park, in fact, works better than those in the Annex and the rest of Toronto, where parks have often become near-bloody battlegrounds in Toronto’s ongoing war between dogs, kids and (insert city issue of choice here). It’s a war that flares up often and has been simmering much longer than this past year’s silly “War on the Car.” Like in a real war, there are protective walls and treaties. Dogs get fenced in. The kids get fenced in. In some places there are specified times when the dogs can run free, posted on a pole by some bureaucratic Martin Luther type. Jean Sebelius Park, in the deep Annex, has all these forces at play and, with one of Toronto’s most politically active populations of dog and child owners visiting it, some of whom are even lawyers, every inch of territory is coveted.
Down in peaceful Little Norway Park at the foot of Bathurst, a battle started this past summer over a proposal to build a fence around a leash-free zone. Urgent press releases were sent out, websites built and land claims were staked like sections of Klondike riverbed. Out in The Beach, the beach itself was the site of an even more passionate struggle between those who saw bare paws and fur as a gateway to Exxon Valdez style beach desecration.
Passions on all sides result in the pettiest of bylaw infractions — like letting a dog off-leash a few metres before the leash free zone — being cranked up to near life or death volume. It’s a politically toxic issue that local councillors fear. In Kyle Rae’s letter last month that stated he wasn’t going to run again in the next election, he said he would miss a lot of things about city politics, but not dog parks.
The rules, they add up and get heavy. The dogs, and the kids, just want to run free. It doesn’t have to be like a war though, and there are places without fences and signs that work just fine, like in Riverdale Park. Those two men I encountered early on, I soon realized, simply have a rather wry sense of humour when on their daily late-afternoon constitutionals and are Cabbagetown’s version of Statler and Waldorf, the curmudgeons from The Muppet Show. They walk, they yell, they chat with everybody, they’re ultimately nice and their dogs shuffle along, alternately snorting and barking.
They’re part of cast of folks I see every day but don’t always talk to during daily dog walks. As every dog owner knows, sometimes you know people only as “Mr. D’Arcy’s” or “Chooch’s mom” for a long while until the oddly formidable first-name barrier is breached. Sometimes you just know people for always talking about conspiracy theories, so you don’t ever want to ask what their name is. I assume this is how it works for the parents of the human children as well.
There are different shifts in the park too, and the time of day feels different because of the people there. The few early mornings I’ve seen are filled with very eager people who greet the day as if they’re walking coffee beans, while the mid-afternoon professional dog walker circuit (they carry looped leashes on their belts like wild west gunslingers), and then the just-after-work folks are followed by a group of easygoing folks who go gently into the good night as if the park were a bar-like social gathering spot.
In Riverdale, all these people seem to know the unwritten code of how the park works in both the upper and lower section. The upper part, adjacent to the zoo, functions like a standard city park, with paths, trees and a splash pond that is filled with water and kids in the summer. Except for designated times during the colder months, this area is not leash-free. Usually only the radical libertarians let their dogs loose up there at the wrong time and, this being downtown Toronto, they are few in number.
Down the hill (the popular tobogganing spot where, it’s said, Oscar Wilde slid down in 1882 when he visited Toronto) are the “flats” — a huge grassy lawn with four baseball diamonds and a cricket pitch. What makes this place nearly unique in Toronto is that it’s leash-free 24-hours a day, all year long, and it’s huge. Other than a sign suggesting it’s leash free, there are no instructions on how to use the space. It’s a miraculous thing for Toronto, a city that likes rules and lots of them. The park works though, and negotiation for space in the summer months when sports teams use the field is subtle, and almost done without thought.
Around 5 or 6pm, when the after-work dog owners are in the park, the sports teams will arrive and plunk down their bags. As they unpack their gear and slowly move out onto the field, the dogs naturally drift to other open areas. Just like that. No fence, no bylaw officer, no signs. Occasionally a dog will, as dogs do, wander into a game. The grumps grump, but most either ignore the four-legged ringer or give it a pet as it passes third base. Even after a few seasons of watching this take place, intelligent self-regulation in an over-regulated society is a wonderful thing to watch.
Since winter has arrived, the parks department no longer has garbage bins down in the flats and some of the dog owners who self-identify as “taxpayers” started to dump their doggy bags in a pile at the bottom of the hill. Three unofficial signs were put up by civilians asking people not to dump (the last one claimed to be by an eight-year-old girl). Nobody has dumped since, and the paper and cardboard signs are fading away. If there must be signs, perhaps they should be ephemeral, correcting an infraction, then fading away.
This lawless park is one of the greatest things in Toronto and I hope it stays that way. Rules are good — but where there’s a lack of rules, and nothing is wrong, we should try to resist the urge to fill that void with more rules.
» Do you have a favourite park for dog walking? Or a park where the pets drive you nuts? Let us know about them in the Comments section below.
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