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Since when did it become Marilyn Bell Park(ing lot)?

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Earlier this week I was on CP24’s “Hour Town” promoting Spacing Votes and got to hang out back-stage with one of the CNE‘s execs. We talked about what each other did as a profession — when he began to talk about the Ex he gushed about the new Green Zone, an array of exhibits focused on protecting the environment and educating the public on sustainable energy. “Ask those kids manning the booths any question and they will know the answer,” he told me.

I haven’t been to the Ex this year, but I want someone, anyone, to give me an answer to this: Why has Marilyn Bell Park been turned into a parking lot for the CNE crowd?

I’ve been biking on the Martin Goodman Trail frequently as of late. I was heading home one night earlier this week, just around dusk, and thought I’d take the leisurely route home. But once I approached the Exhibition grounds I was amazed to find that most of the parkland and green space on the south side of Lake Shore Blvd., stretching between Strachan and Jameson, had been converted into makeshift parking lots. Nothing was paved over, but cars were parked on the grass I sometimes lie on during lazy Sunday afternoons. Vehicles were parked just inches away from trees, which means they were sitting on top of delicate root systems. Camper vans and mobile homes were parked right up to the edge of the waterfront pedestrian path, idling their engines while their generators ran at full tilt.

The photo at the top of this post was taken from my apartment’s balcony and only shows a smidgen of the amount of parking on our parks. Check out the larger version of the photo.

The CNE has been hailed as one of the most enviro-friendly agencies of the City of Toronto. But how can they tout such green credentials when the most prized parkland in the city is being used as a parking lot?

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19 comments

  1. The answer, quite obviously, is that nobody in power in this city gives a shit about parkland.

  3. Proof positive that a car is worth more than a citizen in our town/culture/country…

    Beyond caring anymore.

  4. I think this is an excellent argument for tearing up the CNE’s paved overflow parking lots and turning them into grass fields.

    If parkland works just fine as a parking lot for the two weeks of the year that the CNE runs, then why not take a few of those other parking lots that are barely used outside of CNE season and turn them into parks as well?
    Seems a much more efficient use of the land

    (assuming, of course, that someone in power gives a shit about parkland..)

  5. It’s been about five years since advocating for a Front St. transitway that would improve transit into the northern edge of the Ex, at both Dufferin and near Strachan. But we’re too carrupt and/or stupid, and/or the EA processes are so pathetic to consider that there could be a dozen transit projects instead of a car folly. So yes, the trees are stressed, but maybe push at Giambrone and Pantalone and Miller and ask why they push a road that will harm two transit systems and give a quarter-billion to automobility, and where are the transit options beyond the Metro-era WWLRT which assumes transit will never pollute Front St.
    Meanwhile – I’ve had a couple near-doorings – folks seem to think it’s fine to open their door about six inches just in front of you while saying they see you.

  6. I went to the Ex — mid-week evenings you can get in for only $5 — and have to say I didn’t find the Green Zone that impressive. I didn’t see the Ask an Expert, so to me it just looked like a bunch of tables with posters and hand-outs. One thing that seemed particularly silly was a big flat-panel TV showing “An Inconvenient Truth” — who’s going to sit down and watch a 100-minute documentary in the shadow of the world’s tallest Lego tower?

  7. After the Palais Royale parking fiasco, should we be surprised?

    Joe Pantalone has had the 29 bus extended to serve BMO Field at a loss, nothing must stand in the way of his CNE boostering, not even some greenspace.

  8. The CNE Green Zone was a joke. EVerybody kept pushing paper brochures on me and frankly I felt I knew more than the people at the desks. And what was with the potted pine trees all over? Was that to make it look greener in there ? The people at the City tree table seemed a bit confused as they had different ideas than what the City tree expert that came to my house had told me weeks before. At the Green Zone there were handing out seeds for coniferous trees, which may help with run off but due to their shape may not provide much coolong shade. 2 weeks previous I had been told that coniferous trees were not being encouaged by the City as they offered the least green benefits.

    In terms of cars, some people may not like this but there are many people who drive to the Ex from outside of the city and have no public transit option. Even if they took the TTC they would have to use a parking lot somewhere. There are also people who will never give up driving their cars no matter how costly it is. The slow destruction of Sunnyside into a parking lot is a symptom of that (and Sylvia Watsons car friendly agenda) and a lifelong user of the area, a sad sight.

  9. It is unbelievable that this would be allowed, particularily in year like 2007: the driest year in half a century. Many of our parks have already been devestated by lack of rainfall, I can only imagine the amount of extra damage done by these vehicles.

  10. in that photograph, the cars remind me of aphids.

  11. That park’s been a CNE parking lot for a long time… I worked at the Ex in 1997 and it was there back then.

  12. i don’t think you can avoid the fact that for two weeks of the year, every year, a lot of people want to come down to the cne and the waterfront. that’s the big city, deal with it.
    what gets me though is the day to day functioning of the waterfront ‘trail’, toronto’s largest, most important and most frequented public space. i cross the waterfront from the beaches to the humber on a regular basis and there are some great spots and some lousy ones.
    the marilyn bell section is a classic example of city building. at the start of the summer the city installed the first (that i know of) brand new refridgerated water fountain on the whole waterfront (why here is anyone’s guess, there are way more needy spots) and then promptly closed this section of the trail for most of the summer!

  13. It’s like winter. It happens every year, and every year we are shocked and apalled by it. By this time next year we will have forgotten about it enough to be shocked all over again.

  14. It’s simply a matter of demand.

    Public transportation to the area is adequate at best.

    As a result, cars will inevitably come. Everyone who parked there was likely extremely thankful they COULD park there.

  15. If you don’t want people to park there, make the GO trains run more often than once an hour. It’s as simple as that.

  16. Marilyn Bell Park has always been turned into a parking for the 2 weeks during the CNE. Probably since cars were invented and people needed places to park to attend the fair. I want to remind you that for the other 50 weeks of the year the park is left alone for others to enjoy.

    As a member of the CNE Board we have worked tirelessly to be as a green as possible. With 1.4 million visitors, a large majority do arrive via GO, TTC, Foot and Bike. However, realistically speaking, we need to provide parking for those who choose to.

    In my humble opinion using the park for a brief 2 week period for over flow parking on only the busiest days (weekends)is far better than having an asphalt parking lot sitting empty for 50 weeks of the year.

    Louroz

  17. The destruction of Marilyn Bell Park by the CNE during the summer months, has encouraged illegal parking in the other waterfront parks in the area.

    Parkdale Liberty- August issue (not online)

    Putting the “parking” in Parkdale by Linda Dawn Hammond

    Rash of summer events has turned waterfront green space into overflow parking

    In mid-September, the newly renovated Palais Royale will host a conference organized by the Waterfront Regeneration Trust called Beyond Regeneration: The Trail Ahead.
    Chaired by former Toronto mayor and MP David Crombie, it will present a vision of the waterfront trail, which will “inspire, motivate and impress.” The most amazing aspect, however, may be if the delegates don’t park in the space they’re trying to revitalize.

    This summer has seen a seemingly non-stop string of events by the waterfront that have turned much of the green space near the Palais Royale and the nearby Marilyn Bell Park into overflow parking.
    At the July 1 Canada Day event at Sunnyside Beach the issue boiled over, with parking officers issuing more than 600 tickets to irate motorists, some of whom claimed that event volunteers had told them they could park on the median grass.

    According to Peter Leiss, Parks Supervisor for the Toronto and East York department of Parks, Forestry and Recreation, a meeting was held the week prior and the event organizers were specifically told to put traffic control in place and erect temporary barricades to prevent cars from jumping the curbs and parking in off-limits areas. This directive, according to Leiss, went unheeded.

    Speaking last month at a meeting of the Parkdale-High Park Waterfront Group, Leiss also explained why Marilyn Bell Park had been transformed into a parking lot for a portion of the recent FIFA U-20 World Cup Event.
    Part of the problem was that the Grand Prix and FIFA were going on at the same time, “ said Leiss, noting that it was the soccer event that approached the Parks Department for the event. “They haven’t been using it since the Indy finished.”

    Many of the fences and barriers erected at the end of June are still up, left in place to accommodate the expected crowds for Caribana and the 18-day Canadian National Exhibition later this month. And what’s left behind after the cars leave Marilyn Bell Park – a patchy expanse of grass, mud and debris – won’t be re-sodded until later in September, after all the major events have passed. “It would be an exercise in futility,” said Leiss of doing work before then.
    Members of the PHPWG have a plan to turn up the pressure on the City to stop using the park for parking. “We have to keep our park a park, not an event space, parking lot or storage,” said the group’s president Roger Brook. “Thousands of people live within a block or two of the lake, and most of us don’t have a cottage.”
    To make their point, PHPWG is planning a demonstration against commercial parking use for Aug. 17, the first day of parking for the CNE in Marilyn Bell Park. One idea being floated is to create artificial tickets to inform and alert those parking on the site of the group’s issues. They are also planning to send a letter to Councillor Gord Perks to demand that temporary parking in Marilyn Bell be discontinued by the spring of 2008.
    “It’s about money, clear and simple,” said Brook. “Parks, grass and trees lose money, parked cars make money.”
    There is some hope that this annual ritual may be coming to an end. Leiss suggested at the meeting that in future years parking in the park may be prohibited, and Councillor Perks had advised the CNE to look for alternate solutions. According to Brook, however, the councillor has stated that he will not look at removing CNE parking from Marilyn Bell Park until the city provides additional subsidies for Exhibition Place (CNE), as the organization derives much of its revenue from this parking. In any case, the issue is bound to come up again.
    “If we keep quiet, there’s no doubt that (this park use) will be our future,” said Brook. “We need to get the neighbourhood to reclaim the park.”

  18. According to the official Toronto Municipal Code Property Standards section 629-24.

    I quote:

    “All areas used for vehicular traffic or the parking or storage of a vehicle shall be paved with asphalt, concrete, interlocking stone or other environmentally safe and dust-free equivalent surface.”

    Thus the city is breaking its own codes that their by-law officers enforce on a daily basis.

  19. I can understand the need to provide parking for the CNE and other users of the area, and can even tolerate some parking in Marilyn Bell Park. But at $20 per car, this should mean guards could be installed to keep vehicles from tree trunks, oversize vehicles would only be allowed in open areas — and not under the canopies, a fastidious program would be enacted daily to pick up garbage, broken glass, cigarette butts and food, and when the Ex is over, surely monies could be spent to decompress the ground (and I don’t mean the 2′ depth a tractor does, but at least 6″ deep) , fertilize with a good organic fertilizer, reseed the areas and replant all demolished gardens and commit several thousand dollars to revitalizing the park for the residents for the other 49 weeks of the year!!