NO NAME PARK

  HYPERLOCAL is an interactive project sponsored by Canada Writes and the National Film Board of Canada. I submitted this story at the request of the organizers. I believe it is the intention of CW to maintain the project indefinitely, allowing Canadians to create an online history of the changes in their neighborhoods. Click on the title to be taken the story's web page.

No Name Park

   At the foot of Rochester Street is a small, mixed income, non-profit complex of thirty or so row houses. It opened in the early Eighties and my wife and I and our two, soon to be three, children were among the first tenants. There were three parks within a few hundred feet of 25 Rochester. To the west, across a broad, landscaped walkway that connected Rochester to Wellington, was a low-rise Ottawa Housing apartment building. Next to the building was tiny, hilly Primrose Park. On the opposite side of the complex, a walkway allowed access to Booth Street. On the north side of the walkway, blocked from Booth by a four-story office building, was an unnamed green space large enough to accommodate a number of deciduous trees, mature and proud now, a couple of picnic tables, a small toddler climber, and still leave room for three-cornered catch.
   When the children became old enough to play outside on their own, they would call, “Going to the park,” on their way out. I would call back, “Which one?” and they would answer either, “Primrose,” or “The park with no name,” which I had dubbed the unnamed green space. A fan of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, I thought my name choice clever. Being fans of getting out the door fast, the children soon shortened it to, “No Name.”
  The third park, not officially a park, but truly the best one of the three, lay across busy, four-lane Wellington: Lebreton Flats. The eight- to ten-kid gang that my two oldest ran with wasn’t allowed to cross the street unsupervised, but I was happy to take them as long as they promised not to tell the adults what we got up to.
  The Flats, once a thriving community, is flat in the sense that there are no buildings and few trees: not in the sense that it is level. Between the hills of the Flats, stretches of what were once city streets are slowly being consumed - sidewalks, curbs and all - victims of desertification by bureaucratic fiat. Water still tumbles through a nineteenth century waterworks almost hidden in a deep vale. Tramps across the Flats to the river and the Chaudière Falls were filled with opportunities for wonder and mischief and adventure.
   A grandfather now, I took a walk through the old neighborhood last week. The path across the Flats no longer extends to the river. It ends at four lane ribbons of concrete, an extension of the Western Parkway. The best view of the sunset in all of the nation’s capital, an unnamed look-out where Sparks becomes Bronson, has been blocked by a high rise apartment building. Primrose Park is under construction, fenced off and torn up by heavy equipment at the spring start of a make-over.
  A group of forlorn grade schoolers were watching the excavation when I was there. When one of them suggested they go to No Name Park, I couldn’t help but smile.