“In a city with so many great pockets, and many more improving faster than you can say "gentrification", the competition for the title of Number One Neighborhood is cutthroat…” That’s the opening line from Toronto Life’s recent listing of preferential neighborhoods in the city. With an overall rating of 70.0 (only really loosing points to a lack of effective transit – which many could argue applies to most of the city), Don Mills Branbury outshines all but Rosedale as the neighborhood of choice.
But ranking a community by arbitrary (albeit measureable) standards such as Entertainment, Health, Environment, Shopping, Housing, Crime and Transit doesn’t really tell the story of the neighborhood. It doesn’t talk to the community and the people who inhabit it. Our community toy chest does.
Instead of seeing the toys, neatly stacked under the community play set as plastic awaiting recycling, see instead a totally voluntary, non-orchestrated community toy chest. What started as a way for a young mother of three to reduce the chore involved in getting her children and their toys to and from the local park, she chose to leave the toys in the sandbox. Quickly the idea caught on. More and more families added to the growing supply of toys. And nothing makes a toy more interesting than it be something you haven’t played with before, something that didn’t come from your own home. Now, on any day when the temperature is above freezing, tiny hands swarm the play area gleefully running to find their favorite plastic treasure.
The small community park is the centre of the neighborhood. This is a neighborhood made up of all kinds of people who have arrived here from other parts of the city and other parts of the world. This is a community of people and families that enjoy the close living of urban life and enjoy watching the smallest of the community drive plastic trucks through the hills and valleys of the local sandbox.
No comments:
Post a Comment