Yoni Goldstein: The decline of Toronto’s Christie Pits Park is unacceptable

Spectators during Toronto Maple Leafs versus London Majors during Intercounty Baseball League action in Christie Pits park in Toronto, Ont. in Toronto, Ont. on Sunday September 26, 2021. Photo by Ernest Doroszuk/Toronto Sun/Postmedia

Article content

Between the 1980s and the early 2000s, Christie Pits Park in Toronto was not a place you would want to be after it got dark out. At night, the sprawling grounds near Bloor and Bathurst were a notorious gathering place for the city’s drug dealers and consumers. Vandalism and muggings were rampant, as was gang warfare. Torontonians knew not to be caught dead in the park after the sun set unless you were looking for trouble.

Article content

Article content

In the mid-2000s, local residents decided enough was enough and started to clean up the park. Ever since I moved to the neighbourhood in the early 2010s, Christie Pits has been a bastion of peace in the heart of the city — the kind of place you could count on for a fun, safe and cheap time, any time.

Article content

Article content

Article content

The park’s baseball fields have been renovated with help from the Toronto Blue Jays, the playground is clean and welcoming, the pool is packed. In the winter, the skating rink hosts free parent-child shinny, and in the summer the Toronto Maple Leafs baseball team attracts a few hundred mostly young people to its weekend games in what used to be known as the Intercounty Baseball League and is now known as the Canadian Baseball League. The local community regularly comes together for pizza nights at the brick oven in the very heart of the park; rarely does a summer weekend go by without a cultural festival of some sort.

Article content

Christie Pits has been an idyllic place to raise children for as long as my family has lived near it. My kids learned how to swim at the pool, how to skate at the rink, and how to build friendships on the climbing structures. But that is changing again, in a way that hearkens back to the Pits of old.

Article content

Article content

It started in 2024 on the Canada Day long weekend, when an annual fireworks display, organized and patrolled by local residents, was infiltrated by youths from outside the neighbourhood who decided it was a good idea to light their own pyrotechnics and aim them at people in the park. The scene was pure chaos: kids running around launching fireworks aimlessly as families tried to get their young ones to safety while sparks exploded all around them like tracers.

Article content

Police eventually converged on the scene and closed the park. Ever since, Christie Pits has been shuttered on Canada Day as dusk settles, with police cars ringing the perimeter and Christie Street closed to traffic. The best you can do these days is sit at the very top of the park and gaze southward as light shows ascend above the tree line from the city’s official celebration spots.

Article content

There have been other signs of deterioration at Christie Pits in recent years: increased vandalism, especially around the skate park, more drunk and high people roaming around at night, public washrooms closed for long periods of time, protests that turn violent, anti-Israel posters glued on every available surface. And then last Saturday evening, two people were stabbed in the park and sent to hospital. Once again, police cars patrolled the neighbourhood, and officers closed the park.