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From the December 2009 Newsletter:

WINTER CAMPFIRES

In winter there are lots of birthday-and-skating parties, at the rink-side campfire near the smaller bake-oven. The rink house can’t be booked for birthday parties – it’s open for everybody, not rented out privately – and even the campfire circle is not closed to drop-ins when there’s a party.

Even so, a campfire-and-skating party seems to work very well for celebrations. To book a campfire by the rink, or at the central campfire site, speak to the recreation staff at the rink house, or e-mail staff@dufferinpark.ca. You can borrow marshmallow sticks, pot and pot-stand, oven mitts, ladles, etc. But you have to bring your own wood.

From the October 2009 Newsletter:

CAMPFIRES

Fall is a time when people’s thoughts turn to campfires, smoke curling upwards, the good smell of something tasty cooking over a fire, the beautiful colours of the leaves – and so on. This means that Dufferin Grove Park’s program staff get a lot of requests for campfire permits.

The campfires at Dufferin Grove Park are a bit different than the regular city campfires, which are arranged with the central Permit Office. Centrally booked permits cost $53 and they are located in the more woodsy, natural areas of the largest city parks – in the ravines, beside the rivers, and on Toronto Island. The campfires at Dufferin Grove, in contrast, are a special program in a densely settled neighbourhood. They were started partly to add a lively activity to the park at night and thereby increase the “eyes on the park.” The park becomes friendlier and safer for people passing through after dark. The other reason for the campfire program is that campfires can be a wonderful way for neighbours to gather.

There have been a great many campfires in the fifteen years since the program was established. The sight of people gathered at the fire circle has cheered many park users. But lately the requests for campfires have felt a little overwhelming at times. The program staff have been taking pains to make it clear that the campfires involve a trade: if you have a fire, you and your campfire friends become volunteers for the park. Having a campfire is not like “booking a campsite” or “reserving a table at a restaurant,“ as one very disappointed park user recently said in frustration. She had expected a space reliably reserved for her own party, but instead she found that the site was being used as a sacred fire circle during the pow wow, and that the “firekeepers” would not be finished until half an hour into her picnic. The park program staff are now trying to emphasize more clearly: campfires mean joining the life of the park, not reserving a spot that will be punctually ready for your own group. If the pow wow runs half an hour later than expected, that’s part of the way parks are. They are public, not private, full of the surprise of the unexpected.

At the same time, one kind of surprise is unwelcome at the campfires: any kind of percussion. Campfires are not drumming circles, out of respect for the park neighbours who live so near. For drumming, it’s best to reserve a regular City campfire area, where your group can drum together beside a river or in a woodsy ravine.

At Dufferin Grove, park campfire volunteers must keep an eye out for trouble. They might welcome a stranger into the circle. They can explain to curious park users about how the park runs and how campfires are set up. Sometimes they share their extra food – especially with nosy children who come by from the playground. In return, campfire volunteers get the use of pots and pot stands and marshmallow sticks, shovels and buckets for water, stir spoons and oven mitts and kindling. Most of them willingly contribute $10 for the upkeep of these supplies. There’s no campfire fee beyond that.

To volunteer for one of those kinds of campfires: call 416 392-0913, or (even better) e-mail staff@dufferinpark.ca.

From the September 2009 Newsletter:

CAMPFIRE NEWS

Campfire permits are available throughout the fall. You pay a much lower fee than the city’s normal bonfire permits (only a $10 donation for the use of the campfire equipment).

In return, when you have a campfire, you also undertake to be a park warden during that time, keeping a eye on the park and thereby making it safe and friendly.

A dark, empty park looks much more welcoming if you add in the glow of a campfire, surrounded by people roasting marshmallows, or quietly strumming on a guitar. The fire circles are intentionally located near the main path so that people walking through the park will come across this pleasing sight.

To book a campfire, contact the park’s program staff: 416 392-0913, or staff@dufferinpark.ca.

From the May 2009 Newsletter:

CAMPFIRES

There are two different ways to have a campfire in a city park. One is to get a permit from the central permit office, for one of the bonfire sites in a large park in the ravines or on Toronto Island. The permit costs $72.61 and the insurance cost is tied to the number of people – for example, if there were 20 people coming, the insurance would cost $54.

Firewood is included in the price. A campfire fee of $126.61 means that it would work for larger groups or a corporate function, but not so much for a regular-size gathering of a group of families or friends on a tight budget.

With persistent encouragement from Dufferin Grove friends, the City has kept another approach available – campfires run as recreation programs. That means that people who want to cook over a campfire or sing around it, can have such a fire, with a $10 donation for upkeep of the campfire equipment: -- the trivet, frying pans, pots, and marshmallow/hot dog sticks. The reasoning is that such campfires add friendliness to the park, and increase park safety (more “eyes on the park”). Often food is shared beyond the group that planned the gathering. And a campfire is a beautiful sight. If that’s the kind of campfire you would like, contact the park staff at 416 391-0913, or e-mail them at staff@dufferinpark.ca. You have to bring your own firewood, though.

From the December 2008 Newsletter:

WINTER CAMPFIRES

In winter there are lots of birthday-and-skating parties, at the rink-side campfire near the smaller bake-oven. The rink house can’t be booked for birthday parties – it’s open for everybody, not permitted out privately – and even the campfire circle is not closed to drop-ins when there’s a party. Even so, a campfire-and-skating party seems to work very well for celebrations. To book a campfire by the rink, or at the two other park campfire sites, speak to the recreation staff at the rink house, or e-mail staff@dufferinpark.ca.

From the November 2008 Newsletter:

Thursday November 13, 6 - 7 p.m. World Town Planning Day campfire and meeting

Urban planning students Katherine Sparkes and Eldon Theodore have set up a park campfire meeting for planners, to discuss how Dufferin Grove Park evolved into a park where people can often meet around food. Other park users interested in the topic are welcome to drop in to the campfire and contribute. Do you think the park has too much going on in it? Let the urban planners hear your views.

From the October 2008 Newsletter:

CAMPFIRES

In October there are two small-group campfire locations – centre path and south path. The centre path fire circle is in the middle of the park, and the south path fire circle is beside the cob courtyard. The park’s recreation staff book the cooking fire times. They also give fire safety training and are available to help start/end your fire. You can reach them at 416-392-0913 or email staff@dufferinpark.ca.

CELOS regularly maintains and provides grills, a cast-iron stand (if you want to cook more than marshmallows or hot dogs on a stick), pots and pans for campfire permits. Suggested donation of $10 for upkeep. Park staff will give you water, pails, and a shovel. You have to bring your own wood and be quiet and respectful of park neighbours.

From the August 2008 Newsletter:

CAMPFIRES

For the summer and fall, there are two small-group campfire locations – centre path and south path. The centre path fire circle is in the middle of the park, and the south path fire circle is beside the cob courtyard. The park’s recreation staff book the cooking fire times. They also give fire safety training and are available to help start/end your fire. You can reach them at 416-392-0913 or email staff@dufferinpark.ca.

CELOS regularly maintains and provides grills, a cast-iron stand (if you want to cook more than marshmallows or hot dogs on a stick), pots and pans for campfire permits. Suggested donation of $10 for upkeep. Park staff will give you water, pails, and a shovel. You have to bring your own wood and be quiet and respectful of park neighbours.

In July 2008 Newsletter

From the January 2008 Newsletter

WINTER CAMPFIRES

So far this year there haven’t been many campfires with hot chocolate beside the rink, to keep warm by when it’s too full in the rink house. The staff had to stop making them when they became a hangout for bored youth with various kinds of trouble-making on their minds. They’ll try again now that the holidays have come and gone. Birthday skating parties can book campfires (since no party can book the inside of the rinkhouse – too crowded). Get in touch with rink staff (staff@dufferinpark.ca, or 416 392-0913, or talk to them in person) at least 48 hours before you want your campfire – that’s the rule since last year’s proliferation of formal protocols.

It’s been exactly a year since Parks supervisor Peter Leiss suspended all campfires and then re-instated them with a much more complicated protocol that has added layers of bureaucracy. There are 171 e-mail exchanges about the campfire struggle, posted on the “problems and follow-up section” of the dufferinpark.ca web site, and there may be many more internal ones that park users never saw. All this for a procedure which is almost identical to what has worked well for 13 years!

When CELOS asked to see the draft protocols and the internal e-mails that resulted in so much extra bureaucracy, they were told it would cost them $1700 for staff to get that information out. Another appeal to the Provincial Commissioner, sigh….

Older Campfire News

From the December 2007 Newsletter

WINTER CAMPFIRES

Most Sundays there will be a campfire with hot chocolate beside the rink, to keep warm by when it’s too full in the rink house. There will also be a campfire on many market days, for skaters to warm up when the rink house is full of market-goers. Birthday skating parties can book campfires (since no party can book the inside of the rinkhouse – too crowded). Get in touch with rink staff (staff@dufferinpark.ca, or 416 392-0913, or talk to them in person) at least 48 hours before you want your campfire – that’s the rule since last year’s tightening.

And of course there’s always the woodstove inside, with books and magazines on the shelf and the windowsill, for people who want a warm break from skating.

Campfire News:

In August 2007 Newsletter

In July 2007 Newsletter

In June 2007 Newsletter

Important Notice:

posted January 30, 2007

CAMPFIRE PERMISSION HAS BEEN RE-INSTATED

Staff and friends worked for many days to get back the campfire permission that was removed on Jan.26. You can read the thread of conversation about this issue so far or email staff@dufferinpark.ca if you want to receive email updates. Also see Campfire Protest Letters for some community response. The campfire protest letters were so interesting that they form the basis of a new campfire handbook that has now gone out to the mayor and councillors, and is available at Dufferin Rink.

posted May 01, 2007

Jane's Campfire Walk

Saturday May 5th
Noon to 2 p.m. - meet at the East exit of Lansdowne TTC Station (Emerson Ave.).

Last year Mayor Miller declared May 4 to be Jane Jacobs Day in Toronto (that was her birthday). The next day (May 5) is the first occasion of what Jane’s friends hope will be an annual day of neighbourhood walks to mark her love of cities and of the many ordinary people who make them lively.

In this neighbourhood, the walk is called “Jane’s campfire walk.” It starts at noon at Susan Tibaldi Park (just north of Bloor, on the subway lands behind Duffy’s Tavern, visible from the Emerson Ave exit of the Lansdowne TTC station). Park campfire staff Anna Bekerman and Amy Withers will be cooking fritters made with wild greens and farmers’ market eggs over the campfire there, and artist/activist Dyan Marie will talk about how the area is changing. The walk will go to the site of the new railpath park to pick some more wild greens and get a sneak peak at the sculptures that John Dickson has prepared for the site. The walk then moves on to the heritage buildingsand theTower Automotive building in the Sterling Ave. light industrial area that will soon house a very large new movie studio.

Along Sterling Avenue the zoning is "light industrial," which ranges from the large Moloney Electric Company to warehouses for fish and for marble slabs, to small units making kitchen cabinets, to a place called Sanctuary, a well-equipped cabinet-making shop for homeless people who want to have meaningful work.

The second campfire will be waiting at MacGregor Park, with more tasty food. Artist-in-residence Kristen Fahrig will talk about (and show) what she’s doing there with kids. Then the walk will follow Dundas (with its wonderful mix of old and new, oddly-angled buildings) over to Gladstone.

Brockton triangle resident Emily Visser has some fascinating stories to tell about that stretch of the oldest street in this neighbourhood. Walking north on Gladstone, Kim Malcomson will be at St.Anne’s Church to tell a little about it. From there the walk ends at Dufferin Grove Park, at the third campfire near the cob courtyard, with Anna and Amy cooking the final course, and toasting forks for people who want to cook their own hot dogs or toast marshmallows.

This walk has multiple options for shortcuts, or dawdling and catching up (for parents with little kids). For people with good walking shoes, there will also be a chance for a detour with railpath enthusiast Bruce Ward and park staff Corey Chivers along the proposed rail path park site to get a close look at the grand graffiti show on the multiple piers underneath the Dundas streetcar bridge.

If walking the entire thing isn't for you and you would like to join up with the walk somewhere along the way, you can see the main stops on the map below.

There are lots of other “Jane’s walks” in the city that day too: see www.janeswalk.net/
See the route map below for the locations of some of the points of interest.

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For the Jane's walk website, including other walk locations, see www.janeswalk.net.

Other Links:

• Rail Path Park Landscape Diagrams (pdf >>)
• Rail Path Park Project Summary (doc >>)
• Rail Path Park maps (doc >>)
• Brockton Village wiki
• Greenspots

posted February 03, 2007

COOKING FIRES SUSPENDED

Back in 1993, the friends of the park got their first cooking fire permit. Isabel Perez cooked tortillas with the kids who came to the park. That worked so well that the following year the City added a fire permit beside the rink house. Some youth who were in a gang called the ‘Latinos Americanos’ helped cook soup and hot chocolate there. It worked so well attracting families back to the rink that the cooking fires have gone on ever since. People began to arrange cooking-fire times for birthdays and school outings and family reunions, and since most of those occasions were in the evenings, the park got safer, from having more people in it after dark (“eyes on the park”).

Dufferin Rink staff have recently begun to "take the show on the road" in a few places, collaborating with Rec staff at other parks to see if what they developed at Dufferin can be adapted to other neighbourhoods. In January there were two wonderful events at Wallace Rink and Campbell Rink, each including a DJ, good food, a skate rental van, and a campfire.

Read more >>

posted February 11, 2007

Montreal Gets Winter

Patrick Mullin for Metro Toronto:

I was walking along Montreal’s salt-stained Avenue Laurier when I spotted it. Fire! Yes, deep inside the wooded Parc Lahaie, cheery against the dim of a fading winter afternoon, there were not one, but two untended bonfires blazing.

This doesn’t happen in safety-crazed Toronto, where Dufferin Grove Park regulars are pleading to keep their beloved rinkside fires, and where there are actually signs reading “Caution: Water’s Edge” at a place called “Harbourfront.” So I stopped to investigate. Over the course of 15 minutes, about a dozen locals came through the park, many of them stopping briefly to warm up. That’s when it dawned on me — Montreal “gets” winter.

Thanks to Wallie Seto for finding this

Comment on Patrick Mullin's article from Montreal student Roxi Bechmann: I haven't seen those specific untended fires, but I have definitely seen other fairly unattended fires especially in the evening. There are a lot of festivals and festival-esque community things around here, and every one of them has an outdoor fire or two.

posted February 03, 2007

COOKING FIRES SUSPENDED

Back in 1993, the friends of the park got their first cooking fire permit. Isabel Perez cooked tortillas with the kids who came to the park. That worked so well that the following year the City added a fire permit beside the rink house. Some youth who were in a gang called the ‘Latinos Americanos’ helped cook soup and hot chocolate there. It worked so well attracting families back to the rink that the cooking fires have gone on ever since. People began to arrange cooking-fire times for birthdays and school outings and family reunions, and since most of those occasions were in the evenings, the park got safer, from having more people in it after dark (“eyes on the park”).

Dufferin Rink staff have recently begun to "take the show on the road" in a few places, collaborating with Rec staff at other parks to see if what they developed at Dufferin can be adapted to other neighbourhoods. In January there were two wonderful events at Wallace Rink and Campbell Rink, each including a DJ, good food, a skate rental van, and a campfire.

A campfire provides the "heart" for such a neighbourhood event. The fire's beauty draws people together and makes food taste better. A campfire is a “story magnet.” It loosens tongues so that often even shy people begin to talk to one another.

But the new Parks supervisor, Peter Leiss, was concerned and unhappy about the safety of having all those cooking fires in parks, and he began to question the practice. The Fire Safety section at City Hall was contacted, and after the second cooking fire at Wallace Rink, Fire Captain John Lyons came out there to look.

The second Wallace Rink cooking fire had taken place right after an ice rainstorm that coated the ground and the trees, and the fire site area was very slippery. The least slippery spot was near a pine tree, so the cooking fire staff made the fire there, with close attention so there was no damage to the tree. Then they spent time in the week afterwards, chipping out the ice from the more distant fire site for the following Sunday.

But when Captain Lyons saw the old ashes near the tree, he said that anyone making a fire near a tree was an “imbecile,” and that cooking fire permission for anyone, including staff, was immediately withdrawn – at Dufferin Grove too.

So in the days that followed, rink staff had the painful task of calling all the people who had planning a cooking fire by the rink. They couldn’t get hold of them all. The worst was having to disappoint a group of 25 kids who had come over from a Toronto Community Housing project with their packages of hot dogs and marshmallows. Ouch.

FEBRUARY 9 CAMPFIRE RULE-BOOK UPDATE

If Parks supervisor Peter Leiss had been around when some park neighbours first got involved in making Dufferin Grove Park more lively, none of the liveliness would have happened. Mr.Leiss would have pulled out his rule book and that would have been the end of it. But the chilly wind of bureaucracy wasn’t blowing as hard ten years ago as it is now.

January 26, a new order came down: no more cooking fires by the rink, nor by Wallace or Campbell rinks. Parks supervisor Peter Leiss gave the order to stop them on the grounds of “inadequate protocol." Thirteen years of campfires at the park with no injury, and suddenly they were stopped! From the very beginning there had been an agreement about the park fire permit with Toronto Fire, but Parks management said they no longer recognized that agreement. They backed up some of their safety concerns with the Occupational Health and Safety Act, legislation directed at employees but broadened by Parks management to apply to almost every situation.

When the order came to cancel the campfires, one woman wrote a protest e-mail to the Parks supervisor. So he let her have her campfire after all, even though everyone else was banned. Then a new protocol -- meant to apply to the whole city in exactly the same form -- was devised, then rewritten, and rewritten again. The first meeting to discuss the new fire protocol didn’t include any rink staff or rink friends. The next two meetings allowed two rink staff to attend, but still no community people.

All was confusion. One day it seemed that all campfires would revert to the jurisdiction of the central permitting office, costing $53.50 each time, with no local park staff supervision. Then it seemed that park staff would have to be present every minute to oversee the campfire groups – a staffing expense for which there is no budget (and no need). Then there was a hint that the city was considering banning all campfires from city parks, under any circumstances. It was impossible to find out more.

Then suddenly, before any new rink protocol was ready for public presentation, the Park supervisor called the rink to tell the staff that the campfires had been temporarily restored. This would be in effect for a weekend, or maybe even for a month. The rules would be the old fire safety rules that have been in place for thirteen years.

A happy development? “Better than a kick in the teeth” …. but not much. The staff meetings generated so far by this ban involved a forester, a fire chief, a Recreation supervisor, a Parks supervisor, a Parks manager, a Permit officer, four Dufferin Rink staff, and an assistant to the General Manager, most of them repeatedly, all of them already overworked. Rink friends wrote letters and called the councillor and the mayor’s office. Countless exasperated conversations took place at the rink among skaters, on e-mail, around dinner tables. These bureaucratic collisions take so much of everyone’s time! A remedy is in everyone’s interest.

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You can read the thread of conversation about this issue so far or email campfires@dufferinpark.ca if you want to receive email updates. You can also have a look at our campfires page for information about the campfire program, and Campfire Protest Letters for some community response.

posted May 10, 2006

CAMPFIRES AT THE PARK - A Review

The park has a year-round fire permit, so gathering around a campfire with your friends is pretty easy. These are the rules: if you want to borrow the permit, you need to have a little campfire training session with one of the park staff, during staff hours (staff always stay late on Wednesdays and Thursdays, if daytimes are no good for you). It takes about 15 minutes to go over everything. At that time you can also let the staff know where you plan to have the fire (there are three possible fire sites).

You need to bring your own firewood but we can usually give you some kindling if you like. We'll give you two pails of water and a shovel, which have to be returned to the rink house at the end of your fire.

The person who signs the permit takes full legal responsibility for any injury -- there's a waiver that you'll have to sign. (But people are pretty smart about fires - in 11 years of frequent park campfires, we’ve not yet had an injury.) We ask you for a donation of $10, just to cover staff time. To book, call the park at 416 392-0913

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