Long-awaited skatepark gets rolling
Eighth Street Parkette will be home to the city’s newest skateboard park.
Soil testing of the former Birmingham Street tannery land in June identified “low levels” of metals including arsenic, barium and beryllium, as well as PCBs, hydrocarbons and phenols, report a city-hired geotechnical consulting firm.
The finding essentially greenlights the $500,000 project.
“There is no threat to human or environmental health,” Bob Ostry, senior consultant and hydrogeologist with Stouffville-based AME Materials Engineering, told about 40 residents and skaters at a community meeting Thursday night at Lakeshore Collegiate.
“The levels are low. We don’t anticipate a problem. There is no stress vegetation. The grass is green, the trees are growing, the birds are chirping.”
Consultants found the levels two feet deep in fill soil, the result Ostry said, of a 1977 Islington Avenue reconstruction not from the former tannery operations.
Ground water is not affected, he said.
Low levels are isolated to two small areas in the northwest and northeast of the parkette, outside the proposed 1,875-sq.m. skatepark build area.
A planned site-specific risk assessment will evaluate remediation options, including soil excavation, Ostry explained.
Next comes skatepark design.
Skaters are invited this Friday, Nov. 13 to a skatepark design workshop from 4 to 6:30 p.m. at The Assembly Hall, East Room.
A community working group to design the skatepark will also be struck.
“What should be there? What should not be there,” Ward 6 Councillor Mark Grimes said of the committee’s task. “This (skateboard park) has been very contentious. At the end of the day, we want to work with residents to make it the best it can be.”
Absence of acrimony over the south Etobicoke skatepark follows outrage expressed by residents in 2006 over a city recommendation, later abandoned, to build the skateboard park in the naturalized, lakefront Colonel Samuel Smith Park.
New-age skatepark design incorporates trees, greenspace – even art, said skatepark designer Ariel Stagni with New Line Skatepark, the firm hired by the city to design the Etobicoke skateboard park.
New Line recently designed skateparks in Brantford and London, Ont., and another in Los Angeles.
“When people think about skateparks, they think about old skatepark design of 15 years ago and a lot of concrete,” Stagni said. “Now design is about trying to bring a lot of greenspace into the design, into the skateable space.”
Not all skaters seemed enamored.
“We’re trying to get a skateboard park built that can’t look like a skatepark. It has to look like something else,” said veteran skater Ryan Geluch. “It’s a small piece of land. It looks like the skateboard park is getting incrementally smaller and smaller.”
Some $400,000 is available to construct the skatepark, with another $100,000 budgeted for consultants’ fees, soil testing.
Grimes reiterated a commitment to seek out donations of concrete, as happened with the skatepark built in Ward 32, Councillor Sandra Bussin’s ward.
There, St. Marys Cement donated $250,000 worth of concrete to the 1,935 sq. m. Ashbridge’s Bay Skatepark at Toronto’s eastern waterfront.
Retaining greenspace at the Etobicoke skatepark concerned some residents.
The project dubbed Skatespot at Eighth Street Park’s proposes a skateable space of approximately half of the parkette.
“We’ll retain as much greenery as possible,” Patrick Li, principal with ADA Collaborative Landscape Architects said. “We’ll incorporate a footpath diagonally east to northwest and retain existing trees on the berms (hills).”
Li said he hoped the skatepark design could accommodate the parkette’s existing, relatively new children’s playscape after some residents urged it be retained.
Skater Rob Mark embraced the new location.
“I promise nothing bad will come out of this,” said Mark, who last year sat with 11 others on a community working group that recommended Eighth Street Parkette from an initial list of 20 sites. “Skateboarding is a positive influence. In some kids’ lives, it’s all they have.”
Skatepark designs will be unveiled at a Dec. 17 community open house.
The project then goes to tender, with a contractor awarded by April.
Skatespot at Eighth Street Park could open next August.
[ Inside Toronto ]
