Remember when the Sylvia Holden Park kerfuffle started two years ago?
At the time, we were trying to figure out where exactly the park formally was. Or, maybe I was the only one who thought it was the park at the bend of Holmwood Ave. with the ball diamonds. Turns out the park was closer to the corner of Bank St. and the ball diamonds are part of Lansdowne Community Park.
With the redevelopment, the current Sylvia Holden Park will be wiped out. So, staff are now proposing to change the name of Lansdowne Community Park to Sylvia Holden Park.
Got all that?
Here’s the explanation staff use in the latest report on the proposed Lansdowne urban park:
Sylvia Holden Park – Transfer of Park Name
The former City of Ottawa honoured Sylvia Holden in 1994 for her many years of community involvement and the promotion of community recreation by naming the park at the southeast corner of Bank Street and Holmwood Avenue after her.
As part of the redevelopment of Lansdowne Park, there will no longer be a public park at the corner of Bank Street and Holmwood Avenue. While there will be a substantial amount of public space throughout the mixed-use area, staff recommend that the commemoration of Sylvia Holden Park be maintained by transfering it to the nearby community park known as the Lansdowne Community Park. This transfer will provide an appropriate and tangible alternative honouring Sylvia Holden in a nearby park that serves the same community. The transfer will also provide a clear distinction in names between the Lansdowne urban park and what is currently know as the Lansdowne community park.
Some people still care about what the truth was, but it seems like City staff would just like to put it all to bed, and pretend like none of it existed by RE-applying the name Sylvia Holden to the recreational park that has been allowed to remain.
Here are a few tidbits, for nay who might care.
Article from 1995, which includes a photo of then City COuncillor, Jim Watson, cutting the ribbon on Sylvia Holden Park. I wonder what Mayor Watson thought he was unveiling then? A park, or just a parklike thing? And I suppose that the grassy bit along Holmwood where the City planted all those trees connecting the two parts was just a no man’s land.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_W9tyFkZf4Q0/S7qOX3Z0c2I/AAAAAAAAABM/_JgXhHXjJi8/s1600/Jim+Watsonsc03.jpg
This fact sheet by Save Sylvia Holden Park points out that Sylvia Holden Park originally had two elements, a Sylvia Holden Commemorative Park, at the corner of Bank and Holmwood, and Sylvia Holden Community Park, that the the CIty quietly chnaged to Lansdowne Community Park in their parks database:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_W9tyFkZf4Q0/S-oEy0_eyeI/AAAAAAAAACc/zPmEKuFq94E/s1600/Screen+shot+2010-05-11+at+9.27.54+PM.png
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_W9tyFkZf4Q0/S-oElrxNawI/AAAAAAAAACU/IKgY82m4Txs/s1600/Screen+shot+2010-05-11+at+9.28.21+PM.png
The only reason to transfer the name to the Community Park is because the City did some jiggery-pokery the other year to change the name in their Parks database from Sylvia Holden for the whole of the park from Bank and Holmwood, all the way along Holmwood to the recreational park at Holmwood and O’Connor, to two separate entities, one now called Lansdowne Community Park.
Despite that, it was always understood by the community, and by the City crews that mowed it, that the whole thing was Sylvia Holden Park. And the address on the change/bathrooms pavilion next to the wading pool has always been 945, not O’Connor – it’s in the 600s down that way – but Bank Street, because it was the address of the portion of the park on Bank Street.
In the end, it was concluded that none of that mattered, because apparently the old City never enacted a park dedication by-law to formally dedicate the property as a park, so even though everybody treated it as a park for more than 20 years, apparently that didn’t matter, so it was just peachy to throw whichever parts were convenient into the Lansdowne Live wood chipper.
But then, after the Sylvia Holden Park along Holmwood was despatched, the City went ahead and enacted a bylaw to convert any other previously un-dedicated parks into proper parks, thus avoiding any future messy arguments about which local parks were or were not parks, and whether it would require a vote of full Council to decertify them.
Just a few inconvenient facts that the City decided should in no way be allowed to stand in the way of PROGRESS.
Additional info provided by Adrian Evans, who led the effort in 2010 to protect the recreational portion of Sylvia Holden Park from being lumped into the Lansdowne redevelopment.
The upshot, as I referred to, is that in March 2010 the City severed Sylvia Holden Park into two.
Screen captures from the City of Ottawa’s Parks Inventory (see pg. 3 of document linked below) show on March 9th that Sylvia Holden Park was addressed at 10 Fifth Avenue, with an area of 2.56 acres, and then on the 29th it is addressed at 945 Bank Street with an area of 0.46 acres; and the recreational park addressed at 10 Fifth Ave is now called Lansdowne Community Park.
https://docs.google.com/open?id=1H8wszXAPJAmG-OZPhvpBd7GSqzBcVze0QSc4iUWY8mkiJSg0G2us6il8Yf-o