Tag Archives: Regent Park

Moss Park Community Centre, Toronto

Health, Life and Times, Personal, Senior Sexy, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

john innes community centerDuring a terrific lunch with Lorrie after a radiation treatment this last week. (Three down two to go) I talked about the amazing dances that I would go to on Friday nights at the Moss Park Community Centre. Today this 3.4 hectare downtown park at Queen Street East and Sherbourne Street features a lighted ball diamond, two tennis courts, a basket ball court, a wading pool and a children`s playground. On the east side of the park is the Moss Park Arena and the John Innes Community Recreation Centre.  Back in the sixties and seventies, it was the center with lots of green space, hockey in the winter and swimming in the summer.  It’s where I learned to swim and stand on a pair of skates.  The center was monitored and maintained by dedicated people who cared about the youth in the community and attempted to engage, encourage and stimulate us to see a future.  They believed they could make a difference.  For some of us they did.

The recreation center was the gathering place for us kids to meet socially let off some steam and for me the best part was to dance on a Friday night.  To set the scene you need a little emotional physical and environmental background to fully appreciate how these dances modeled our lives.

I was probably around 13 when I use to seek out to these dances. I would climb out of a second story window onto a roof over the door, and then drop down.  Getting back in was a little trickier.  I was born into a family of biracial kids. Our mixed genes allowed my siblings and I to present as exotic, tall, and sensuous people with golden skin tones in an environment that was mostly white Irish and European.   We were extremely beautiful and attractive to the opposite sex and of course we had rhythm and could dance. We were like the beautiful peacocks with feathers all in plumb, strutting around with the glorious tails to attract only the best and it worked for we were never without a partner to dance.  Dancing was free to learn and the center Friday night dance was a quarter to attend.

To prepare every week we would be glued to our television … oh yes, black and white TV, watching Soul train and Dick Clark American Bandstand following and nailing down the latest moves which came so easy to us. We had James brown and my idol Dianna Ross. The early seventies were about the music and the beat that took over your body right down to your core. The dance was almost tribal in its movements on the floor. Everyone felt it and unlike the dances of the teens today. I’ve supervised a few high school dances for my daughter were you had a few dancers up all doing there own thing and everyone else standing around against the walls.  Back then, the dance was a ritual and a right of passage.  Everyone moved no one sat the sidelines. We slipped, swayed, slide and dipped in our line dances and oh my … did we grind to the slow tunes. That was the dance of young passion and it definitely generated competition among the sexes.  For my siblings and me, we ruled those dances.   My brothers had a following of poor infatuated girls, just fawning after them on all levels and as for my sister and I; we weren’t really interested in the boys other than as dance partners.  The boys did not mind, they were dancing with the hottest girls and we were amazing wonderful dancers.  With our without the boys I easily got lost in the music and could dance in a room full of people, in a world all my own to a beat and rhythm that was part of my soul.

Sometimes, when I close my eyes today and I hear the wonderful dance pulse, I feel the music, see the dance and feel the rush of the beat coursing through my body.  Dancing was and is a feel good emotion for your body and soul and of course when I’m having a good day, I still get up and swing and sway it’s in the blood, only sometimes I have to remember that things don’t quite bend in the same way.  So, when no one is looking turn on your favourite music and do a slow, winding bump and grind… or better still grab your partner and waltz them around the kitchen.   It’s a guaranteed simile for the day

Regent Park, Toronto

Life and Times, Personal, , , , , , , , , , ,

Regent Park, Toronto, Canada, the projects as we called them.  The last time I had visited the area was a year ago after being away for over 25 years.  I was stunned, in my youth there was low-rise brown block buildings on the north and to the south townhouses and tall apartment now nothing but rubble and shattered brick.  It looked like a bomb had just blasted all of south Regent away.  A war zone, in the middle of Toronto.  I vaguely remember hearing on TV or the radio that Regent Park was going to be up for redevelopment but must admit I was not prepared for what I saw.

As I drove around to Park School where I spent my elementary years there was only the facade with the name “Park Public School” held up by boards, All the rest of it gone just rubble in the wind.  My life just wiped out as if it had never existed.  I experienced a sadness even though I grew up hating the place.

Built in 1949 Regent Park was a redevelopment for the slums of Cabbagetown.  It was Canada’s first public housing project and in the 1950’s and included the area south of Gerrard Street, later know as Regent Park South. That’s where I grew up.

In 1960 my family was one of the first families with kids of colour  (my mother was Irish and my father a black Canadian).  We moved into the apartment called Whiteside Place.  I was eight the eldest of six.   Most other residents were made up of the poor and working-class people of British and Irish descent, with a few European Jewish and Balkan immigrants.  So you see with being half Irish we fit right in.  No not really, I must admit it took awhile with lots of scrapping, name calling  and bloody noses.  My play yard after school was climbing in and out of the old chemical tankers on Shutter across from the school.

What I remember most was the violence, the drinking and the sexual abuse.  As females growing up in that type of environment without any community support it was like living in a third world country with no rights.  It was all about male dominance and power and control.  Out of the few girlfriends I had each and everyone of them had been sexually abused and there was no one there to help us.  Our mothers were either victims themselves or drunks even the police were in on it.  My God they use to come over and sit and drink with my abusive father, who they knew beat my mother on a regular basis.  So, when I read Regent Park was originally designed to alleviate the area’s substandard housing, crime, and social problems, I laughed.  The city threw all their unwanted into that cesspool “out of sight out of mind” and it was a fight for survival for every man woman and child.  With every weekend a brawl and women screaming late into the night.

I left when I was sixteen came back a few times through the years to try and have a relationship with my parents and siblings, but in the end I drifted away only to return to see a blasted out whole that was once my life.  Hopefully, with redevelopment and the attempt to make the community mixed use and with proper community support what lays beneath the old Regent Park in the dark place under the new  stays in the rubble and the shinny glass and metal I see going up brings some light.