FORGOTTEN MONUMENTS

Elizabeth Haggarty
20 September, 2007

There aren’t any Sumachs on Sumach Street. Follow it through the heart of Regent Park and it is the apartment buildings that stand like trees on the deserted street, each run down facades stamped with a Sumach building sign, a forgotten attempt to assure that this is a beautiful boulevard.

It is here at the corner of Dundas and Sumach that construction of a new indoor pool will begin in 2008, six years ahead of schedule. The pool will be part of a central park that will see all buildings on this block and two blocks west demolished.

So, what is the importance of this new pool for Regent Park’s residents? Can it stand as a monument of hope for a rejuvenated housing estate?

“It’s important for the children” a group of young mothers watching that there toddlers don’t stray far on the Doritos wrapper covered grass. “They are the future here and they need something to do.”

The health and happiness of children seem to be the underlying force for improvement on the housing estate. Signs for groups like Better Beginnings, concerned with the health of children in Regent and Moss Park, offer the only visible uplifting messages along the streets, with their posters of rainbows and silhouettes and children running with kites.

Places for sport are desperately needed. In an interview on CBC Radio 1 Kathy Hardill, a nurse at the Regent Park Community Health Centre, said that residents health had been in decline over the last 15 years.

Looking around you can see why children’s health may be in crisis. It’s difficult to exercise when the few green spaces are littered with rubbish. The outdoor pool on the estate is hardly inviting. Now drained for the winter the dirty cement and chain mail fence strewn with signs banning drinking fade perfectly into the apartment towers.

On the corner where the new pool will be built stands a monument to a past vision of a happier Regent Park. The sheltered seating is painted with a mural of colourful smiling fish. A cement fountain is now turned off; the pool of water at its feet rejected even by the city’s pigeons and is now home to rotting paper and crumpled cans.

These dirtied monuments of past optimism still dominate peoples vision of the future in Regents Park and bear a bleak warning: this housing estate was someone’s hopeful dream in the 50’s; a hopefulness, now so covered in grime, graffiti and battered murals, that it is difficult to uncover in these new stages of rejuvenation.

“I’m not coming back” resident after resident tells me “maybe things will get better here,” they say doubtfully, “but, it doesn’t matter I’m not coming back.” Can a new pool wash away a distrust built from years of failed optimism? A group of teenage boys lean against a corrugated iron wall duly eyeing the building in front of them. “I don’t know what will happen, but a new pool has got to be good,” one says to me smiling “It’s got to be good right?” he adds as he scratched his hoodie. Perhaps, the graffiti covered fish might just have stood for something.

For more information on the proposed indoor-pool visit:
http://www.regentparkplan.ca/phasing.htm#Phasing_update
Organizations concerned with children’s health in Regent Park:
http://bbbf.queensu.ca/index_e.html