Christie Pits pizza nights sliced by city
Two summers ago, some parents watching their kids at the playground in Christie Pits Park looked over and noticed what looked like a miniature house — a community bake oven that was built 10 years earlier by volunteers, but since had been sealed with a padlock.
A great idea struck the group: Community pizza nights in the park.
The idea went off beautifully. The volunteer group Friends of Christie Pits Park stretched the dough every week, slathering on tomato sauce and mozzarella. A city recreation worker manned the oven. Some nights they baked as many as 80 pizzas.
Though the city had to pay the staff member, the products from having up to 100 people sitting in the park together every Friday night — the reduced crime, the cigarette butts and empty pop cans removed, the sense of neighbourhood pride and park ownership — were difficult to quantify.
”We’ve become a community,” says Monica Gupta, the chair of Friends of Christie Pits. ”It shows what passion we have for our community. We want to keep it going.”
Unfortunately, however, they’ve fallen prey to a recent crackdown by the city on irregular recreation programming. That means that if they want to keep running pizza nights, they will have to get a permit every Friday and pay city recreation staff to work the oven, Gupta says.
That will be expensive. A permit alone costs almost $100, she says. And rec staff? “We can’t afford it. We are all just volunteers.”
Three weeks before the ninth annual “Icycle” event at Dufferin Grove rink — which features 50 people on bikes racing across the ice before a crowd of 200 — earlier this month, organizer Derek Chadbourne was told it was no longer considered part of the recreation programming and he’d need a permit and insurance.
Same thing for the family skate day at the Wallace Emerson rink. And the Women of Winter Outdoor Shinny Tournament, which has been considered the showcase event for women’s pick-up hockey in the city for five years, was told they’d have to start paying fees next year.
“When you add fees to volunteer events, you effectively end them,” says tournament organizer Deirdre Norman.
Malcolm Bromley, the city’s director of recreation, said his aim was to build more programs, not destroy existing ones. But he also said programs need to be regulated.