Some Photos & Facts About Rouge Park

Rouge Park is slated to become the first urban National Park in Canada — and the biggest urban National Park in the whole world. It's on the very eastern edge of our city, running up along the Rouge River and the border between Toronto and Pickering. I recently headed out there to check it out and can tell you it's pretty freaking awesome. I posted my photos, along with more information and some historical facts about it to Facebook. And you can those out, whether or not you have a Facebook account, here.

Clayton Ruby & Buffy Sainte-Marie In 1967

As I write this post, Clayton Ruby is in court. He's the lawyer trying to get Rob Ford booted from office as Mayor for a conflict of interest. (You can read more about the case on Torontoist over here.) He's been fighting for progressive causes in Toronto since the 1960s. That's when he set up a free legal clinic on the streets of Yorkville, offering free legal advice to people, including hippies who had run into trouble with the police and draft resisters who had come to Canada to avoid fighting in Vietnam. 

Here he is, in this photo from 1967, at the Love-In at Queen's Park. That's Buffy Saint-Marie performing. And that's the young Clayton Ruby in the glasses in the front row.

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I first learned about Ruby in the '60s thanks to Stuart Henderson's excellent book, Making The Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s which I wrote a bit about here. 

Dream 03 "The Death of Giovanni Fusillo" (Giovanni Fusillo, 1960)

He’d been in the tunnel too long. The water was already up to his knees and the smoke was getting thicker. It stung his eyes. It burned his throat with each gasp of hot, thick air. The others had gone quiet. He’d lost sight of them in the haze. And he was tired, had to rest against the wall for a moment, had to let himself close his eyes.

He dreamed that he was an old man, sitting on a porch. It was summer, and hot, under an enormous white sun. He took his hat off to wipe the sweat from his forehead. It felt good, this heat, and there were children playing in the road. He liked that. He couldn’t see them, but he could hear them, shouting and laughing somewhere nearby. It was nice to sit there in the sun and let his eyes close listening to those happy sounds. He was tired and old and he could feel the strength leaving him, gently easing out of him, and he let himself relax.

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Learn about Giovanni Fusillo here. 

Explore more Toronto Dreams Project postcards here.