Yoni Goldstein: The decline of Toronto’s Christie Pits Park is unacceptable

Between the 1980s and the early 2000s, Christie Pits Park in Toronto was not a place you would want to be after it got dark out. At night, the sprawling grounds near Bloor and Bathurst were a notorious gathering place for the city’s drug dealers and consumers. Vandalism and muggings were rampant, as was gang warfare. Torontonians knew not to be caught dead in the park after the sun set unless you were looking for trouble.

In the mid-2000s, local residents decided enough was enough and started to clean up the park. Ever since I moved to the neighbourhood in the early 2010s, Christie Pits has been a bastion of peace in the heart of the city — the kind of place you could count on for a fun, safe and cheap time, any time.

The park’s baseball fields have been renovated with help from the Toronto Blue Jays, the playground is clean and welcoming, the pool is packed. In the winter, the skating rink hosts free parent-child shinny, and in the summer the Toronto Maple Leafs baseball team attracts a few hundred mostly young people to its weekend games in what used to be known as the Intercounty Baseball League and is now known as the Canadian Baseball League. The local community regularly comes together for pizza nights at the brick oven in the very heart of the park; rarely does a summer weekend go by without a cultural festival of some sort.

Christie Pits has been an idyllic place to raise children for as long as my family has lived near it. My kids learned how to swim at the pool, how to skate at the rink, and how to build friendships on the climbing structures. But that is changing again, in a way that hearkens back to the Pits of old.

It started in 2024 on the Canada Day long weekend, when an annual fireworks display, organized and patrolled by local residents, was infiltrated by youths from outside the neighbourhood who decided it was a good idea to light their own pyrotechnics and aim them at people in the park. The scene was pure chaos: kids running around launching fireworks aimlessly as families tried to get their young ones to safety while sparks exploded all around them like tracers.

Police eventually converged on the scene and closed the park. Ever since, Christie Pits has been shuttered on Canada Day as dusk settles, with police cars ringing the perimeter and Christie Street closed to traffic. The best you can do these days is sit at the very top of the park and gaze southward as light shows ascend above the tree line from the city’s official celebration spots.

There have been other signs of deterioration at Christie Pits in recent years: increased vandalism, especially around the skate park, more drunk and high people roaming around at night, public washrooms closed for long periods of time, protests that turn violent, anti-Israel posters glued on every available surface. And then last Saturday evening, two people were stabbed in the park and sent to hospital. Once again, police cars patrolled the neighbourhood, and officers closed the park.

The sense that Christie Pits is not a safe place after dark is once again creeping in. And it’s not just the park itself — the surrounding area is also beginning to feel far less open and welcoming. This summer, there has been violence and crime at two annual festivals held nearby. In early June, the Do West Fest, just a few blocks south of Christie Pits, was shut down early due to overcrowding and more than 40 incidents of theft; the next month, Salsa on St. Clair, a few blocks north, was abruptly cut short when a shooting match erupted in the crowd, leading to two deaths and five injuries. Even the famed Taste of Little Italy festival a short walk away on College Street felt overcrowded and unsafe this year, as if a spark could ignite at any moment.

These days, I’d rather my kids play at a smaller park with significantly fewer amenities hidden in the belly of the neighbourhood, rather than roam Christie Pits and the adjoining streets leading to the subway entrance. If I have to walk the dog late at night, I avoid even the outermost perimeter of the park. It’s just not worth the risk.

On the other hand, keeping Christie Pits Park from falling back into disrepute is absolutely worth the risk. This year marks the 93rd anniversary of the Christie Pits Riot, when a Swastika was unfurled on the park’s steep slope during a baseball game involving a Jewish team. A fight ensued between local Jews and Italians on one side and people shouting “Heil Hitler” on the other. The Toronto Daily Star described the scene: “Heads were opened, eyes blackened and bodies thumped and battered as literally dozens of persons, young or old, many of them non-combatant spectators, were injured more or less seriously by a variety of ugly weapons in the hands of wild-eyed and irresponsible young hoodlums….”

The park has put its sordid past behind it — or at least many of us thought it had. A metal plaque at Christie Pits Park’s southeast entrance is a constant reminder to visitors of the riot, and Torontonians of a certain age have not forgotten the park’s dark days in the decades leading to the Millennium. As Christie Pits teeters again, it’s time to clean things up before they get out of hand, and ensure the park remains one of Toronto’s natural jewels.

National Post