She attended the ground-breaking nine years ago and now there’s officially a park in Fort York to help us remember the remarkable contributions of June Callwood.
Though it’s a regular-sized park in city-wide terms, June Callwood Park, at 0.4 hectares, may seem a little small in an area with such parks as Coronation (12.7 hectares), and Garrison Common (3.32 hectares). But with a reflecting pool, granite and bright pink rubberized benches, a hedge maze, ornamental gardens and soft surfaces for what the city parks department calls “unstructured play,” not to mention 300 trees, it’ll seem much larger than it actually is. A little like Callwood herself.
Callwood herself was hard to categorize. A journalist, she spent a good deal of her life putting more effort than most into issues she believed in. She wrote
one of the first books to deal with AIDS on a personal level, in 1988, and helped found
a hospice for people with AIDS, a shelter for abused and otherwise endangered women on the city’s east side that’s still running today, having helped hundreds of women out of otherwise impossible circumstances. (She was also one of the motive forces behind the writer's organization
PEN Canada.)
Callwood’s work was very much of the moment. She wasn’t a city builder, she didn’t work to build a legacy. She worked to fix what was in front of her. She’s the sort of person, in other words, who has a tendency to fade into history. But a park in her name goes some way to ensuring people will continue to
look up her name and see that there are Torontonians whose force of character and sense of purpose make the city, bit by bit, a better place to be.
Jill Frayne, Callwood’s daughter, and her family attended the opening ceremony.
Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Karen Fulcher