‘It was a pile of garbage, and here we are’: Toronto’s newest waterfront park opens this weekend

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Biidaasige Park: Canoeing the Don River

Biidaasige Park: Mayor Chow

Biidaasige Park: Climbing the wooden owl

After 18 years in the making, Toronto’s newest waterfront park opens today

‘It’s amazing’: New public park to open at Toronto’s redeveloped waterfront

One of the largest and most complex public parks in Toronto is set to open on Saturday, a project 18 years in the making.

• IN PICTURES: Toronto’s newest park is set to open this weekend

Biidaasige Park, pronounced “bee-daw-si-geh,” means “sunlight shining toward us” in Anishinaabemowin and sprawls across 40 hectares of land–the largest park to open in Toronto in a generation–in the city’s redeveloped Port Lands, near Cherry Street.

Construction of the park started in 2017, and included the creation of a new mouth and kilometre-long extension of the Don River, a key part of $1.35 billion Port Lands flood protection project to protect the space from a regional storm or 100-year flood.

“We moved a river, that’s what we’re celebrating today, we literally moved a river,” Julie Dabrusin, Minister of Environment and Climate Change of Canada, said at Friday’s unveiling.

“And by doing that, when we look at this place, these were lands, contaminated lands. These were lands where people avoided them. And now with the opening of the park we have people who are going to be able to come here and enjoy and celebrate. It’s about community building,” Dabrusin said.

Christopher Glaisek, chief planning and design officer at Waterfront Toronto, says wildlife has been slowing coming back to the space since the work started, including bald eagles, swans, and fish species he said the harbour hasn’t seen in 50 years, including bluegill and smallmouth bass.

“We wanted people to be able to come back down here…because it was in a concrete box for the last 100 years and that was very unappealing, not a place you would want to go, not a place you would ever celebrate the river,” Glaisek told CP24 Friday morning.

While the park will open Saturday, construction is still ongoing on the manmade island, dubbed Ookwemin Minising, with the construction of 14,000 new homes for 25,000 people slated to begin next year as part of a $975-million investment from all three levels of government.

Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow was on hand for the park’s unveiling Friday and said the previous industrial space was “really dirty” and “terrible.”

“It was a pile of garbage, and here we are. Wow, yeah, it is just amazing…let us just be very grateful. Feel gratitude. Imagine the joy we are all going to have (here),” she said, adding that she actually kayaked to the site Friday.

This weekend’s grand opening will feature music, hands-on crafts and entertainment on both Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 39 Commissioners St. The event is free and open to all ages.

With files from Joshua Freeman