Honour Delhi’s Natural Landscape

Re: “The Pickleball Park” (News, July 15). Delhi Park is an important example of a great tradition in civic parks. Picton is fortunate to have such a complex and multifaceted home for wildlife, gardens, recreational trails, and vistas.

Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, famous for giving us Manhattan’s Central Park, Boston’s Emerald Necklace and Montreal’s Mount Royal Park, established the template for great landscaped public parks. He designed by subtraction. The long meadow, the passage of scenery, and a promise of creating “a clearing in the distance” (a term that became the title of Witold Rybczynski’s 1999 biography of Olmsted) defined his parks. 

To Olmsted, a clearing was never space awaiting programming. The clearing is the program.

Years ago, I studied in a landscape architecture studio led by Michael Van Valkenburgh, arguably the most consequential landscape architect of our era. His firm has just completed the first phases of a landmark Toronto waterfront park, where more than $1.25 billion has been spent unbuilding a century of asphalt and industrial fill to return the Don River to its marshy mouth. The new park is called Biidaasige, which is Anishinaabemowin for “sunlight shining toward us.” 

Canada’s largest city is paying dearly to recover the kind of living landscape that is Delhi Park and Marsh Creek today.

The herons, turtles and frogs that call Marsh Creek home carry knowledge of this place, something Indigenous communities have understood for generations. Notably, no wildlife study or baseline noise study has been conducted for this site. We have not yet asked what we stand to lose.

Prince Edward County has no master plan for its civic parks. Yet we propose to commit our public parkland reserves — and Delhi Park’s most sensitive edge — to six asphalt courts serving a single sport for a handful of people. Pickleball is popular today, but so too were shuffleboard and tetherball in their day. Asphalt outlasts every recreational fashion. We don’t need a consultant to tell us that.

I do not oppose pickleball. I oppose its placement within Delhi Park. Thanks to the efforts of civic leaders like Victoria Taylor, let us pause, as more than 600 petitioners have asked. Complete the studies, write the parks plan our county deserves, and find these courts a home elsewhere. Delhi Park has been generous with us. Let us honour it with proper stewardship and the recognition it deserves.

Ian Chodikoff, Ontario Association of Architects, Bloomfield 

Wharf Street is Heritage?

It seems whenever an investor wants 

to create something that will attract tourists, there is a “piling on” against it by neighbours and local activists. 

The pearl-clutching over the Drake Devonshire’s expansion plans and what it might do to the heritage feel of that particular area is surprising, given that the entirety of Wharf Street below Loyalist Parkway is a parking lot! And not only that, it’s a parking lot the current owner will not share with the community in the evenings when their business is closed, so Wharf Street is basically an empty parking lot! 

Any development will be an improvement because parking lots don’t have heritage value.

Mark Russell, Wellington

News Editor Position

I understand that you are searching for a News Editor for the Picton Gazette. I am surprised that you didn’t remember to call me.

Just a reminder. I am an expert at the English Language. I have had many years of experience helping friends (Chris and Simon Fanning) become better linguists. 

I also have important information about cheese factories in the counties of Lennox and Addington and Port Carling, which could be useful in preparing an article for the Picton Gazette on where to buy yummy cheese curds.

I read your newspaper fairly often. My reading time is governed by my advancing age and associated eye problems and balance issues. I  am also distracted by my support for the Blue Jays on TV. I do try hard to read every issue. It might save you some money if I get two issues a month which I will read from cover to the section on real estate sales. Those I find disquieting as I would love to live in Picton.

Thanks for your attention. I await my next Gazette and your offer of employment.

Michael Bulge, Toronto