McCowan District Park rink delay leaves Scarborough out in the cold: Keenan
The outdoor rink and skating path were supposed to open last January but now will have to be ripped out and built again.

TheStar.com
Sept. 19, 2017
Edward Keenan

In an area of Toronto starved for outdoor skating rinks, McCowan District Park was supposed to be a major attraction by now. Its hockey rink and its winding, landscaped leisure-skating path have appeared to be complete and ready for residents to lace up and glide for a long time. It was scheduled to open in January 2017 after nine months of construction, when it would have become Scarborough’s second outdoor skating facility.

Instead, the entire $600,000 facility on McCowan Rd. just south of Eglinton Ave. E., remains behind construction fences, its brand-new concrete already veined with cracks and surgically excavated in places to expose the piping underneath. It will not be ready for action until at least December 2018, almost two years behind schedule.

The city quietly announced this week in an update on the parks website that a problem with the refrigeration piping installed in the facility has damaged the brand-new concrete surface upon which ice is supposed to be made.

“This was outside the control of the city, and staff are working with the designer and construction company to determine the reason for the failure and an appropriate solution,” city spokesperson Jane Arbour wrote in an email this week.

Arbour says the reconstruction necessary will be done at no additional costs to the city, and that staff members are working with the contractor both to expedite the reconstruction and diagnose what caused the need for it. “It has been determined that the refrigeration piping embedded in the concrete slabs failed. Investigation has found that the piping blistered, expanded, fractured and broke in some locations, however, the exact reason for the failure of the piping hasn’t been determined,” Arbour says by email. She says the problem became evident in January when the contractor who built the facility started up the system to prepare for its opening.

Local Councillor Gary Crawford, who has been so proudly anticipating the new ice park that he included it in his 2014 election campaign materials, says the result is that the entire thing will need to be ripped out — all the concrete, all the refrigeration piping — and built again. And so another year of skating will be lost. “I’m completely frustrated,” Crawford says. “When I first found out about this I had a very intense meeting with city staff to find out what went wrong.”

Ripping out and rebuilding the path and rink will take five months, Arbour says, and work cannot begin until “weather permits” — presumably in spring 2018.

It’s hard to overstate how anticipated this rink and path are for some residents of Scarborough. In a country, and a city, where outdoor skating — both shinny hockey and family fun — are the stuff of myth and literature, until recently even depicted on the five dollar bill, the former municipality in the east end has long felt left out when it gets cold.

A decision by the City of Scarborough decades back to cover all of its ice rinks to make them more usable as indoor arenas left it only one outdoor ice surface, at the former Scarborough city hall in Albert Campbell Square. Meanwhile, in other parts of the city, shinny pads in parks where people can wander up with their skates are common. (I, for instance, live less than a 10-minute drive from at least three.) There are 52 in the city in total.

The lack of ice in Scarborough became a flashpoint in the city during the Rob Ford years, pointing to the area’s perceived have-not status also represented by poor public transit service. Local politicians and residents at public meetings called for the immediate construction of four or five new ice rinks to address the gap. McCowan District Park’s facility was planned in 2014 to at last give Scarborough another place to skate.

And a beautiful one: in addition to a traditional hockey rink surrounded by boards and bleachers, the park is to have an ice path winding hundreds of metres through trees and tall grasses. Similar paths have opened over the past few years at Colonel Samuel Smith Park in Etobicoke and Greenwood Park in east Toronto and have become immediately popular destinations for families during the winter.

Crawford says the same popularity is expected at McCowan Park. “This is very anticipated by residents,” he says. The city recently installed a new crosswalk to the park in anticipation of heavy foot traffic by skaters. Crawford has been getting “a lot” of response about the delay, even before the newest announcement went out. People, he says, can see the fencing up and the lack of any apparent work being done.

Crawford says he hopes his office and city staff will be able to figure out a temporary solution this year — to have some kind of artificial ice on the site for people to use, even if it can’t and won’t be the full path and hockey rink that are planned.

John Tory’s office reports similar frustration at city hall. “Mayor Tory is extremely disappointed this project isn’t finished,” says Don Peat, the mayor’s communications director. “The mayor agrees with parks staff that the rink and skating path should be rebuilt at no additional cost to the city.”

No additional money cost, of course. As Crawford points out, the “inconvenience” is a cost born by Scarborough residents, who will go another winter without the skating facility we’ve already paid for. Another lost season when local kids could be learning to skate, passing the hours, having fun. Another winter felling left out in the cold.