Hi Folks,

I’ve enjoyed reading your series on city parks and was very excited to see that Toronto had it’s own article. Being a Torontonian, I was looking forward to hearing about little known areas of this city that I hadn’t yet discovered. This expectation seemed reasonable as the previous articles of different cities were well researched, well written and fair in both the good and bad attributes. Unfortunately, this was not the case for the Toronto parks article.

I was at first surprised to read that Toronto has a new mayor, as David Miller has been in office for almost three years now. I was again surprised at the mention of Newmarket as this is a bedroom community of Toronto, almost an hour north of the downtown core. I have family who live there, so I am familiar with the area and can assure you, no one coming to Toronto as a tourist or those that live in the city would ever make their way that far north. After reading the article, I got a sense that it was less about the city parks and much more about the author. The stories, although entertaining, were not in line with the previous articles in the series. I found it left me with a rather negative feeling about the city without actually telling me anything about its parks. I was expecting an honest and factual report, but instead got an extremely outdated and uninformative group of stories. There was obviously no recent research done as the majority of the stories take place in the winter months and the one that took place in the warmer months was spent discussing his dislike of birds and striking school children.

I think that even if this story was not about Toronto, I would have the same feeling of this article not fitting in with the series. I probably would not have felt the need to provide feedback though, as I wouldn’t have known any better.

I am regularly impressed with your Canadian content and do very much appreciate your efforts in that regard. Unfortunately, I feel this article drastically missed the mark and an opportunity to provide an interesting view of Toronto was lost. We are by far not the greatest city in the world, but we can do better than this article implies.

Just so you know I don’t only provide negative feedback, I’ve very much enjoyed the Gary Benchley, Elisabeth Eckleman, and Peanut series. You have a great web site and I will continue to enjoy it.

Thanks,
Teresa

Rosecrans Baldwin responds: Teresa, we appreciate your feedback. For this series we asked our writers for their creative interpretations of their town’s parks; we never intended to publish travel guides, booster pieces, or stories that weren’t based on our writers’ personal experiences, and Pasha’s take is a wonderful example of how many different ways there are to experience one’s city, parks and all.