Coronation Park

Equipment by Miracle.

Surface: Rubber.

Of Toronto’s six boroughs, York is the one I’m least familiar with. I know that these things don’t officially exist anymore, but those of us old enough to have clear pre-1998 memories still think in terms of Scarborough, Etobicoke, North York, East York, York, and the City.

Of those six, York has always been a bit of a blind spot for me. So in an effort to explore that north-ish, west-ish sector of Toronto, I decided that we’d go for a swim at the York Recreation Centre at Black Creek and Eglinton. I was so enthusiastic about this expedition that I forgot to check the pool’s hours, and we arrived with 90 minutes to kill.

That’s how we found ourselves at Coronation Park, which ended up being a colourful, pleasant surprise.

The orange and teal climbers by Miracle really stand out from the landscape, which is just hilly and treed enough to make for a good game of hide and seek. Other equipment includes some swings, a bee rocker, a rope climber, and a large glockenspiel (missing its mallets, as they usually are).

Our most unexpected bit of fun here came thanks to the splash pad, which looked to be much older than the rest of the equipment, and bizarrely glitchy. The water would come on for just five or ten seconds at a time, and then disappear, almost daring you to try and walk across without getting ambushed by jets of frigid water.

Which is, of course, what we ended up doing. The unpredictability of it (and my exaggerated reactions to getting soaked) had my daughter in hysterics. It was a good reminder that the best play often involves an element of risk.

We had lunch sitting on the bleachers of what I thought was a baseball diamond, but was actually the site of a circular ice rink in winter. Then we walked over to the indoor pool (which turned out to be great, by the way).

As we walked towards the pool, we passed a building that turned out to be the old York Civic Centre – one of Toronto’s six pre-amalgamation City Halls. There’s no broad, open space out front the way there is at the civic centres in North York or Etobicoke or even East York, and it looks more like a community centre or a high school than a former seat of municipal government.

We’d been playing in the shadow of this place the whole time and had no idea; apparently, I have trouble seeing York even when I’m looking for it.