Montrealers who never gave up win fight to reclaim wild urban jungle

After a decade-long struggle to protect Gorilla Park, a vacant piece of land in Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie will become an official park.

Walking through a vacant piece of land between industrial buildings in Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, Frances Foster starts to describe what the area once was.

The large concrete blocks that separate parking lots were never there, she says. Instead, poplar trees and scrubs stood on both sides of a natural walking path. In the summer months, wild grass would grow taller than her five-foot-seven frame.

“I used to come here, and it was an oasis. It was five degrees cooler and our only sort of park in the sector,” says Foster, who moved into the neighbourhood in the early 1990s. “It was very special.”

Foster, 64, was describing a linear piece of land known to locals as Gorilla Park, or Parc des Gorilles, for its previous resemblance to a “wild, urban jungle.” After most of the area was razed by a developer in 2013, a citizen committee cropped up in response, to protect what remained and reclaim the site.

In mid-November, the city of Montreal acknowledged their efforts by awarding a contract to finally make the site an official park. Valued at $10.3 million, the work will include adding a shelter, rehabilitating the soil, planting trees and vegetation and integrating a water-retention system.

To Foster, the announcement is a “small V” victory for the environment. But, she said, to her, it also shows that citizens — no matter how great or small in numbers — can take a stand and make a difference.

“So it’s a very emotional time for me,” she said. “As I’m sure it is for many people in the neighbourhood.”

The land in question is Y-shaped and bordered by St-Zotique, St-Urbain, Beaubien and Waverly Sts. Long before residents adopted it as a much-needed green space, it was owned by Canadian Pacific Railway and divided by train tracks.

When the tracks were abandoned in the 1990s, the site became overgrown with trees and vegetation. In the following years, Foster said, the area became a “well-known secret” in the neighbourhood: residents used it to plant vegetable gardens or put up art installations. Kids would make treehouses and forts.

“One thing about our neighbourhood is that it’s part industrial, but it had this unbelievable park going through that was completely wild,” said resident Clayton Bailey, recalling the “informality” of the park that gave it its charm.

“It was an integral part of what made people like this neighbourhood.”

The site remained untouched until the land was sold to Olymbec in 2013. Acting without a permit that spring, the developer cut down an estimated 50 mature trees — “20-year poplars, 10 or 12 metres high,” Bailey said — and covered the space in gravel.

The shock was immediate.

“We sort of thought we were safe and then, boom, overnight it was bulldozed,” Foster said. “It was quite an outrage in the community. And that’s what really fired everybody up.”

Citizens protested and organized under the banner Les AmiEs du Parc des Gorilles, of which Foster is a founding member.

Through the years, Foster estimates core members of the group held upward of 300 meetings to plan events and find ways to keep applying pressure on authorities. Beyond protests, they held organized cleanups, installed gardening containers, hosted picnics and barbecues and led guided heritage and nature walks.

The borough also reacted to the outrage over the tree-cutting. As early as 2013, it put a reserve on the land as a future park and worked to convince the city to act.

In an interview, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie borough Mayor François Limoges called the city’s announcement about the park a win for citizen involvement and the borough alike.

“It’s a really big accomplishment because it’s been a 10-year-long battle for both residents and the borough. For everyone,” Limoges said.

“They did an incredible job,” he added of those who stood up for the park. “Their work supported ours at the borough level and, I’d say, vice-versa. There were steps for which the residents mobilizing was really important, and other steps that required the borough.”

Limoges spoke of the park as a necessity for the neighbourhood given the area’s density and industrial character, calling it a much-needed “green lung” and an important step toward the sector’s ecological transition.

He also acknowledged that some may question why the process took so long.

“Creating a park when there’s already money set aside for it, when you already own the land and you’ve planned it for a long time can be a faster process,” he added. “But that wasn’t the case here.”

The city’s timeline for the project calls for the work to begin in January and be completed by the summer of 2024.

Asked what she makes of the announcement given the decade she’s put into the park’s survival, Foster said it’s hard to describe.

From the very beginning, she said, she felt the group’s fight was only one of many happening across the province as green spaces continue to be lost to development.

And she never wavered in her belief that a “dedicated bunch of people” could make a difference, no matter the circumstances.

“In our case, I guess they saw we weren’t going to go away and we weren’t going to back down,” Foster said. “And we never did.”

jfeith@postmedia.com

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