General
A New National Park That Rests on Indigenous and Industrial History
The collapse of a steel mill project during the Great Depression preserved natural lands linked to First Nations people in Windsor, Ontario.
While I occasionally return to my hometown, Windsor, Ontario, to do reporting for other articles, few of them have been as directly linked to my childhood as the story of Canada’s next national urban park. It was a trip that filled in some blanks from my past.
Sidewalks are all that remain of a failed model steel town in Windsor, Ontario.Credit…Tara Walton for The New York Times
As I wrote in an article, a bill that’s now in its final stages at the Senate with funding in the current federal budget means that a patchwork of lands surrounded by industry, highways, stores and houses will become a national urban park, probably within a year.
[Read: Amid Heavy Industry, Canada’s Newest (and Tiniest) National Park]
While the final boundaries of the park, as well as its name, have yet to be worked out, one bit of land that is likely to be included was once my childhood hangout. It sat several blocks from my family’s home in the neighborhood, which was developed between the 1950s and 1970s. Back then, everyone called the park Rankin Bush, presumably for the street that once marked its eastern boundary before developers came along.
It had a novel feature: ribbons of crumbling sidewalks and partly grown-over, unpaved roadways crisscrossing the forest. They were useful for cycling, bouncing balls and acting as a platform for experiments with homemade gunpowder that produced, at best, a fizzle and a disappointing puff of smoke. Legends about what older kids did at night in the bush were plentiful, but I can offer no confirmation.
I vaguely knew by the time I was in high school that the sidewalks and roadways were leftovers of a planned company town that was supposed to support a steel mill project before it collapsed during the Great Depression. Now, and then, a section of the unfinished mill sits near the Ojibway Nature Center, which will become the key component of the national park. But the collapse of the steel mill project had the unintended consequence of preserving swaths of tallgrass prairie and woodlands in an area that otherwise had long been consumed by industry and agriculture.
