My childhood neighbourhood
This is where I grew up in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. From this elevation is looks small, but it's not so small when you're on the ground walking, or riding a bicycle. I like(d) my neighbourhood. It was a good place to grow up. I cannot see my house in this picture because of the trees, but I can see where it is.
The main feature here is the Royal City Park and Speed River. After the park, Wellington Street, which parallels the river for a couple kilometers here, is another dominant feature. I can see the old OPP Station, Edinburgh Road, the Wellington Street Dam, Gow's Mill Pond and Gow's Bridge and the weir across the river between the dam and Edinburgh, and Gordon Street Bridge. I can see the Rockwell plant on Wellington. Barry Cullen Used Cars might be there on the north side of Wellington, too, but I can't distinguish it. (In this photograph, north is left and south is right.) Trees - planted en masse in the 1980s - haven't been planted yet on the banks of the river and the banks are still fields of mown grass. My school, John McCrae Public School (since this picture was taken it was demolished, then re-built and re-opened as a French immersion public school), is visible there on Water Street, on the south side of the river. The principal there at the time of this picture was Vern Shaw. Mr. Shaw was also a director of plays at the Guelph Little Theatre.
Between the river and the school playground is a dirt road were Guelph Police Constable Peacock (later Sergeant Peacock) used to demonstrate bicycle traffic safety by having a test car smash into a bicycle while the entire student body sat on the grass watching. Constable Peacock scared me because he always seemed to be yelling at us. I suppose he was a nice enough man, with a wife and a daughter, but not to an elementary school kid.
I can see a patch of ground near the school we used to call "the snake pit" because of all the garter snakes infesting it. It was off limits to students, but the teachers couldn't stop us. Walk two meters into the snake pit and the ground would be slithering.
My parents told me that when they arrived in Guelph in the early 1960s the dump was on Wellington near Waterloo Avenue near the Hanlon Expressway today - a piece of land currently occupied by two brownish apartment buildings. That location is just a little out of the frame. The banks of the Speed River in this photo were a dumping ground in the 19th century - also the city's water supply, explaining the typhoid outbreak in the 1890s. That typhoid outbreak motivated the city to move its water source to the Arkell Spring, and to introduce water pipes - lacquered wood at the time, samples of which are still on display at the Civic Museum. If construction crews go digging in the Royal City Park, or almost anywhere in that stretch of park land from Gordon to Edinburgh, they can expect to strike 19th century garbage. Many contemporary nature enthusiasts and environmentalists eulogize the beautiful nature of the Royal City Park. They're idiots. The Royal City Park today with fantastic mature elm trees is completely landscaped and fabricated. It used to be the dump.
For many children, the pond behind the dam and the dam itself was a place for recreational swimming. I never swam there, heeding my mother's advice that the water was too dirty. But on very hot, humid summer days many young people didn't care and they took the plunge. My family enjoyed canoeing on the river upstream from the dam.
The Wellington Street dam today has outlived its original life-expectancy. In addition, flood control in the Grand River watershed is handled by another, larger dam, the Shand Dam operated by the Grand River Conservation Authority many kilometers north of Guelph. So, the Wellington Street dam in Guelph is not only obsolete, but superfluous. But people like it. It's scenic in the summer time. But the beloved dam's disposition and fate are perpetually in the hands of a City of Guelph budget committee.
The past was a dirty, stinking place with horse and human manure and trash, no air conditioning and no antibiotics or painkillers.
But I could be wrong.