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Hello 

Hello!  On behalf of everyone at Evergreen, Welcome to Evergreen Brick Works

My name is [insert name] and I am a volunteer who will be taking you on a little walk today.

(find out a little about audience?. So please follow me out into the Common Area, and we will begin!                                                          

Find out

about the Audience 

Walk to the  

Common Area      

A question we get around here at lot is 'What is this place?'

On any given day, some will come in to the Welcome Centre and say "I've driven by here a thousand times and finally decided to come in today to se what you do, ... so what do you do here?"

.... and to tell you the truth, it's hard to explain in a few sentences, it's not as simple as that for us here at Evergreen ... We do so many different things .... many of which you will see today.  

What is Evergreen?

   The Story
    

 of Evergreen      

In the early 1990's, there were several big environmental charities working to save vast amounts of Canadian wilderness from various threats and for various threats and for various benefits to society- species protection, clean air, clean water, etc.

The David Suzuki Foundation and the Nature Conservancy are two examples of these types of charities.

However, at that time no one was really addressing nature where people actually lived.  No envrionmental charity focused on bringing nature into cities ore reconnecting people with nature, or looking at the benefits of having nature in cities - for people, various species and for ecologocail services

So Evergreen was started with the mission ot reconnect nature with cities, for the benefit of both.

Learning

Grounds 

and

Common

Grounds

It started with two programs - Learning Grounds and Common Grounds 

created to rehabilitate both school grounds and community spaces with native plants and edible gardens in Canadian Cities

In order to get a national reach, Evergreen has associates located in every province, and provides grants to various groups to do placed-based project.

in 2012 Evergreen will award over $900,000 to more than 200 community groups and schools

The

       Brickworks   

and now on to the second part of our name, Brick Works 

for over 100 years this site was a brick factory.  At its peak it was producing over 43 million bricks a yeaand literally built this city of Toronto.   The bricks you see all around us is the same brick you see in many, many buildings across Canada

 Watershed Wall

Altough we live in a built environment here in Toronto - with building and roads, and sewers, and so forth --- ti's important to remember that we are actually embedded in a natural landscape.   As this map of the Watershed Wall showcases, the city of Toronto is built over top of a living system with the main watersheds, the Humber, the Don and the Rouge 

       MOVE 

       Expo               

This summer, with MOVE: the transportation expo underway, we are focusing on how things move in all elements of our on-site programming, so I want to showcase here now, looking at the Watershed Wall, you can see that our rivers in the GTA start up at the Oak Ridge's Moraine , and water flows through our city, underneath our feet and around us, and into the Lake Ontario.

This type of natural movement may not be what comes to mind for most people living in urban areas but it’s as real as the movement involved in our motorways, streets, and paths and can be incorporated into our living city transportation networks.

... So to continue our story, and explore how the national charity Evergreen came to be at the Brick Works [ POINT OUT BRICK WORKS ON THE MAP IF YOU’D LIKE] , let’s head on over to what once was the Brick Works clay quarry.

                    Quarry       

 In 1984, the industrial use for this site had ended, and 16 vacant buildings and a large brick quarry were left [showcase photos]. 

To make use of the property, the owners at the time filled up and flattened the quarry area with dirt (from digging out Scotiabank Plaza downtown on King St.) and rented it out to a condo developer.

Once the community, just to the North of here, found out that condos would be built in their backyards, they formed a group called ‘Friends of the Don’ and fought to save this area from development. They won and the City of Toronto bought the property.

How they

won 

The community group “Friends of the Don” use three pieces of key information to save this property from development.

1.  We are on a floodplain. During Hurricane Hazel in the 1950s, water was waist deep on site. A bylaw was created in the Don, to have no personal dwellings in this area.
2.  This is a heritage site.
3.  This is a site of international geological significant. A.P. Coleman, a geologist from the University of Toronto found evidence of an interglacial period on site (a time between two glaciers) called the Don Formation. The quarry area is now a UNESCO recognized site of geology and Evergreen interprets A.P. Coleman’s work in many ways throughout the site.

Street Artists      

Photographers

Ravers

Film-makers 

So, throughout the late 80s and 90s, the industrial pad was left derelict. Street artists, photographers, raver [partiers], WWII low-budget film-makers and so on took over the site and used it as a recreational centre

It was a cultural institution, that, to be perfectly honest, you had to be somewhat brave to enter... [If you’ve walked around, you will see evidence of this time on almost every wall on site...] 

        1998

        The Revitalization of the Quarry Area 

 In 1998, Evergreen came to this site to help revitalize the quarry area, which had received funding to be turned into a City of Toronto park.

As you can see, the design of the park is a series of storm-water management ponds that help clean water as it comes from the north end of the site to the south, and down into the Don River. As we will see as we cross the industrial pad, there are also greenways (or bioswalls) that run through the site, helping to move water across the site –while naturally cleaning it- and into the Don

This is great example of how nature can be utilized to work to filter and funnel water through a build environment – and unlike sewer systems and water purification plants, nature requires very little capital cost and management.

 Like many other- the visual artists, photographers, film makers and so on - Evergreen was inspired by this interesting abandoned site.  They saw an opportunity in the buildings and in the land. At first, the idea was quite simple- an inner city nursery [they would plant the trees in the back quarry, up root and sell them from an old factory building, to sustain the charitable mission] .. however with 16 decaying buildings, scattered with graffiti in the heart of the Don Valley, creativity was easy to find and more ideas quickly arose and Evergreen’s tree nursery expanded