Thirty-eight acres of grass where the west end drinks in summer, with a white squirrel that has its own following.
Trinity Bellwoods is the west end’s living room. On any warm evening from May to September it holds several thousand people sitting on the grass, and it functions as a park, a beach substitute and a social institution simultaneously.
The gates
The ornamental gates on Queen Street are the surviving fragment of Trinity College, founded in 1851 by Bishop John Strachan as an Anglican alternative to the secular University of Toronto. The college federated with U of T in 1904, moved to the main campus in 1925, and the original building was demolished in 1956.
Only the gates remain, at the end of what was the college’s tree-lined drive.
Garrison Creek
The dog bowl in the middle of the park — a wide grassy depression that everyone gathers in — is the buried valley of Garrison Creek, which ran from north of Davenport down to Fort York.
The creek was progressively enclosed into a sewer from the 1880s and the ravine filled in. It still runs underneath, and the depression is the shape of the valley it cut. A number of Toronto’s parks are former creek valleys of the same kind.
The white squirrel
Trinity Bellwoods has a small population of white squirrels — leucistic eastern greys rather than albinos. They have their own local following, a coffee shop named after them, and periodic reported sightings when one has not been seen for a while.
The summer
The park’s popularity has produced a running argument. Drinking in public is illegal in Ontario, and Trinity Bellwoods in summer is one of the more visible places where it happens anyway. Enforcement has fluctuated, there were high-profile crowding incidents during the pandemic, and residents have complained about noise and rubbish for years.
The city has trialled permitted alcohol consumption in some parks, and the arrangement has changed more than once. Check the current rule rather than assuming either way.
What is around it
Queen Street West runs along the southern edge — vintage shops, galleries, bars and restaurants.
Ossington Avenue, a block west, is a dense strip of restaurants and bars and one of the better places to eat in the city.
Little Portugal and Dundas West to the north, Parkdale further west.
Practicalities
Free, open at all hours, well used. There is a community centre with a pool, tennis courts, a dog off-leash area and an outdoor rink in winter.
Streetcar 501 along Queen Street is the way in; the nearest subway is Osgoode, twenty minutes’ walk east.
More Parks & Outdoors
High Park
Four hundred acres with a zoo, a lake, an oak savannah that burns on purpose, and a cherry blossom that shuts the roads.
The Scarborough Bluffs
Ninety metres of eroding cliff along fifteen kilometres of lakeshore, holding a geological record of the last ice age.