Picture this: you’re walking carefully through plaza parking lots in Scarborough’s Wexford Heights and you find hammocks to lie down in. And a then three-wheeled tuk-tuk you can sit in while eating takeout food. And an oasis of plants around a small stage.
It can only mean WexPOPS is back. The first experiment in creating privately-owned public spaces (POPS) brightened Wexford Heights Plaza in 2019. After turning up in North Etobicoke’s Thistletowne last year, it’s returning to Wexford with five plaza installations, not one.
“These are publicly accessible, no-pay-to-play spaces for gathering,” Daniel Rotsztain, executive director of plazaPOPS in Toronto. “It’s good for the spirit.”
What Rotsztain tells plaza owners is that they are sacrificing a few parking spaces temporarily — 10 at Wexford Plaza for the project’s event hub, three at Colony Plaza for the tuk-tuk — to draw more customers and boost local businesses.
Four years ago, volunteers built an oasis at Wexford Heights Plaza stacked with 300 planters filled with vegetables, herbs which were given away and native plants transplanted to The Meadoway later.
“It really demonstrated what else you can do with the extra space we have in our neighbourhoods,” said Rotsztain, though some people “thought we were a garden centre.”
Other WexPOPS locations are ready to pop up between Warden and Pharmacy avenues at strategic spots where they are being welcomed.
Rotsztain’s group staged a design process at the Working Women Community Centre (Victoria Park Hub) to decide the focus of each site.
The plan was to have the installations ready for the Taste of Lawrence 2023, the area’s annual street festival, on July 7 to 9.
Being experimental, WexPOPS is running late but should be up for a three-month period from August through October.
“If other groups want to do this, we kind of have a manual,” Rotsztain said.
The hammocks will be set up in a space outside the Arab Community Centre of Toronto. WexPOPS wants to hear from community groups interested in hosting events, Rotsztain said.
One design process suggestion was a drive-in movie at Wexford Heights Plaza, he said. “We might even show Wexford Plaza, the movie.”
