Bellevue Square Park

This park conveniently located in the Kensington Market has been problematic for many many years now, but in the past few years has seen a bit of cleaning up of shady characters with the frequent patrolling of police officers.
In warmer weather, you’ll see plenty of people in the park and it’s definitely a mix crowd. The park consist of a children’s playground and wading pool with many benches throughout the tree-​lined path. It is also a great place to catch local performers and home to many festivals and celebrations especially in the summer.
A great little park to let the four legged friends walk through and do their business if you’re in the area.

Probably the most important park in the city if your a dealer, user, prostitute, or homeless. In the summer Bellevue Square becomes the best people watching park in Toronto but be warned, you might want to leave the kids at home.

Total dump– in a good way. This is a little like what Washington Square in New York was like before it turned into a police state shopping mall. There are hippies playing music and degenerates selling pot. And parents still bring their kids to the playground because a little bit of weirdness builds character.

This park is really quintessential Kensington. An interesting place to be if you’re a grown-​up, but I would think twice before taking kids there. Even though there’s technically a slide, swings, etc. it’s the kind of place where you just might find a needle or two poking out of the sandbox.

Le Paradis des loseurs. Pas assez pété après avoir fumé de l’herbe? Et ben, Bellevue vous offres tous les genres de pothead. Y’avait les hipsters intello branché qui fumait un bat, les hippies qui grattait de la guitare, quelques unes en contemplations et d’autre se passait le bat. Les nerds techno qui écoutait du dubstep et le duo dynamique, un yo blanc et latino qui jouait une toune gangsta rap en se passant le bat et puis il y avait nous, au fond avec la status de je-​né-​sais-​qui qui regardait tout cela. Les clochards du coins buvait une grosse bière dans un sac en papier brun pendant que sa copine geulait et était visiblement en délirium trémens et les enfants du coins qui regardait et riait silencieusement de la vieille dame. Très bizzare voire ecclectiques mais en même temps, très pacifique comme endroit.
Loser’s Paradise. Not High Enough after chilling at The Hot Box? Well Bellevue offers you all kind of pothead. There’s was the cool relaxed hipsters. The bunch of hippies playing guitar and singing old 70’s rock song while other were contemplating and passing the dobie to the left hand side. The Techno Nerdy dude listening Dubstep and then white and latino duo listening some gangsta rap on their iphone. And there was finally us, with the bronze status of I don’t know who. The homeless dude screaming to her homeless drunk buddy to make less noise and her laughing out loud and kid from the place, looking at them and laughing silently. Weird but cool moment. It’s pretty unique and even though it’s a very sketchy amount of people in the same place, it’s quite peaceful and green!

Without a doubt the strangest park I’ve ever stepped foot in. Come here to people watch, make something of your afternoon. I’ve never seen such a wide range of people before. I sat next to a group selling marijuana, then moved to the other side of the park and sat near a guitar player under a tree. Each tree seemed to have some unique person/​group of people relaxing below it’s branches. Children laughed in the water fountain while drug offers were being made meters away. A loose Yorkshire Terrier bolted through the open park as people tried to return it to it’s owner.
It was a strange experience on this sunny day, and yet, it all felt very safe.

Yeah, this park in the heart of Kensington is a lil’ rough around the edges, but it is a good spot to eat the empanadas or other delicious snack you picked up in the market (because so many places, e.g. agave y aguacate don’t have much seating). The people-​watching is pretty great too, as others have already mentioned, since there is lots of pedestrian traffic in the area. Some of those kids on skateboards are pretty impressive too.

If I weren’t a committed urbanite with a healthy appreciation for interesting characters I think I would have walked on by (my suburban friends would freak out and refuse to enter, I’m sure). I think the first time I sat down on the swing with my baby it was really an experiment, because I’m pretty yuppie and it shows. I don’t think I expected to be chased out of there, but I think I expected at least a sideways glance. Sometimes amongst a group so eclectic the one thing not so well tolerated is being entirely not eclectic (guilty). But nope. Nothing. No one batted an eyelash.
It’s a great, safe place to take your kids if you want to make sure they don’t grow up to be sheltered, prissy brats who freak out at the site of a homeless person or a group of punk teenagers with highly interesting piercings

In the middle of Kensington market is a great little parkette called Bellevue Square. I mean, it could be a real great place to take your kids if it was filled with teenagers drinking Schnapps, homeless punks and dog crap. On the other hand, it’s go it’s own sort of community charmed filled with all that. I doubt that the houses that line the park were originally intended to house dozens of poor artists and students in each when they were built, and the park was probably intended as «green space». Now it’s just a spot to smoke joints with your friends, and play Frisbee with your slightly mutt-​faced dog.

This is the most important park in a city on the planet, in the capital of Toronto, the Kensington Market. Only here will you find so many people from so many paths come together with a common aim. Whether anything is accomplished is another matter.
If you study psychology, there is no other place for freely observing such a variety of contemporary western homo-​sapiens, and yourself among them, breathing here, now.
Also a prime spot for polar attraction, dealing, playing frisbee, singing out loud, kids, adults reading books, crackheads, punks, drunks, theorists, hippies… and surprisingly very few gangstaz.
The wading pool is open in warm months and even hires «watchers».
The kids growing up here are POTENTIALLY unlike kids anywhere else. Whether they, or anyone else but me sees this is another matter.