Downtown outdoor spaces

[panamaniac]

It's not DTK, but the complex of parks made up of Meinzinger Park, Mausser Park (especially), Concordia Park, and Lakeside Park, centred on Homer Watson/Stirling/Greenbrook, seems very underutilized to me.  Meinzinger has come a long way from its days as just a snow dump, and Lakeside has improved over the years, but the four parks together would be considerably larger than Victoria Park, I think, and see only a fraction of the use.

Those parks are indeed nice, and I walk there (particularly Lakeside) fairly often, even though it's about a 20-minute walk away for me. But Lakeside and Concordia really only have trails (and not enough of them, given the parks' size!) and not any other activities. Meinzinger has soccer fields for organized games but not much else. And Mausser not even that.

I would love to see the city buy a few properties to connect Mausser to Lakeside, provide decent street crossings (Stirling much easier than Homer Watson) and make these parks into a coherent park complex:

• A reasonable network of trails, not just ones running through
  
• Activities for kids (little and not so little)
  
• Picnic areas
  
• Signage!
  

Currently the parks are not enough to be a destination for most people, and the actual suburban population bordering them is fairly small, so they will not get much usage.

P.S. Add Schumacher Greenway to the list!

Indeed - "Borden Parkway" could have been much more than it is.  Imagine an enjoyable pedestrian link (along a renaturalized Shoemaker Creek) between the Schneider lands and Lakeside Park!  At the moment, the pokey play area toward the end of Borden Parkway is the only amenity, afaik.