Every time I drive passed the former Vincelli`s Garden Centre I expect to see the place leveled and construction of almost three hundred condos begun. When I was young I was always looking for some nature in the city, an empty lot, the lanes in our NDG neighbourhood, the Villa Maria orchards, or riding our bikes along Norman Street and the empty fields there and then continuing on to Dorval Shopping Centre. That is all finished, Norman Street is all construction-trucking-delivery firms, the highway to the shopping centre is now many lanes wide and people drive like devils on it, no place for some kid on his bicycle. This is change, it isn`t progress. Being in nature, even an empty lot in the city, is good for children; every empty lot having a new condo built on it isn`t progress, it`s become uncontrolled development. I think by now we have seen through the illusion of progress, except perhaps in medical science; most progress is change for its own sake. And usually there is the profit motive in this, not that there is anything wrong with people making money--improving their family`s fortune, owning a nice home, improving themselves--but there are always consequences to what people do, and making money for its own sake can become greed. An empty lot, some country-like environment, is good for children, they can escape the relentless presence of modern life which is getting relentlessly omnipresent, it is also bad for our children`s health, and diminishes any vision or spiritual inclination that children may have been born with. Seeing Canada geese flying overhead, Monarch butterflies in the garden, honey bees, earth worms, urban wild life, imagination and creativity, dreams and day dreams, solitude, playing with other children, this is a connection with nature and getting in touch with something greater than ourselves, even with the divine spark in each of us. But the current housing boom is upon us, houses that families could afford just five years ago are now double the price to buy them and are being bought up by banks, foreigners, and entrepreneurs out to renovate and flip the property for profit. So, some children are being deprived of both using their imagination and a decent and safe place in which to live. These condos that will be constructed on the old Vincelli`s Garden Centre site won`t be cheap and they won`t be four bedroom condos for families, they will be built to maximize profit, probably one or two bedrooms for old people who are downsizing from their family home. It is not a positive future ahead of us as we get deeper into this century, some of us see it as dystopian.
These photographs of Vincelli's Garden Centre taken in late August 2021,
