by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

People in charge of cities are good at many things.

Of all their skills, depriving citizens of green spaces is the one thing they do best.

There’s nothing authorities enjoy more than to keep urban dwellers away from nature. That’s nothing new. In England, the rich would fence off nature to commoners, who would knock the fences down, thus earning the name commons.

In modern times politicians have developed special vision: they can’t see a green space they wouldn’t prefer paved or fenced off.

I write this article a few feet away from Montreal’s Incredible Shrinking Green Space. Up to five years ago, the park near my home was big enough to roam. Now there’s not space for 50 competitors in a cat-tail swinging contest.

I’ve learned that the park is home to an astounding history of civic mismanagement and betrayal.

It begins in 1803, when Hugh Brodie came to Montreal via a three-month boat ride from Scotland. He bought a farm in lower NDG, where he had cows and an apple orchard, and he built a sumptuous 15-room farmhouse of local limestone and cedar beams at what’s now St-Jacques near Oxford.

Hugh Allan, the railroad magnate, would steer Scottish immigrants there until they settled in elsewhere. The farm supplied the anti-American military efforts in the War of 1812.

Brodie wasn’t Catholic but once had a Catholic leave the dinner table for eating meat on a Friday. “If you cheat God, you cheat me,” he told the visitor. His wife once spent a night in a tree to avoid NDG-area wolves.

The farm contained a melon patch that grew pumpkin-shaped Brodie melons, a now-extinct delicacy that can be described as an oversized cantaloupe, coarse, sweet and pink inside.

Unlike nearby streets, which are named after settlers, the status-seeking city pretentiously named the Brodie road a posh-sounding Oxford Avenue.

In 1949, six Brodie inheritors sold the farm to the city of Montreal for $73,000, roughly about $600,000 in today’s cash.

The farm would become Oxford Park, and the farmhouse would become a museum. One newspaper reported: “Where the feet of marching militiamen and Scottish immigrants once tread, wide-eyed children and their parents will tip-toe and whisper as they point to the proposed museum’s fascinating historical items.”

But nobody wrote the museum promise into the contracts, and a dozen years later, city official Claude Robillard demolished the historic home.

Robert Brodie, 90, of Montreal West, remembers the farm and remains disappointed that the city wiped out the magnificent building.

And when came time to rename the park in 1996, he was among the many who hoped that it would finally be named Brodie Park. The Doré administration claimed to be studying the suggestion but then unexpectedly announced that it would be named after a Caisse Populaire manager. The new name didn’t stick, and it’s still referred to as Oxford Park.

The tradition of mismanagement continued unabated. The Bourque regime put plastic turf on the field. To insure the field, the city has to fence it off. As a result, everybody is excluded from the land where the farmhouse once stood, except for organized soccer teams, who are all from outside the neighbourhood. The major cultural event of the area, the longstanding annual Italian festival, has been forbidden because the city worries that the fireworks will damage the artificial turf.

Since then the city has laid waste on the little space remaining, pouring concrete in the middle of the field for basketball nets, installing a bocce court and now building a community centre well into what’s left of the park. Some hope the new facility will finally honour the Brodie name, but don’t expect politicians to start listening now.

Sadly, the Brodie farm, its magnificent farmhouse and the longstanding greenspace around it have been reduced to a few blades of grass. Doubtlessly, countless other Montreal parks and green spaces have suffered similar slow extermination through the years.

So if you live near a green space, enjoy it while it lasts.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca