New Year’s in North York

The city is taking strides to reach out to North York’s growing Persian community by helping residents organize an annual Iranian festival of celebration.

North York councillor Shelley Carroll and York Mills councillor Cliff Jenkins have teamed up to help the Persian community organize the Fire Festival of Char Shenbeh Souri in honour of the Persian New Year.

According to Carroll, the festival has always been held, but much to the chagrin of police, it was always a spontaneous event at Sunnybrook Park, held more from word-of-mouth than actual planning.

Celebrants would start impromptu fire pits and then jump over them as a symbolic gesture meant to welcome the New Year. Although the event was typically free of incident, it caused one spirited teen to hurt his leg, and created traffic mayhem on local streets.

Police and Emergency Medical Services approached the community and warned them that the gathering was getting out of control and if it didn’t become a licensed event, it would have to be cancelled, said Carroll.

“That was the last thing this group wanted,” she said. “(Jenkins and I) stayed heavily involved throughout it and helped them work things out with the service agencies and helped them have an organized event.”

The result was a huge success, with the only challenge being how to ease the gridlock caused by people coming in and out of the park. In preparation for the event, Toronto police closed a portion of Leslie St. to traffic.

Carroll said she plans to keep building communication and rapport with the community. A large part of the politician’s ward is made up of Iranian families, most of which live in the Parkway Forest Neighbourhood. She said a big part of the reason she got involved with planning the festival was to reach out to all of her constituents.

She will keep on reaching out to them in the beginning of April when the community, the councillors, plus several service organizations in area will get together to review the success of the party and discuss how they should form a steering committee to keep the festival an on-going tradition.

“It was a challenge that had to be met,” said Carroll. “We’re going to take the event from something that caused concern in the community to something that has to happen in Toronto each year because it’s so special.”