Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:52:00

Two papal visits, a Rolling Stones mega-concert for half a million people, and the aircraft plant that built Canada's warplanes - few parks carry a resume like this. Downsview Park at 35 Carl Hall Road in north Toronto occupies the former Canadian Forces Base Downsview, land that de Havilland Canada bought as farmland in 1929 to build aircraft beside its own airfield. The RCAF expanded the site through the Second World War and after; the base formally closed on 1 April 1996, and in 1999 the federal government declared the grounds Canada's first urban national park, managed today by the Canada Lands Company. The event pedigree came early: Pope John Paul II celebrated mass here in 1984 while the base was still active and returned for World Youth Day 2002, and in 2003 the Molson Canadian Rocks for Toronto concert - the SARS-recovery benefit headlined by the Rolling Stones and AC/DC - drew one of the largest concert crowds in Canadian history to the airfield. Edgefest, the VELD electronic festival - a fixture since 2012 - the Tragically Hip's 30,000-strong Canada Day show in 2011 and the Junior Carnival have all used the grounds, with the Festival Terrace engineered for events of up to 40,000. The park proper, opened in stages since 2012, layers forested trails through Boake's Grove, a lake with a three-kilometre running loop, an urban farm and orchard, an aviation-themed playground and the Sesqui Trail commemorating the land's Indigenous, farming, aviation and military layers. The wider lands keep evolving: the decommissioned Downsview Airport, now branded YZD under Northcrest Developments, hosts Rogers Stadium - the temporary 50,000-capacity concert venue opened in 2025 - while a decades-long redevelopment reshapes the runways into new neighbourhoods. Served by Downsview Park station on both the subway and GO lines, the park is that Toronto rarity - genuine big-event acreage inside the city, with a century of flight and festival history under the grass.