Keith Lawrance contributes this week’s Throwback Thursday.

This story is about an area slightly outside of our boundaries but the story is entertaining enough that we thought you might enjoy it.

As you probably know, Regent Park was the original Cabbagetown and there are many stories there from days gone by. 

At the south-east corner of Sumach and Shuter Streets (google.com/maps) is a small parkette officially (although not creatively) called the Sumach-Shuter Parkette. The parkette was the former site of the Coulter Brass building until the early 1960s. On the southwest corner today is a small, but popular coffee shop called Sumach Espresso – but in the early 1960s it was a corner store run by an older gentleman. Children of the time used to buy bulk candy there, but the owner was notoriously impatient and the kids complained that the store had a peculiar odour. 

According to an account posted on the Cabbagetown Regent Park Museum website, one day the proprietor ejected a few of the kids and after one of the kids yelled “This place smells like you let off forty beer farts”, the children ran across the street to the parkette and colloquially named it “Stinky’s Park,” which caught on more widely in the area. It’s not clear if it was the source of the odour but, when new owners purchased the store, they found cash stuffed into the walls and floorboards – which must have taken the sting out of living next to Stinky’s Park somewhat. 

The original version of this story (crpmuseum.com) appears on the Cabbagetown Regent Park Museum website. The CRPM is currently raising funds(gofundme.com) to create a new website and can be followed on facebook.com also.