Requiem to a wall: our simplest, cheapest, most overlooked urban recreational facility

   That's right, just a plain wall with no windows or pipes
or basketball nets fastened onto them is a great
recreational asset for any area, as it provides an essential sports surface for a bunch of sports that people can play alone or with others.
   Here's why I've always loved walls for sports and think we need a ton more of them: in spite of growing up with two brothers and three sisters, I was alone much of the time as a kid, constantly looking for ways to amuse myself while my four elders and one younger sibling were doing their best to get into whatever they were doing.

My first love affair with a wall: 580 Grosvenor

   So I'd frequently get out my baseball glove and throw a tennis ball against our driveway wall and test my fielding skills, seeing if I could make hot backhand stabs and quickly toss another before stretching far to the right to grab the next one. I eventually graduated up to hard rubber lacrosse balls, which were even harder to grab. I was probably a pretty good fielder but my area had no serious baseball teams so I'll never know.
  Then I realized that the nearby school had a huge expanse to hit a tennis ball and would duplicate the same game behind Roslyn School. That wall was so awesome that there was even a line between the foundation and the bricks just about the same height as a tennis net.
 So I got to be relatively proficient at tennis before ever even walking onto a court.
 Then when I finally got a friend after years of trying, we played a form of two man baseball.
  The hitter would stand in front of a rectangular strike zone painted on the wall.
   The other guy would toss tennis balls hoping toss strikes and an imaginary runner would get to first if he failed four times, and so forth.
  Roslyn School, as you see in the photo, pretty much wrecked the chance to play these games by putting stuff all over the place and that same spirit of misunderstanding of the recreational utility of plain walls is duplicated everywhere.
   For  a few years I used to bring my daughter to the parking lot of the nursing school at the corner of Oxford and Upper Lachine and we'd hit tennis balls onto the wall until the douchebags who organize that facility installed fences to keep people like us out.
   There went the only useful wall in this entire neighbourhood, and I frequently see people trying to hit tennis balls onto the tiny wall of the chalet in Oxford Park, often losing balls onto the roof in the process. It's heartbreaking to watch when they do and always leave dejected.