The Big Reveal

Last month we shared news of the task of sorting and cataloguing a large collection of slides from the late Lloyd Syer, a former Director of the Parks and Recreation Department of the City of Belleville. This task is now complete and the full listing of all 2,600 slides is now available in the online catalogue of the Community Archives. We are now able to share some of the photographs.

The slides were taken over the span of thirty years, including Syer's entire time with the Department,  which lasted from 1964 to 1990. In that time period, some major projects were undertaken to improve Belleville's public spaces and these are well represented in the slide collection. These include the construction of Centennial/Rotary Park in 1971, the toboggan hill at Zwick's Park in 1973, the Lions Park on Station Street in 1978, and many improvements to West Riverside Park.

Lloyd Syer took several sets of aerial photographs in the 1970s and these have been scanned and shared online through our Flickr account. They form an interesting record of the changes in the city and its parks in those years.

Syer also took photographs of smaller details, such as a night-time view of the fountain in Corby Park, and a close-up of a bed of tulips at the department's Service Building on North Park Street. Behind the tulips is a Trillium Award from the Belleville Horticultural Society, awarded for "Property Beautification." The latest slide in the collection is of the plaque dedicated to Lloyd Syer in the Summit Garden of West Riverside Park., commemorating his life's work.