By Sue Stefko
(Appeared in the Glebe Report, October 2025)
The Glebe Annex Community Association (GACA) is in the midst of another busy fall season. On an incredibly beautiful September day, the association hosted our community and park clean-up. We don’t know if it was because of the great weather, or perhaps the word spread that we were offering free coffee from the relatively new Bacata Columbian coffee shop around the corner on Bronson, but we had the best turnout we’d had in years! Having a large and enthusiastic group meant that the neighbourhood was cleaned up and looking tidy in short order, leaving the clean-up crew time to chat, have some coffee and enjoy a mini social at the end of the clean-up.
GACA is now preparing for our free Hallowe’en event, which will be held at the front of Dalhousie South Park on Bell Street South from 5:30 to 7 on Friday October 31st. We will have loot bags for the children, and back by popular demand, our photo ‘booth’ – weather permitting. This year, we’ll be sporting a new spooky backdrop, and our DJ Morris will be back, spinning some scary tunes.
This will be our third Halloween event, which is rapidly becoming a tradition here in the Glebe Annex. We first came up with the idea in 2020. We had gotten our very first City of Ottawa grant for a party in the park for the 2020 season – officially the worst year ever to try to host a social event! We tried to salvage the grant later that year by delaying the party until late summer, although COVID restrictions were still in place. Finally, we proposed a safe social distancing Hallowe’en event, but that too was not to be. While we were ultimately not able to take advantage of the grant funds that year, it did plant a seed for some kind of neighbourhood Hallowe’en event.
Even though the community had been seeing a decline in trick-or-treaters, as it seems our neighbourhood’s children travel to neighbourhoods with fewer medium and high rises that are more accessible to the trick-or-treating crowd, in 2022 we finally decided to take a chance on a Hallowe’en event. We were happily surprised to see crowds of people lining up to get their photos taken at our photo booth. While the neighbourhood still doesn’t see many trick-or-treaters grace their doors, we are happy to see the Hallowe’en spirit alive and well in the Glebe Annex and are excited that families stop by and make our photo booth and candy collection a part of their evening plans.
GACA gets involved in many different areas in our community – providing input on development, advocating for better transit, sharing information about upcoming events, promoting neighbourhood safety, etc. While we believe all our work is important and valuable, none seem more appreciated than our events, and certainly none are as fun to undertake! We are always excited to meet new community members and to make a few new friends at our events, and hope that this year will be no exception. We hope to see the community come out to enjoy some spooky fun at this year’s Hallowe’en event!
Photos (all by Gabrielle Dallaporta)
Halloween 2024:
- Some community members who came out to enjoy GACA’s Hallowe’en 2024 event
Clean up:
- The clean-up crew getting ready to get down to work, showing off both their gloves and their enthusiasm.
- Displaying the fruits of their labours – some of the litter that just one family was able to remove from our neighbourhood streets.
- Bacata coffee was a much-appreciated reward for a job well done!
