The PNE's last summer on the old Hastings Park midway
The amphitheatre is built, the midway moves next spring, and the wooden coaster — as required by law, sentiment and engineering — stays exactly where it is.
The fair that opens Saturday is the last one on the midway's old footprint. When the gates close on Labour Day, the rides come down as they always do — and next spring they go back up two hundred metres east, on the realigned grounds the park's master plan has been promising since before some of the ride operators were born.
The move is the midway's part of a larger reshuffle: the new amphitheatre opened this summer, the sanctuary ponds expand into the old parking, and the fair's long, awkward coexistence with a residential neighbourhood gets renegotiated with better fences and a sound engineer's fingerprints on the site plan.
The wooden coaster stays. It was never going anywhere — heritage designation, engineering reality and public sentiment forming, for once, a unanimous committee. The realigned midway is designed around it, which the fair's president describes as "planning a city around a cathedral, if the cathedral rattled."
For this final summer the fair is leaning into the occasion: the archives on display in the Forum, ride tokens printed with the old map, and — the detail that will fill everyone's cameras — the midway's original 1958 arch, found in a maintenance yard in 2019, restored and standing at the gate it first stood at, for one more season of photographs.
