Newmarket opened the doors to Mulock Park this weekend, turning a long-planned public project into a new gathering place for residents, families, and visitors.
The 16-acre park opened to the public at 5 p.m. Friday, Sept. 18, with grand-opening activities continuing through Sunday, Sept. 20. The site sits at the corner of Yonge Street and Mulock Drive, where the former Mulock private estate has been reshaped into a four-season public space built around nature, art, recreation, and local history.
The Town of Newmarket describes Mulock Park as one of its largest parks and public gathering spaces. Its opening followed years of planning and a community-visioning process that helped shape what residents would eventually find there. The town says the project is intended to be a place where people can gather, explore, celebrate, learn, and spend quiet time outdoors.
The opening weekend’s program was designed to make the park feel lived-in from the start. Residents could walk the site’s network of paths, visit the historic Mulock House, take part in art workshops and community activities, hear live performances, play lawn games, and try roller skating with equipment and instruction available for children and adults.
Friday’s schedule included a community picnic lounge, discovery and information stations, live music, an all-request dueling-piano show, croquet, a DJ, an artistic roller-skating performance, and activities in the park’s artist studio and glass hall. Families could make paper flowers, contribute to a community mosaic, color murals, try musical instruments, and explore exhibits connected to Newmarket’s history.
The town also arranged free shuttle service from the Magna Centre and Ray Twinney Recreation Complex because parking at the park was expected to be limited. Streets near the park were restricted to local traffic during the weekend to help manage visitor flow.
NewmarketToday reported that thousands of people came through during the opening weekend. In coverage published after the event, the outlet described council members reflecting on the experience of seeing the park finally open after years of work. A separate NewmarketToday report documented a community thank-you gathering for residents, consultants, builders, staff, and partners who helped bring the project to completion.
The park’s design combines open green space with facilities intended for year-round use. The town lists two kilometres of paved trails, public art, water features, a greenhouse conservatory connected to an artist studio, and a winter skate trail among the site’s features. The renovated Mulock House serves as the park’s heritage centrepiece, and selected works from the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Indigenous and Canadian art collections are being shown there through a partnership with the AGO.
Mayor John Taylor said the park represents a shared community vision and an investment in Newmarket’s future. The town’s announcement also emphasized that residents helped shape the project through public engagement, making the opening more than a ribbon-cutting: it was a public reveal of a place the community had helped imagine.
Mulock Park gives Newmarket a rare kind of civic story: a major public space opening with no single star at the center. The focus is on neighbors, families, artists, local history, and the ordinary rituals that make a park belong to a town. People came to skate, listen to music, make things, walk beneath the trees, and see what years of shared planning had produced.
The park is now open to the public, with general park hours listed as 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. Specific facility hours may vary.
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