Undressed Toronto

From the Swimming Hole to Sunnyside, How a City Learned to Love the Beach, 1850–1935

Dale Barbour

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780887559495
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Undressed Toronto looks at the life of the swimming hole and considers how Toronto turned boys skinny dipping into comforting anti-modernist folk figures. By digging into the vibrant social life of these spaces, Barbour challenges narratives that pollution and industrialization in the nineteenth century destroyed the relationship between Torontonians and their rivers and waterfront. Instead, we find that these areas were co-opted and transformed into recreation spaces: often with the acceptance of indulgent city officials.

While we take the beach for granted today, it was a novel form of public space in the nineteenth century and Torontonians had to decide how it would work in their city. To create a public beach, bathing needed to be transformed from the predominantly nude male privilege that it had been in the mid-nineteenth century into an activity that women and men could participate in together. That transformation required negotiating and establishing rules for how people would dress and behave when they bathed and setting aside or creating distinct environments for bathing.

Undressed Toronto challenges assumptions about class, the urban environment, and the presentation of the naked body. It explores anxieties about modernity and masculinity and the weight of nostalgia in public perceptions and municipal regulation of public bathing in five Toronto environments that showcase distinct moments in the transition from vernacular bathing to the public beach: the city's central waterfront, Toronto Island, the Don River, the Humber River, and Sunnyside Beach on Toronto's western shoreline.

1

Central Waterfront

Testing the Waters

Toronto’s early waterfront seemed crafted for bathing. The city fronted on a shoreline that included “a shingly beach” wide enough for a carriage to ride along and water shallow enough to wade into.1 The city’s early nineteenth-century wharves stretched out into the shallow bay to reach water deep enough for ships to anchor and were ideal spaces for bathers to dive from. The shoreline at the mouth of the Don River on the eastern side of the bay approached the lake at a gentle slope but rose into a high ridge of land, called the Ontario Terrace, which towered thirty or forty feet above the shoreline, as you moved west.2 The Ontario Terrace was high enough that in the 1830s a soldier, who had been out drinking and was found passed out in the Freeland Soap Factory, was able to skulk unseen along the shoreline and reach the Fort York military garrison.3 If the soldier had not been trying to keep out of sight, he could have taken a gravel path along the top of the terrace. According to Toronto historian Henry Scadding, the path, with wood-hewn bridges to cross the ravines along the waterfront, was maintained by the garrison.4 “From its agreeableness,” Scadding adds, “overlooking as it did, through its whole length the Harbour and Lake, this walk gave birth to the idea, which became a fixed one in the minds of the early people of the place, that there was to be in perpetuity, in front of the whole town, a pleasant promenade, on which the burghers and their families should take the air and disport themselves generally.” 5

Toronto was never supposed to be Ontario’s capital. After Britain used the Constitutional Act to split Quebec into two new colonies in 1791, Upper Canada (Ontario), for United Empire Loyalists who had left the United States after the American Revolution, and Lower Canada (Quebec), for French Canada, Governor General Guy Carlton favoured Kingston for Upper Canada’s capital, thanks to its location at the head of St. Lawrence River, which was the lifeblood of the British North American colonies.6 Upper Canada’s new Lieutenant Governor, John Graves Simcoe, preferred a site along the Deshkan Ziibi River, which he quickly renamed the Thames River, because he imagined its location in the heart of the colony would help with administration and defence. But Toronto also drew Simcoe’s eye. Bolstered by Joseph Bouchette’s survey of the bay in 1792, Simcoe envisioned Toronto Island serving as a defensive perimeter for a new garrison town that would manage Upper Canada until a new capital was settled upon.7 Simcoe arrived in Toronto in 1793, gave it the new British name “York,” and set about building up the colony. Toronto reclaimed its original name when it was incorporated as a city in 1834 and became the colony’s, and eventually the province’s, permanent capital by default.

We are going to look at the environment that Simcoe, and the settlers that followed him, found when they arrived in Toronto. This was still a contested terrain at the start of the nineteenth century, with Indigenous people working to keep access to the territory’s rivers and lakes, and settlers who went for a swim fully expected that they might encounter Indigenous people along the waterline. The practical and metaphorical presence of Indigenous people influenced how these early European bathers thought about their new bathing spaces. We will see how Toronto’s early lawmakers worked with the city’s physical environment and how that affected attempts to police people bathing openly on the central waterfront. Finally, I will look at the construction of the Esplanade in the 1850s: a project intended to create a public walkway and a rail corridor on the Toronto waterfront. The Esplanade has been blamed for breaking Toronto’s relationship with its waterfront. But when it comes to bathing the Esplanade did something more complex; it created a patchwork waterfront where some areas were developed and industrialized while others were left incomplete and could be co-opted by vernacular bathers. Haphazard development enabled activities such as nude bathing to survive even as the social restrictions against nude bathing solidified in Toronto.

The island that drew Simcoe’s eye was little more than a “spit of sand” in 1793.8 Still tethered to the mainland as a peninsula, the territory “was a waste of sand, with here and there clumps of willows and stunted poplars,” to quote newspaper editor and historian John Ross Robertson.9 The name Toronto itself, or Tkaronto, in its original Mohawk form, has been interpreted as “Trees Rising out of the Water” and erroneously attributed to the island. But even in the nineteenth century that idea was being debunked by Scadding. He argued the name referred to the Lake Simcoe region but was used as a shorthand for the island and Toronto region because they were a turning point for people heading north to Lake Simcoe along the Carrying-Place Trail, an Indigenous portage route that ran along the Humber River valley.10 Even today the origin of Toronto’s name is still debated.11

C. Pelham Mulvany refers to the Don and the Humber Rivers as the “Cyphissus and Ilyssus of Toronto” in his 1884 history of the city, taking the names from Greek river gods to suggest how the rivers guarded the boundaries of Toronto.12 Elizabeth Simcoe and Scadding describe the natural beauty of the Don River at length. The Don was charming enough that the Simcoes built Castle Frank, a summer cottage named after their son, on the high ground overlooking the Don Valley. The Don was adopted by settlers as a bathing space almost immediately; in 1802 the Oracle, Upper Canada’s first newspaper, noted that Scottish settler Peter McGreg had drowned in the river while bathing near one of York’s earliest bridges.13

It was the Humber River that drew Europeans to Toronto. Teiaiagon, located just a few kilometres up the Humber from Lake Ontario, was a substantial Haudenosaunee community in the seventeenth century.14 The Carrying-Place Trail ensured that Toronto was a critical trade conduit for Indigenous groups—the Wendat and later the Mississauga—that were heading north from Lake Ontario or east or west after having reached the lake from the north. Toronto Island, just a short distance away, provided a sheltered space for travellers on the lake. The French established a post at Toronto by 1720 to tap this lucrative trading conduit; their claims were passed on to the British after the Seven Years’ War in 1763.

The American War of Independence was decisive for Toronto’s fate: the 1783 Treaty of Paris drew the boundary between British territory and the new United States of America through the Great Lakes and turned Toronto into a border region. United Empire Loyalists who were pushed out during the war or who left willingly after it moved into the land around Lake Ontario.15 Land surrender agreements with Indigenous groups followed. Brokered in 1787, the Toronto purchase was an agreement between the Mississauga and the British government, intended to transfer ownership of a wedge of land about 28 miles (45 km) deep and 14 miles (22.5 km) wide, which ran from the Etobicoke Creek in the west to a point just east of the Don River, in exchange for £1,700 in cash and goods.16

The Toronto Purchase was challenged immediately: the Wendat argued the Mississauga had no right to sell the land and the Mississauga disputed what had been included in the agreement.17 Even the colonial government recognized the dubious authenticity of the Toronto Purchase and held a second meeting with the Mississauga in 1805 to “confirm” what was included in the agreement. As Toronto historian Victoria Freeman has argued, the 1805 revision took advantage of the Mississauga, who had negotiated the Toronto Purchase.18 The colonial government used the 1805 revision to expand the territory included in the Toronto Purchase, and added Toronto Island, which had been excluded from the original agreement. The 1805 revision offered a pittance of ten shillings, or about two dollars, in return as compensation for the expansion. The underhanded negotiations l...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Central Waterfront: Testing the Waters
• 2 Central Waterfront: Vernacular Spaces
• 3 Toronto Island: Implementing a Beach
• 4 The Don River and the Bathing Boy
• 5 Humber River Encounters
• 6 Sunnyside and the Beach
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Illustration Credits
• Index