It was then that I realized that the memoirs I was writing — about growing up in the 1930s and 1940s — were filled with some incidents of anxieties, but the overall tone was one of security interspersed with challenge. And certainly, the anxiety never led to me developing into a chronic worrier. Quite the opposite. I tend to be more in the “things always turn out for the best” school. Then I began to muse: was it possible that my childhood days marked the last, or near last, “age of innocence”?
Unwilling to be accused of being a Pollyanna, a non-realist, an idealist, I took a critical eye to the events of my upbringing. I knew that the decade in which I was born had not been free of stress and pain. It was the decade when Charles and Anne Lindbergh’s twenty-month-old son was kidnapped and later found murdered; when millions of North Americans were out of work due to the Great Depression; when Joseph Stalin’s wife was suspected of committing suicide; when the Second World War broke out. But good things were happening, as well. New York’s Radio City Music Hall opened. The Toronto Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup. If you had any money, the price of a house averaged six thousand dollars and a loaf of bread cost a mere seven cents. A new car cost $610 and gas was ten cents a gallon. Elizabeth Taylor was born!
Reviewing my growing-up years over those two decades and comparing them to the society in which my children and their children will have to live, I have an increased understanding of how difficult it is for today’s generation to discern how to make positive choices. The growing prosperity after the war years, plus societal changes wrought by the war, were a prelude to the revolutionary social mores of the 1960s. Individualism and relativism are now dominant. Guidelines are often fuzzy or non-existent. By learning about times that were different, this generation may be encouraged to know that life was and can be different. That it’s possible to restore some of that innocence into their world.
I realize my life had an extra dimension that coloured it forever. Growing up at the Beach (or the Beaches, as many Torontonians refer to it) infused my nature with a resiliency as multi-faceted as the moods of Lake Ontario, and a foundation as firm as the grand old willow trees that line the boardwalk. I was truly blessed, as was every child who was a son or daughter of the Beach.
Bring back “the old days”? No, that’s not possible or even desirable. But honour those old days? Yes — and realize there are ways to integrate their values into today’s anxious world.
Growing Up on the Boardwalk
Every man has within himself the entire human condition.
— David Shields, “Reality, Persona” in Truth in Nonfiction
Today The Beach neighbourhood is considered a safe stable place for busy Torontonians to live and raise a family. It is a trendy oasis of relaxation, and a refuge from the summer humidity that can wither city dwellers. But in 1793 when the Ashbridge family started to farm there, it was boggy, buggy, and plain hard work. The family, who’d moved there from Philadelphia in 1793 when John Graves Simcoe was lieutenant-governor, was determined to persevere in civilizing this lakefront wasteland. By the 1850s, other pioneers had joined them, including a settler named Joseph Williams. Williams bought a farm near the present-day Queen Street and Lee Avenue area and named it Kew Farms. Ever a man of enterprise, he designated a sector of it as The Canadian Kew Gardens. Contemporary documents described it as “a pretty pleasure ground of twenty acres, fifteen in bush, fronting on the open lake.” It offered “innocent amusements in great variety, including dancing,” and “temperate drinks, but no Spirituous Liquors.” The resourceful Williams instead sold his own milk and buttermilk as “the temperate drinks.”
The Beach area grew as the public became increasingly interested in its developing attractions. In 1876, a new subdivision between Silver Birch and Balsam Avenues reserved a “private promenade” on the waterfront for lot buyers. Streetcar and steamer service became available. The Toronto Gravel and Concrete Company built a tramway along the south side of Kingston Road. Horse-drawn trams brought picnickers to Woodbine Park (site of the first Woodbine Rack Track). New streets laid out in Balmy Beach Park bore the name of trees. (Veteran Beachers to this day maintain if you didn’t live on a street named after a tree you weren’t really a son or daughter of the Beach.) Still, life was not entirely civilized. People who went to work on winter mornings to downtown Toronto had to have a lantern which they left in a little shed at Woodbine Avenue. When they returned at night, they’d pick up their lantern, light it, and walk home.
Thomas O’Connor, a Catholic layman and benefactor of the Sisters of St. Joseph, was another Torontonian who owned a huge block of lakefront land. He bequeathed his farm, consisting of forty acres of land and twenty-four acres of water lots stretching from the lake to Queen Street East, from Leuty to MacLean Avenues to the St. Joseph congregation. After his death in 1895, the Sisters farmed the area as a profitable dairy and garden produce source. They used the income to maintain one of their major projects in the city — the House of Providence on Power Street, a huge institution for the indigent, sick, and aged. Finally, in 1906 the Sisters decided to sell the fertile farm site and establish a new farm on St. Clair Avenue East.
In a short-sighted decision, Toronto City Council declined to buy it because they considered it too expensive. The Sisters sold the property to Harry and Mabel Dorsey in 1908 for the sum of $165,000. By that time this eastern section had a population of about 5,000. It was developing into a year-round settlement with a school and churches. This growth was initially the result of the Toronto Railway Company’s expansion of service. It had installed streetcar tracks along Queen to Balsam in 1891 — for summer use only. Then, in 1901 East Toronto was incorporated into the City proper. By 1900 a third of the 287 lakefront homes east of Woodbine were no longer merely summer cottage escapes, but were occupied on a permanent basis. Queen Street was gradually extended past the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant (known to locals as the Water Works and site of an illegal driving range to many aspiring young golfers). They had no inkling that in future years it would be celebrated in Michael Ondaatje’s novel, In the Skin of a Lion. Queen East ended at Fallingbrook Avenue and the Hundred Steps, at whose base was a small dance pavilion. The Dorseys recognized the land’s potential. There’d already been a series of short-lived amusement parks at different locales along the lake. They had a vision of an amusement park on the site patterned after New York’s Dreamland. They invested $600,000 to build the largest park with the most attractions ever put in the Beach area. In March of that year, a contest was held to choose a name for it. It opened June 1, 1907 as Scarboro Beach Park. It had everything that Coney Island ever had! There was a bandstand and a scenic railway that took visitors all around the grounds. the Shoot the Chutes ride had an opening underneath the spectators’ walkway for the boats. There was a multitude of choices — the Whirl of Pleasure, the Disasters Presentations, and the Electroscope, a bathhouse, the Scarboro Inn restaurant, and a carousel. Amidst the other hundred attractions the extremely long roller coaster ride proved popular, as did the Bump the Bumps Slide, Shoot the Chutes, and the Tunnel of Love. Performers used the thirty-eight-metre-high tower for daredevil acts. A miniature steamship train transported merrymakers all around the grounds. At night, thousands of lights decorated the park. Families would gather in their canoes and rowboats at the lakeshore to listen to concerts. Professional lacrosse (officially designated as Canada’s sole national game until 1994) and other sports were played at the athletic grounds, which featured a wooden velodrome. That interest in sports was to remain constant, with the Beach being the home of many softball, water sports, and tennis championship teams through the decades. The first public exhibition flights in Canada were made there by Charles Willard in September 1909. After almost two glorious decades, the amusement park closed on September 12, 1925.