Historian Richard White examines how the Beach came to be in recently released book
By ALAN SHACKLETON
Why is the Beach neighbourhood the way it is?
That was the question local resident and historian Richard White asked himself, and it led to his recently released book The Beaches: Creation of a Toronto Neighbourhood.
White, who has lived on Willow Avenue in the Beach for more than 25 years, takes a historian’s approach to discovering how the neighbourhood came to be what it is today. He has a PhD in history from the University of Toronto, is an author, a part-time professor and lecturer of history at U of T.
In an interview with Beach Metro Community News, White said his book is written with a historian’s eye and not from the perspective of preservationist looking to keep the neighbourhood exactly the way it is.
“I think a historian is someone who investigates the past and tries to understand it. I don’t think a historian necessarily wants to preserve things.”
White grew up in London, Ontario, then lived in Edmonton for a number of years before moving to Toronto about 35 years ago with his family. White and his wife and two daughters lived near the U of T campus downtown for about 10 years before moving to the Beach in 1997.
“When we moved here we did not have a particular sense of what it was,” he said.
White said his earliest impression was that the area was “covered with trees and oddly close to the lake.”
His book examines how the neighbourhood, its styles of housing, street layouts and parks came to be. It also looks at how all of that has shaped and defined the ‘character’ of the Beach.
Readers may note this story calls White a Beach resident, but his book is titled The Beaches: Creation of a Toronto Neighbourhood. The Beach or Beaches debate is seemingly endless, and White has chosen to go with Beaches.
Knowing it’s a hot topic among residents, here’s his explanation for that decision:
“One cannot write about Toronto’s Beaches neighbourhood without commenting, and taking a position, on its name – the singular Beach or plural Beaches, a matter of serious dispute among many residents, and a cause of serious eye-rolling among many non-residents. This study stands firmly on the side of the latter name, as its title shows, and does so for mostly historical reasons.”
However, White acknowledged in the book’s introduction that the Beach “singular name was common enough in the formative years of the current generation of aging, historically minded residents, that they demanded it be made official, and they have partially succeeded.
“Though I too am an aging, historically minded resident, I have not been persuaded. For this history, which covers the genesis and growth of one neighbourhood out of multiple beaches, Beaches seemed right, on account of both basic logic and historical usage.”
The book also defines the neighbourhood as being bound by Woodbine Avenue to the west; Victoria Park Avenue to the east; Kingston Road to the north; and Lake Ontario to the south. It is the changes, development and creation of the community in that area which the book examines.
Land ownership and geography played key roles in how the Beach evolved into the neighbourhood it now is, said White.
It’s important to remember that land on the north shore of Lake Ontario had been lived on for centuries by First Nations peoples.
“There can be no doubt that the roughly two kilometres of shoreland, from the sandspit enclosing Ashbridge’s marsh in the west to the towering Scarborough Bluffs in the east, has long been travelled through, gathered from, hunted on, fished along, and probably at times settled upon by Indigenous inhabitants,” wrote White in the book.
How the area developed after the arrival of European immigrants is the focus of the book and that began in the late 1700s and early 1800s.
“The history of an urban neighbourhood such as the Beaches is thus, in short, a chronicle of the thoughts and actions of the interlopers who comprised the settler society, and its history thus begins with their arrival,” wrote White. “As questionable, even unjust as the entire colonial endeavour now appears to many historians, these thoughts and actions have shaped, in this case, the living conditions and lives of tens of thousands of residents for over a hundred years, right through to the present day.”
Right from the establishment of Upper Canada in 1791 and the Town of York, surveying of the surrounding land had started and its ownership was being assigned by the British government. Once surveyed, the lots were granted to private owners.
“A full slate of grantees and subsequent purchasers of Beaches lots has never been compiled, but most whose names have come to light were members of the colony’s early political, military, and business elite,” wrote White. “Upper Canada’s initial land grants are known to have been done to create and sustain a colonial elite, and what we know of initial ownership in the Beaches district certainly demonstrates this.”
And for many years the land stayed with some of those original owners as its geography of being steeply sloped, of sandy soil, and featuring small creeks, and the large ravine that is now Glen Stewart, made it unsuitable for most large-scale farming which would have been the main usage desired by settlers in the early 1800s.
The geography, with the bluffs at the far east end and some of the land viewed as swampy, also made the area one in which the building of major east-west roads along the lakeshore difficult. So the Kingston Road turned north at the area of Ashbridge’s swamp and ran along the elevated plain of the land.
“This bypassed triangle of land between the Kingston Road and the lake would become the Beaches,” wrote White.
The Grand Trunk Railway (GTR) also took the same decision as the builders of Kingston Road to run their tracks well north of the lake and avoid the difficult landscape east of Woodbine Avenue, thus preventing a rail line along the shores of Lake Ontario as is often seen in other parts of Toronto and Ontario.
“Railways invariably had a large impact on land ownership and development patterns in pioneer settlements. This decision by the GTR to veer inland rather than continue along the lake made the district the only part of Toronto with a lakeshore not used for shipping or industry,” wrote White.
Those moves meant that in the coming years, the community would grow only as a residential (and recreational) area with some small service businesses along Queen Street East and Kingston Road, but with no major industrial or farming uses.
“The neighbourhood was entirely residential and that’s another aspect of its social character,” said White. “There were no barber shops or corner stores in the residential fabric. It’s pure residential except for Queen Street.”
Things didn’t really start happening in the Beach until around the middle of the 1800s when most of those original 200 acre lots were broken up.
It was once the city around the Beach started to grow that the community took steps towards becoming what now is.
The first major influence was in the later 1800s and early 1900s as the area’s proximity to the lake and beaches saw it become a place of leisure and recreation for those living in other parts of the city. There were cottages built right up to the lakefront, large country estates, and amusement parks.
The first amusement park to open was the Victoria Park, on what is now the home of the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant, in 1878. Other commercially run parks in the area including Kew Gardens, which was owned by the Williams family and was opened in 1879, were also established. In 1896, Monro Park amusement park opened and four years later its owners took over control of the neighbouring Victoria Park. It was followed by the Scarboro Beach Amusement Park which opened in 1907 and closed in 1925.
In the late 1800s, electrification was reaching the area, and that would lead to the building of more and more houses. One of the main reasons for that “building boom” was that the Toronto Street Railway became electrified and streetcars were serving the Beach, as they still do today.
White wrote that prior to 1900, the main appeal of the area was the lake. After that, as the electric streetcar service became more reliable the growth took on “a more conventional suburb-building” process.
“There had been these horse-drawn streetcars before, but they weren’t very reliable and they were surprisingly expensive and people didn’t use them. Once electrified, it became a viable technology and the city was expanding,” said White. “The fact they were growing and they were served by electric streetcars opened up ‘distant’ areas for residential development all at once.”
Owners of large sections of land began to develop them for housing, or sell them off to others who would sometimes then subdivide the land yet again. And it was all done with little co-ordination between land owners and no central planning authority in charge of what was built where or how.
“I didn’t realize how unplanned the neighbourhood was until I started working on this,” said White of his book.
White also writes about the creation of some planned neighbourhoods within the community – including Glen Manor (or Stewart Manor as it was first known). The development in the west side of the community is generally more unplanned than the homes built further east, he said.
“For the physical character, it’s compact,” said White of the neighbourhood. “The character was created by the private entrepreneurs, they squeezed in as many houses as they could to maximize their profit. There’s considerable density, small lots, narrow streets, minimal setbacks.”
And since most of that building was done before automobiles, much of the Beach sees houses very close together with no space put aside for driveways. “Since it was pre-automobile, most of it, there’s not as much space between houses which increased density. There’s also a lack of sophisticated design…it’s a fact that almost none of the houses in this neighbourhood were architect designed,” said White.
For Glen (Stewart) Manor, Pine Crescent and the Price Brothers’ four-plexes on the site of the old Scarboro Beach Amusement Park, more thought was put into the design of the homes, said White.
The Price Brother’s homes were designed to be rental housing, he said. “Those four-plexes were rentals. They weren’t sold…It was for lower middle-class renters. The strategy of sorts was to sell the lower land (south of Queen Street) at a lower price point.”
White said in those days of Beach residential development, builders knew exactly who their customers were. “The builders built for low-income people. That’s the thing I find so interesting. The proximity to the lake, which people value so much now, that’s where the lower-value housing was put. The higher-value housing was built north of Queen Street on the hill.”
Another reality of the Beach’s growth is the number of small apartment buildings, he said. “I think the prevalence of apartment buildings is more an essential part of this neighbourhood than people realize. Queen Street does have a small-town feel because of them, and that’s part of the physical characteristic.”
By 1951, approximately one-third of the dwellings in the neighbourhood were classed as apartments, said White. “South of Queen Street more than half of the residences were classed as apartments” so that certainly played a part in establishing the social character of the neighbourhood, he said.
A huge influence on the community was, of course, the amount of land purchased or expropriated from private owners to create the enormous lakefront park and Boardwalk.
The waterfront cottages were taken down and a public park with access for all was instead created by the City of Toronto.
“The lake, maybe more than the beach, is the strongest natural continuity in the Beaches’ history,” wrote White.
He wondered, however, if it would be possible for city politicians to take such action to build parks along the waterfront today. “Imagine it being done now. There’s no way it could be done now but it was a major step forward for the city’s public realm,” said White.
As for the future and how the neighbourhood’s ‘character’ evolves, White said he’s curious to see what happens.
“The character of the neighbourhood that we see is not the way it was given. The character of the neighbourhood was once junky shacks. They were demolished and turned into permanent residences. Should they have been preserved? Characters of urban areas change as the economy and culture evolves,” he said.
“I don’t see why ‘character’ has to be frozen in place. So I feel that building should be allowed to reflect the present values and design principles. I’m not a preservationist, I just can’t be. Though maybe the character of a neighbourhood is persevered by attracting people who like the character.”
White said readers of his book may find the neighbourhood’s history a bit of a revelation.
“I think they just might realize that the history of the neighbourhood is more complex than they had thought. There are many factors in it. It’s gone through various stages. It certainly was not built as an elite neighbourhood at all. I guess some people do have the impression it’s an elite neighbourhood. It never was.”
The Beaches: Creation of a Toronto Neighbourhood is available at local book stores and online at https://utorontopress.com/9781487526467/the-beaches/
