In Today’s Toronto Star Insight section I have an essay on Sunnyside. It’s accompanied by some nice photos by the Star’s Keith Beaty that are not online (only the one above is), so if you see a copy, take a peek. This article is accompanied by a piece by Christopher Hume on Toronto’s out-of-bounds attractions.
On hot summer days from the 1890s until August 1950, streetcars would rumble along Toronto streets stopping for children with bathing suits and carrying towels. They could climb aboard for a free ride to the intersection of Queen, King and Roncesvalles, where the car would turn south, pass over the railway tracks and head west down a gentle slope.
The destination was not the middle of the Gardiner Expressway, as it would be today, but the Sunnyside Beach area. Toronto provided this free “bathing car” service to children in order to bring them to Sunnyside — or to three free “bathing ferries” — so they could cool down in Lake Ontario. An added bonus: the land adjacent to the beach was home to an amusement park.
To feel truly isolated from the city today, sit on one of the benches in front of the Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion and look directly north. It’s like being inside the primitive 1980s video game Frogger: two lanes of cyclists, eight lanes of Lake Shore Blvd., six lanes of the Gardiner Expressway, and finally the railway tracks. All this is a more formidable barrier than the alligators and floating logs players dodged in Frogger.
3 comments
You mentioned near the [of the completer version of the article] that no one swims there. I just wanted to add that the City just finished a pilot water cleaning project there about month ago, where the water of a certain area of the beach is pumped and cleaned using an onsite facility. You can see the big metallic rectangular box just off of the boardwalk. I’m not sure how much it has drawn in new people, but we sometimes take advantage of it after volleyball.
There is a plan for Sunnyside, see Western Waterfront Master Plan at http://www.toronto.ca/waterfront/wwmp.htm for information, which includes realigning Lake Shore Blvd. W. northward to create more parkland. The current grass between the eastbound and westbound lanes of Lake Shore are used only by the geese and ducks.
It’s true plans are in the works to make Sunnyside swim-able (cleaner, warmer) — no room to get into the new stuff in this article. Am usually a big proponent of swimming in Toronto — so these area all good things.