The Gardiners Cottage
The origins of the Beaches community can arguably be traced to the arrival of Joseph Williams in 1853. Williams settled in the vicinity of
The area remained isolated until the 1870s, when it began to take shape as a summer resort for Torontonians. In 1876, a new subdivision between Silver Birch and Balsam Avenues reserved a "private promenade" on the waterfront for lot buyers. After suffering from a variety of private encroachments, the promenade was transformed by provincial legislation into "Balmy Beach Park" in 1903. A special management body, the Balmy Beach Park Commission, opened the new public facility in 1904. Building a pavilion for the Balmy Beach Club was one of the Commission's park improvements for 1904-05.
In 1879, Williams turned part of his property into "The Canadian Kew Gardens." A brochure from that year described the site 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 "[a]ll temperate drinks, but no Spirituous Liquors." Williams' own milk and buttermilk were among the temperate drinks available. In 1907, the City purchased the grounds and adjoining properties for its own Kew Gardens. The Kew Williams stone cottage (1901-02) was retained for use by the park superintendent. It survives along with a public library built in the park in 1916.
In 1880,
After assuming the TSR's franchise, the Toronto Railway Company (TRC) extended streetcar tracks along Queen to Balsam in 1891 for summer-only service. A final extension into "Munro Park" was realized in 1898. Munro Park was leased to the TRC by the heirs of the original owner, former Toronto mayor George Monro [sic]. The 16-acre site opened in 1896, and was managed in conjunction with Victoria Park to the east, a fare-attracting strategy common across North America. What began with a dance pavilion and bandstand soon featured a mineral well, a 150-foot Ferris wheel, a water merry-go-round, and, for a time, Lundy's Ostrich Farm. After the TRC's lease expired in 1907, Munro Park was subdivided for housing, despite local hopes that it might become a "public breathing place."
By the end of the 1890s, the Beaches was developing into a year-round settlement. Kew Beach Public School, a four-room brick affair, was erected at Queen and Kippendavie in 1899. In 1900, the World reported nearly a third of the 287 lakefront houses east of
The last privately operated pleasure ground in the Beaches was also the largest and most ostentatious, though it sprang from humble beginnings. From 1895-96 to 1906, the Sisters of St. Joseph operated the "House of Providence Farm" on the lakeshore between Maclean and Leuty Avenues. The Farm was sold to the Toronto Park Company for $165,000 in 1906 after the City balked at the asking price. The "Scarboro' Beach Amusement Park" opened the following year. This $600,000 facility, modelled after similar enterprises on Coney Island, included a Scenic Railway and a Shoot-the-Chutes, staged disasters and sideshows (including Toronto's first "genuine monkey circus"), and a stadium hosting professional lacrosse. The first public flying demonstration in Canada was apparently held over the park in 1909.
Scarboro' Beach Park met the same development fate as Munro Park. The TRC, which had owned and operated the site since 1913, tried to have the new Toronto Transportation Commission (TTC) purchase the grounds once the TRC's streetcar franchise expired in 1921. The TTC refused, and after a final season in 1925, the site was subdivided and rapidly covered with streets and houses.
Beaches Park
According to plans prepared by the THC in 1912 and 1920, the Beaches district was to be endowed with a grand public waterfront. Neither scheme came to fruition, as much of the shoreline remained in private hands. Improvements were nonetheless made in front of the City-owned Kew Gardens, where the Kew Beach Bathing Pavilion was erected in 1913-14, and to the east, where the Leuty Avenue Life Saving Station was built in 1920 to Alfred Chapman's design. (Chapman was also architect for the THC's Administration Building, the Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion, and the Princes' Gates and Ontario Government Building at
The $2.4-million Beaches Park was developed on water and land lots acquired by the City as early as 1921. Actual construction, which began in 1930, was financed largely out of relief work appropriations. Some 211 dwellings and an unspecified number of private boathouses were removed; in their place rose a public boathouse, a refreshment booth, a lavatory building, an athletic field, and a 4,800-foot boardwalk. Though a throng of nearly 60,000 welcomed the park's opening on Victoria Day 1932, squabbling broke out when the Parks Commissioner suggested that the new facility be named "Kew Beach Park." Residents of the Balmy Beach area felt that they had "a certain community autonomy, a certain identity by virtue of the adopted name, which they [were] unwilling to forfeit"; Kew Beachers feared that their neighbourhood's "peculiar exclusiveness" would wane if its name was applied too broadly in a geographical sense. "Beaches Park" became City Council's compromise choice.
Excerpted from Waterfront Trail, on the Metro Toronto Web site.
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