Stepping onto one of the aged ferries at Jack Layton Ferry Terminal it can feel like you are traveling back in time. The oppressive summer heat and the noise of the city fade away, replaced by the sounds of seagulls and the excited hum of the crowd heading to the beach. On the 15-minute commute across the water you can look back at the towers of glass and concrete shrinking in size and turn to see a forested island approaching as the ferry pulls up to the dock. When you step off the ferry onto Toronto Island, the time travel is complete. You are now in a world without many modern amenities, with the most noticeable absence being cars. Mainland Toronto’s car centric design makes a place free of cars instantly apparent. The air feels clean, and the constant noise of the engines and horns is gone. This to me is the part that feels most like time travelling. The island is a little pocket of quieter, almost forgotten time. Perhaps that is what draws in over 1.5 million people a year to the island [1].

As soon as warm weather arrives in Toronto I eagerly pack my towel and head to the beach with my friends to relish the short bliss of Toronto’s summer. Hanlan’s is Church Street’s only rival as the heart of Toronto Queer life and in summer time, while the weather cooperates, I would argue that it eclipses Church street. The beach is the place to be in summer, and you can head there with a near guarantee that you will run into friends on the ferry or at the beach even without making plans ahead of time. For me personally, the beach is a place I will never forget. I started going to the beach during the COVID years as it was one of the few places that it was permissible to gather, being an outdoor experience. One of my friends brought me to the beach and I was understandably quite nervous. Hanlan’s Point Beach is one of only two clothing optional beaches in Canada and I had never been to anything like it before. There were many thought’s racing through my head, most of them being very critical of my body. I was quite self conscious at the time and was very anxious about showing so much skin. But, I made the leap and stepped out of my trunks and… the world kept turning. Nobody pointed, nobody laughed, in fact, nobody cared at all about me. It felt amazing. After that day the voices telling me that my body wasn’t good enough were never quite as loud again.

I returned many times to the beach after that day and discovered that it was a queer Toronto tradition to head to Hanlans and I was thrilled to join in the fun. The beach has a special place in my heart filled with joy, acceptance, and friendship. Hanlan’s has a forgotten history however, one which I stumbled upon by accident. At work I was looking at the land registry map of Toronto which shows parcels of land (properties). It was a slow day and I scrolled over to the island and saw that Hanlan’s was divided into hundreds of house sized parcels like a subdivision. This was puzzling as there are no homes anywhere near Hanlan’s. The closest homes are at Ward’s Island, which despite the confusing name is not a seperate island but merely the far eastern portion of Toronto Island. I started looking into the history of the Island and discovered that there had been dozens of homes at Hanlan’s and a thriving community now lost to time. The history of the community that lived on the island and the institutions that made their home on the island are almost completely forgotten. Memorialized by only a few signs on the island, the average torontonian has almost no knowledge of Hanlan’s rich history and the journey the area took to become one of Canada’s hotspots for queer culture. My goal is to bring a forgotten history to light and help Torontonians appreciate that history and the current space we now have.

The modern history of Hanlan’s Point starts in 1858 with the Hanlan family, whom the area is now named after. The Hanlan family moved to the Island in 1862. Other Torontonians followed the Hanlan family in 1867, the same year of the Confederation of Canada as a country, when the City purchased the Island from the Federal government and parceled the land into cottage sized plots. Many Families from Toronto built summer cottages there and a community started to form. [need sources for this paragraph perhaps]. With the arrival of more summer residents, the Hanlan family capitalized on the popularity of the island and built the Hanlan Hotel between 1878 and 1880. The finished building was beautiful and featured 25 rooms for guests. A photo of it is shown below. It was sadly lost to fire in 1909 [24]

The hotel was quickly followed by an amusement park built in the 1880s by the Hanlan family, complete with roller coasters and a famous circus attraction featuring a horse which dove 40 ft into Lake Ontario. The amusement park was one of several precursor amusement parks in Toronto which have now evolved into the modern day CNE, held annually on the mainland almost directly opposite Toronto Island. The amusement park grew and expanded with the creation of the Hanlan's Stadium which hosted the Toronto Maple Leafs Minor League Baseball team from 1909 to 1926 [10].

The community on Hanlans was a thriving one and then, as now, many people visited in the summer months to escape the growing city of Toronto to enjoy the relief that the Island brought. A, sadly unnamed, Toronto Woman’s poem was published in the Toronto Star in 1896 and captures a similar story to the modern experience of visiting Hanlan’s. While her name is sadly lost to time, her poem has made it through all 129 years since she first penned it. Her poem reflects feelings that are relatable to people who visit the island today, albit with a very Victoria England flair to the writing.

The Toronto Harbour Commision’s development of the Sunnyside Amusement Park in the 1910s spelled the end of the boom times for Hanlan’s amusement park [11] . The access by car and streetcar for sunnyside made it a much more accessible location and drew much of the crowds away. With it’s peak in the past the amusement park declined and in 1937 was demolished to make room for the Toronto Island Airport [12].

The island cottages remained longer than the amusement park but after the Gardiner Express way was started in 1956 the city started looking for new green space to make up for the vast amount of waterfront parkland that the gardiner had eaten up [13] [16]. The city official’s eyes looked to Toronto Island to make up the new park land and decided to begin the process of evicting all residents of the island. This was a controversial move, especially in the eyes of the island residents. An article in the Toronto Star, by an island resident named L. Stevenson, shows the frustration felt. The article shows that many of the homes on Hanlans were demolished with no compensation given to the residents. The article alleges that the city in years prior had encouraged home building on the island by veterans of the first and second world wars but this reversal was a betrayal of the island residents [14].

By 1962 all homes at Hanlan’s were demolished and in 1964 Hanlan’s point reopened as a public park, all traces of what came before removed[15]. Hanlan’s time as a place for cottages, hotels, and amusement parks was demolished and planted over with trees as part of the vision by Metro Parks for new green space for Toronto.

Out of the ashes came a new beginning for Hanlan’s however. It served it’s new purpose as green space for the growing city of Toronto, now at a population of over 2 million people compared to approximately 40,000 when the Hanlan family first moved to the island [17] [18].

To me, and to many other Torontonians, Hanlan’s is one of the few accessible green spaces in downtown. Hanlan’s is also widely considered the oldest queer space in Canada and a place of gathering for the queer community for generations, it was the site of the first pride celebration in Canada [2]. In 1971, pride was not a celebration as it is now. Though decriminalization of homosexuality had taken place in 1969, attitudes and laws towards queer people were still hostile, with police arresting gay men under the guise of other laws such as public indecency . Hanlan’s was a center point of activism during these decades, in part due it’s remote location away from the eyes of the police. The “Gay Day Picnic” of 1971 was a precursor to the modern day pride parade and was held at the beach. It was a fundraiser to send activists to Ottawa to protest for legal recognition and protections [2]. Today, the beach is still a gathering place for Queer Torontonians during the summer heat and a gem of green space away from a dense concrete city.

Hanlan’s queer history started before the conversion to parkland. Many of the residents of Hanlan’s cottages were gay men. Details of their lives are difficult to pin down as the times were not friendly to gay men which resulted in their lives remaining very secretive[20] [21]. Even after the City tore down all the homes on Hanlans the gay men and broader queer community remained, now as day trip visitors to the beach. Hanlan’s was a refuge from the homophobic policies and police brutality of mainland toronto. The most famous case of police brutality was called “Operation Soap” which involved 200 police men raiding a bathhouse in Toronto and arresting all the men inside in 1981 [19]. The City of Toronto would only issue an apology decades later in 2016. This backdrop highlights the likely reason that queer people began to gather at Hanlan’s. It was out of the way, and more importantly out of the public eye. It was a space where queer people could be themselves and feel relatively safe. Even Hanlan’s was not completely safe in those days for queer people however. In 1978, Toronto Police organized a mass arrest of gay men at Hanlans under the pretext of public nudity, despite the beach’s history of being a nude beach stretching back to 1894 [22].

Despite incursions by Police, Hanlan’s status as a queer gathering place thrived. In 1999, Peter Simms, a gay Toronto lawyer, put plans for an official clothing optional pilot program for Hanlan’s before council and got it approved. While the beach had been a nude beach as far back as 1894 [22] Toronto City Council had revoked the clothing optional designation in 1930. Hanlans has remained a clothing optional beach since 1999 despite resistance from conservative members of Toronto’s council attempting to moralize public space[20]. More threats to Hanlan’s emerged in the 2020s as the City of Toronto released plans for a live music venue next to the beach which prompted a fierce backlash from the queer community who knew that this would entail a sanitizing of queer elements to make the venue a “family-friendly” space. In 2023, the plans were reversed due to the community organization of many queer individuals and groups, like Friend’s of hanlans [20]. Even in the 2020’s however there are still threats to queer people. A gay man, David Gomez, was assaulted on the path from the ferry to the beach on June 5th, 2021, during Toronto’s Pride Month [23]. He was left unconscious and with a broken nose.

Hanlan’s today, is a special place for myself and many other Torontonians. Its history is incredibly fascinating and unfortunately remembered by very few. It is important to contextualize the impact queer people have had all through the history of hanlan’s and it is worth considering why queer people could only find a place of belonging in such a remote escape. Hanlan’s is a place of joy for many people today and despite the hardships we queer people face we have come through it all. Hanlan’s is our space and one which I will always love. It’s history is our history and learning more about it has brought me an even deeper connection with the modern iteration of Hanlan’s. The poem from 1896 puts the feeling of Hanlan’s into words in a perfect way.