From diving horses to Babe’s first blast
Toronto’s waterfront was home to amusement parks, historic baseball stadiums
They heard the crack of the bat and saw the ball fly out of the park, but how were baseball fans at Toronto Island’s Hanlan’s Point Stadium to know history was being made.
It was Sept. 5, 1914, and 19-year-old George Herman “Babe’’ Ruth had stepped up to the plate and taken a mighty swing — hitting his first professional career home run and giving the ball a one-way ticket into Lake Ontario.
“The Babe” was playing for the Boston Red Sox-owned minor league team, the Providence Grays, against the Toronto Maple Leafs, the city’s professional, minor league baseball team (it folded in 1967, a decade before the Blue Jays arrived on the scene).
Dubbed the “southside phenom” by the Toronto Daily Star, Ruth set baseball fans agog that day, when he struck out seven sluggers from the Maple Leafs team and hit his homer in a 9-0 victory for the Grays.
The Star gave Ruth the praise he deserved in its coverage: “Babe Ruth Held Them Helpless in the First Spasm” read one headline. The Star referred to the $25,000 paid for the Babe by the Red Sox: “He looked to be worth every nickel of it.”
Today, there’s a Heritage Toronto historical plaque near Hanlan’s Point ferry dock, not far from the island airport, where the 17,000-seat stadium — also called Maple Leaf Park — stood. The city team moved to another stadium at the base of Bathurst St. in 1926. The island stadium was eventually demolished and the site re-developed for the Toronto Island Airport.
But in its heyday, the island stadium was adjacent to one of the favourite summer destinations of Torontonians, Hanlan’s Point Amusement Park. From the1880s until its demise in the late 1920s, this is where citizens of all backgrounds and incomes came, via ferries, to unwind and beat the heat.
International champion sculler Ned Hanlan had used some of his earnings to rebuild the family hotel around 1880 (Hanlan’s Point is named after his father, John, an early settler) and expanded the attractions. Thousands enjoyed the picnic facilities, tea garden, dance hall, shooting galleries, merry-go-round, airplane ride, dance hall and side shows. According to an1888 newspaper article, the “Museum of Living Curiosities” included a 230-kilogram “fat lady,” and an “Irish-accented Zulu warrior.”
A 1909 fire destroyed most of the park and cost the life of a young female cashier. But it was reconstructed and opened the following year.
Diving Horses became a major attraction in the U.S., and Hanlan’s Point in the early 1900s featured J.W. Gorman’s two white diving horses, King and Queen, who would walk up a steep platform and dive off it into Lake Ontario. Press reports at the time said the popular horses performed “without a whip and with the horses’ own volition.”
At the same time Hanlan’s Point was thriving, so was an amusement park called Munro Park on the eastern edges of Toronto’s “Beach” community. George Munro, a Toronto businessman, bought the land in 1847 and called it the Painted Post Farm. He added a picnic site, swings, carousel, dance hall and bandstand. Later, the land was leased to the Toronto Railway Company, which added to the attractions. By 1900, there was a Ferris wheel, boardwalks and human and animal performers, as well as musical and vaudeville acts. By 1906, however, competition was about to open just a few blocks away and the lease for Munro Park was not renewed. Today, only the name Munro Park (Avenue) remains.
After paying $160,000 for a waterfront parcel of land, between Leuty and MacLean Aves., a couple named Harry and Mabel Dorsey opened the Scarboro Beach Amusement Park on June 1, 1907, which they patterned after New York’s Coney Island. The attractions included its own board- walk, arcades, shooting galleries, coaster, swing ride, carousel, a “Tunnel of Love” ride, “freak shows” and more.
Canada’s first “air show” took place Sept. 7, 1909, when pilot Foster C. Willard took off from the park’s beach and landed twice with his Curtiss biplane. An earlier attempt had landed Willard and his plane in the drink, both surviving. The Toronto Railway Company purchased the park in1912 and added attractions, but by 1925, it had closed, with much of the land sold to developers. The park’s name carries on today with Scarboro Beach Blvd.
Around the same time as other city amusement parks were shutting down, Sunnyside Amusement Park was coming into its own. Located at the foot of Roncesvalles Ave. and named for a local farm owned by John George Howard (who bequeathed High Park to the city), the park officially operated from June 28, 1922 to 1955.
Within a few years of Sunnyside opening “the original seven rides, nine games and ten food concessions had grown to eight rides, fourteen games and nineteen food outlets,” wrote Toronto historian Mike Filey in his book, I Remember Sunnyside, The Rise and Fall of a Magical Era.
The summer air was scented with the allure of hotdogs, French fries, fried onions and cotton candy. Two “Downeyflake Donuts” could be had, with milk, for 17 cents. People played games of chance and entered a slew of contests, like one for red-haired, freckled-faced children and the handsomest man. In 1930, the Star offered “cash prizes” for a Sunnyside masquerade in which people dressed up as their favourite comic strip character.
The Sunnyside Bathing Pavilion was built in 1922, so lake swimmers had a place to change, and a public pool was added in 1925 because lake water was so cold. The first Miss Toronto beauty contest was held at the pavilion in 1926 — with modest bathing attire (the suits looked like woollen tank tops and shorts), for this was still Toronto the Good.
In the end, the popularity of the automobile would spell the end of the amusement park. The city had plans to alleviate the congestion on Lake Shore Blvd. with a “super highway.”
In 1955, the demolition order came through. A few rides went to the Canadian National Exhibition. Disneyland, which was just opening in California, claimed the hand-carved merry-go-round.