Undressed Toronto: The Transformation of Bathing, 1850 to 1935

Bathing transformed between 1850 and 1935 as Toronto moved from a vernacular system, epitomized by the swimming hole, to the heterosocial public beach. I’ve coined the term vernacular bathing to describe a system that was predominantly male, nude, and relied on a shared embodied knowledge of found spaces within the urban environment. I treat the beach as a competing system, rather than merely a space. It emerged in the nineteenth century in North Atlantic cultural circuits and relied on the bathing suit to cloak and contain the body and surveillance to ensure the moral and physical security of male and female bathers. While its implementation seems inevitable today, the rules and expectations of the beach were negotiated and challenged by men and women in the nineteenth century. Importing the beach rewrote the recreational geography of the Toronto; popular vernacular spaces in the Don River could never be made to fit the image and expectations of the beach, while Sunnyside, on the city’s western shoreline, was reimagined by the Toronto Harbour Commission to fit the model of a twentieth century beach and amusement space. This project upends assumptions about class, the urban environment, and the presentation of the naked body. Rather than attempting to drive vernacular bathers out of urban space, the middle class viewed the bathing boy through the lens of anti-modernism and turned them into pre-industrial folk figures. That gloss of nostalgia preserved and romanticized vernacular spaces in the city even as the order and structure of the beach was emerging. Puncturing the nostalgic gloss of the swimming hole allows us to see the city with new eyes. We can over-turn declensionist narratives that imagine the city’s rivers and waterfront as too polluted or too industrial for recreational use. When we follow the bathers we find they often nestled within the most industrialized sections of the waterfront and used that industrialization to cloak their presence. Seen with new eyes the industrial waterfront becomes a hybrid world where recreation and labour, industry and nature, blended and where the undressed male body, rather than being hidden, was part of the urban experience.Ph.D