Hanlan's Point Beach
Hanlan's Point Beach is a nude beach on The Island just offshore from downtown Toronto, Ontario. It stretches for 2 km along the western shoreline of Hanlan's Point, facing the open waters of Lake Ontario. Recognized by the City of Toronto as one of the ten oldest surviving queer spaces in the world, it is also Canada's oldest surviving queer space and the site of the country's first Gay Pride celebration in 1971.
History
Early history
Hanlan's Point is located on the western tip of the Toronto Islands, a chain of low-lying sandbars that began forming approximately 7,000 years ago as glacial Lake Iroquois receded. These lands are part of the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and other Anishinaabe nations.The first written European record of the land that would become Hanlan's Point appears in the 1793 diary of Elizabeth Simcoe, wife of Upper Canada's first Lieutenant Governor, John Graves Simcoe. She frequently visited the sandbar peninsula and described it in vivid detail, captivated by its blend of natural meadows, wildflowers, and shifting lake vistas. In August 1793, she wrote:
“I went to my favourite sands; the bay is a mile across... The air on these sands is peculiarly clear and fine. The Indians esteem this place so healthy that they come and stay here when they are ill.”Simcoe likened the wooded parts of the peninsula to “shrubbery” and the open dunes to the beaches of Weymouth, England. She noted the abundance of wild grapes, lilies, and creeping purple “everlasting peas,” and even documented a nearby Indigenous burial site marked by a raised wooden platform, bow, arrow, and dog-skin. She and the Governor named the western tip as Gibraltar Point, believing the sandbanks could be fortified, a name that would remain in use on maps well into the 20th century.
In 1858, a major storm breached the eastern neck of the peninsula, severing it from the mainland and forming what is now known as Toronto Island. In 1862, Irish immigrant John Hanlan moved his family to the western tip of the island, where he opened a small hotel near the site that would later bear his name. His son, Edward “Ned” Hanlan, trained in the waters around the island and went on to be the World Sculling Champion from 1880 to 1884.
In 1880, the City of Toronto established Island Park on Centre Island as one of its first official public parks and included the Western Sandbar, the predecessor to today's beach. That same year, Ned Hanlan leased additional land north of his father's homestead and constructed a larger hotel along with rudimentary amusements, laying the groundwork for future resort development.
By the 1890s, the name for the point had changed from Gibraltar to Hanlan's. In 1892, Hanlan sold the hotel and surrounding lands to the Toronto Ferry Company. The company expanded the site's entertainment offerings, formalizing Hanlan's Point as one of the city's most popular pleasure grounds. By 1894, the Toronto Island Guide promoted the area as a full-scale resort distinct from the quieter east-end communities like Ward's Island and Island Park.
World's First Nude Beach (1894)
On 17 July 1894, Toronto City Council passed a by-law authorizing nude sunbathing and swimming "at all times" on a designated portion of the western beach at Hanlan's Point, then part of the Western Sandbar. The designated area measured approximately 200 feet in length by 50 feet deep, and the City Commissioner was instructed to erect fencing to mark the boundaries. This measure represented a rare proactive legalization of public nudity, predating other known official nude beaches by several decades.The 1894 by-law was passed in the context of a broader municipal effort to regulate waterfront bathing. Nude bathing had previously been permitted only during night-time hours at two mainland sites under a 1893 by-law, but the Hanlan's designation removed time-of-day restrictions, making it the only location in Toronto where nude sunbathing was legally permitted.
During this period, the Western Sandbar attracted a wide range of recreational users. Newspaper reports from the late 1890s describe the beach as frequented by boys during the day, with working-class men swimming there in the evenings. In 1896, Mrs. Turner, proprietor of Turner's Baths, a nearby semi-private bathhouse, began filing repeated complaints to the City about nude bathers swimming outside the designated area. Council acknowledged the complaints but "refused to prevent bathing outside the baths, regarding the public interests as more important than hers".
1897 marked the completion of major land reclamation works at Hanlan's Point. The Toronto Ferry Company, which had acquired the land in 1892, opened an amusement park and the first Hanlan's Point Stadium. Between 1901 and 1910, under the management of Lol Solman, the TFC expanded Hanlan's Point into a major summer destination. Attractions included vaudeville shows, athletic contests, whippet races, regimental bands, and other public events. A second, larger stadium was built after the first burned down in 1903, and a third concrete stadium, Maple Leaf Park, opened in 1910 with a seating capacity of 17,000, making it one of the largest in North America at the time.
In 1907, City Council designated the land around the former Herber's Hotel as parkland and renamed it Hanlan Memorial Park in 1909. That park consisted of the area alongside the airport fence, near today's Blockhouse Bay washroom.
A hangar for WWI military flight training was built on the northern tip of the sandbar, facing into the lagoon, in 1915.
Decline and Reshaping (1926–1937)
opened across the harbour in 1922, drawing traffic away from Hanlan's Point. After the stadium lost its main tenant, the Toronto Maple Leafs baseball team to Maple Leaf Stadium in 1926, Hanlan's Point Amusement Park was acquired by the City of Toronto through their purchase of the Toronto Ferry Company by the Toronto Transit Commission that same year. The gradual removal of rides and attractions marked a turning point in the area's history, as Hanlan's shifted from a bustling entertainment hub to a quieter, less supervised landscape.Two years later, in 1928, the Hospital for Sick Children closed its Lakeside Home for Little Children at Gibraltar Point. Located near the south end of Hanlan's Point Beach, the home had previously introduced a degree of institutional presence and supervision. Its closure further reduced oversight on the beach during the summer months. In 1929, the Toronto Harbour Commission began planning for an airport at Hanlan's Point.
On 29 July 1930, Toronto City Council passed a new by-law consolidating municipal rules on public bathing. This by-law eliminated all previously designated clothing-optional zones, including the 200-foot stretch of Hanlan's Point Beach where nude sunbathing and swimming had been legal since 1894. The Toronto Daily Star reported:
“The right, by by-law, for a person to bathe in the nude along the Exhibition grounds and other sections of the lake front at certain hours, passed out of existence through the action of city council yesterday.”Despite the repeal, some limited use of the beach by nude bathers and gay men likely continued during this period.
In 1937, the City of Toronto undertook major alterations to the northern end of Hanlan's Point. The lagoon that separated the Western Sandbar from the main Island was filled in to construct the Toronto Island Airport. This project also involved the removal of 37 cottages located north of Turner's Baths, transforming the site into a more open, windswept space with fewer sightlines and less residential oversight.
Together, these changes reshaped Hanlan's Point from a busy recreational node into a quieter and more secluded environment, laying the groundwork for its reemergence in the mid-20th century as a space associated with queer socializing and informal nude recreation.
1937–1960s
With the Lakeside Home for Children abandoned in the early 1930s and the vegetation growing alongside the new airport, two nodes at the far north and far south end of the beach emerged as places of queer refuge.By the 1940s, the beach was being heavily frequented by gays and lesbians. As Carol Ritchie-MacKintosh attests to in Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives:
“In the late forties, when I was much, much younger, I met a lot of very nice gay people, both men and women. We took the boat - and the island boat at that time went around the islands and ended up at Hanlan’s Point - and we would arrive… very posh, very beautiful. The beautiful people on the beach. We used to all meet at a place called the Candlelight Cafe. Everybody met there on a Sunday. We wore whites and yachting caps, and we had large picnic baskets with all sorts of stuff in them. Smoked oysters, you name it, we had them all… Wine, blankets, and we’d head for Hanlan’s Point, which was the gay section of the beach.”The dance hall near the ferry docks, a remnant of the amusement park era, remained in use throughout the Second World War but was shuttered in 1949 after it became a site of gang activity.
The parks department destroyed part of the natural dune system in 1955, which had been regenerating since the construction of the airport in 1937. This had the effect of opening up sightlines, particularly to the middle section. One local remarked, "it's the first time in 25 years that I've been able to see the beach and the lake", underscoring just how private the beach had been in previous years. In 1956, the Toronto Islands were handed over to the Metropolitan Parks Department under the authority of Commissioner Tommy Thompson. Thompson launched a $20-million park development program for the islands that included the demolition of all existing homes and legacy amenities at Hanlan's Point.
George Hislop, one of Canada's foremost gay rights activists, met his partner at Hanlan's, which he described as a "gay beach" in 1958.
In the spring of 1962, the dance hall at Hanlan's Point was demolished, along with the houses, marking a final end to the era of amusements and attractions that began in the 1880s.
Between 1962 and 1966, tennis courts, changing booths, and a children's wading pool were installed near the middle of the beach. The Hanlan's Pavilion was built nearby, closer to Lakeshore Avenue, and contained a concession stand and washrooms. The architect, Irving Grossman, used rustic brick to blend the structure into its surroundings and designed the shelter roof out of precast concrete columns and ribs to evoke a tree-like form. At the far south end of the beach, another washroom building and children's wading pool were added at Gibraltar Point.
In January 1968, the Toronto Harbour Commission released their A Bold Concept plan alongside Metro Toronto's Waterfront Plan for the Metropolitan Planning Area. The centrepiece to this plan was Harbour City, a residential neighbourhood lined with canals, developed over a proposed infill of the harbour and Hanlan's Point. Designed by Eberhard Zeidler, the plan was endorsed by the City and Metro Councils in the fall of 1968. The provincial government announced a refined plan in May 1970, supported by urbanists like Jane Jacobs. Ultimately, Hanlan's was spared destruction by the election of Bill Davis, who cancelled the megaproject in December 1971.