Each of the seventeen or so islands known collectively as “The Toronto Island” has its own, distinctive history. Even the two remaining residential areas, Ward’s and Algonquin Islands, have very different pasts.

Algonquin Island was developed as a result of the creation of the Toronto Island Airport in the late 1930s, when about thirty of the summer cottages that had stretched along West Island Drive were floated over to what had been called Sunfish Island and placed around the perimeter of the newly named Algonquin Island. Most of the remaining houses were built after the Second World War as year-round residences. The post-War bungalows and the earlier West Island cottages with their distinctive battered skirts and miniature mansard windows are still easy to distinguish on Algonquin.

Ward’s Island started residential life as a camping ground. Known as “tent city,” life on Ward’s was necessarily informal and fairly primitive. For example, there was no electricity, no refrigeration, and no clean “City” water until 1906 when communal, cold water taps finally sprouted. Early campers had to light lamps, dig holes, and erect little windmills to solve their utility problems.

Each Victoria Day, mainlanders ferried their camping gear across the Bay to “set up,” i.e., erect their tents on wooden platforms arranged along sandy streets. Tenters were naturally careful to keep cooking fires away from the cloth tents, but over time, canvas runways were erected to protect “the cook” and others when dashing between living and kitchen areas.

Eventually, the rustic life under canvas began to pall. In the late 1920s, Ward’s Islanders started lobbying the City for permission first to erect wooden roofs, then entire buildings, on their campsites. When the City refused, some Islanders found ways around the restrictions. “You weren’t allowed to close the tent in,” long-time tenter Daddy Frank Staneland revealed. “This was canvas. But a lot of us fooled them. We put the canvas on the outside and then had wood inside at each end.”

By 1931, the Ward’s Island Association finally persuaded City Council to allow Ward’s Islanders to build permanent cottages on their campsites. Each one had to contain no more than 840 square feet, had to have electricity, and had to be “maintained in a state satisfactory” to civic officials. Even before the final regulations were passed, Ward’s Islanders pulled out their hammers and got to work on their “permanents,” as they fondly referred to them. A thriving cottage industry soon sprung up: Sheppard and Gill Lumber Company, architect Bob Maginnis, and even the Robert Simpson Company got into the act. Two years later some residents were already looking back nostalgically to the good old tenting days.

Today, Ward’s Island still reflects its tenting origins. The pedestrian streets follow the old pedestrian pattern; the tight spacing of the year-round houses follows the distribution of the old campsites; and many of the surviving houses follow the basic lay-out of the old canvas tent-cum-kitchen-shed living spaces. The communal spirit of the early tenters also lives on.

Based on Sally Gibson’s More Than an Island: A History of the Toronto Island. Toronto: Irwin Publishing Inc., 1984.

Sally Gibson