Cherry Beach (originally Clarke Beach Park) is a lakeside beach park located at the foot of Cherry Street just south of Unwin Avenue in

Toronto, Ontario Toronto ( , locally pronounced or ) is the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, most populous city in Canada. It is the capital city of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Ontario. With a p ...

, Canada. It is on Toronto's outer harbour just east of the Eastern Gap. It was once connected with

Toronto Islands The Toronto Islands are a chain of 15 small islands in Lake Ontario, south of mainland Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Comprising the only group of islands in the western part of Lake Ontario, the Toronto Islands are located just offshore from the ...

as part of the former peninsula before 1852 and later as sandbar (also referred to as Fisherman’s Island). Despite its location at the tip of Toronto's formerly heavily industrial Port Lands area, Cherry Beach is a popular gathering place. There is no boardwalk and much of the surrounding areas is marshland or leftover grounds from what was once commercial industry and factory grounds. Recently the park has undergone improvements which includes a paved entrance way and a renovated washroom and swimming change room facilities. It has change rooms for bathers and barbecue areas for picnickers. It also has an off-leash area for

dog The dog (''Canis familiaris'' or ''Canis lupus familiaris'') is a domesticated descendant of the gray wolf. Also called the domestic dog, it was selectively bred from a population of wolves during the Late Pleistocene by hunter-gatherers. ...

walkers. The

Martin Goodman Trail The Martin Goodman Trail is a Leslie Street Spit The Leslie Street Spit, or officially the Outer Harbour East Headland, is a human-made headland in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, extending from the city's east end in a roughly southwesterly direction into Lake Ontario. It is about long. The Spit is ...

from direct surges of

Lake Ontario Lake Ontario is one of the five Great Lakes of North America. It is bounded on the north, west, and southwest by the Canadian province of Ontario, and on the south and east by the U.S. state of New York (state), New York. The Canada–United Sta ...

History

Bathers at Cherry Beach prior to the construction of the Leslie Street spit -a

The area that comprises Cherry Beach today was originally a marsh and sandbar that has been land filled.Dakane, Abdulkadir. ''Bioaccessibility of metals in Toronto city parks''. Royal Roads University, 2012
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/ref> It was a place of spiritual significance for many indigenous people. In the 1850s, settlers established a community in the area. The area was called Fisherman's Island and included a commercial fishery and church. People would travel to and from the mainland of Toronto by boat or across a breakwater that was built in 1882. The beach park was originally named Clarke Beach Park after Harry Clarke, an

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who was responsible for creating the park in the early 1930s. In 1974, the Toronto's Central Waterfront Planning proposed to eliminate Cherry Beach for industrial use. In 2003, the city officially renamed it to Cherry Beach which was already the common name among locals. In 2020, a group of local residents issued a collective statement criticizing a feasibility study by Waterfront Toronto which considered providing water taxis access to the beach.

Ecology

For many years it was one of the few Toronto beaches that was clean enough for

swimming Swimming is the self-propulsion of a person through water, such as saltwater or freshwater environments, usually for recreation, sport, exercise, or survival. Swimmers achieve locomotion by coordinating limb and body movements to achieve hydrody ...

windsurfing Windsurfing is a wind-propelled water sport that is a combination of sailing and surfing. It is also referred to as "sailboarding" and "boardsailing", and emerged in the late 1960s from the Californian aerospace and surf culture. Windsurfing gain ...

and

kitesurfing Kiteboarding or kitesurfing is a sport that involves using wind power with a large power kite to pull a rider across a water, land, snow, sand, or other surface. It combines the aspects of paragliding, surfing, windsurfing, skateboarding, snow ...

; It typically meets high water quality, environmental and safety standards; however, a 2012 environmental assessment found that the concentration of lead and zinc in the soil at Cherry Beach is above guidelines, which is attributed to previous industrial use of the area. The only other major stands of cottonwoods in the Toronto area beyond the Toronto Islands are located at Cherry Beach.

Cherry Beach Sports Fields

A wooded area by the beach has been turned into soccer fields, children's play structure and a metered parking area. In 2006 a pair of

soccer Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport played between two teams of 11 Football player, players who almost exclusively use their feet to propel a Ball (association football), ball around a rectangular f ...

fields were completed on land that had formerly been part of the greenbelt, at 275 Unwin Avenue. The fields were surfaced in

astroturf AstroTurf is an American subsidiary of SportGroup that produces artificial turf for pitch (sports field), playing surfaces in sports. The original AstroTurf product was a pile (textile), short-pile synthetic turf invented in 1965 by Monsanto. Si ...

and built to

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standards, and games of the 2007 FIFA Jr championship were to be played there. During the environmental assessment the site was found to be heavily contaminated by

heavy metals upright=1.2, Crystals of lead.html" ;"title="osmium, a heavy metal nearly twice as dense as lead">osmium, a heavy metal nearly twice as dense as lead Heavy metals is a controversial and ambiguous term for metallic elements with relatively h ...

, hydrocarbons and PCBs. The soccer field was described as a "transitional" facility, as most of the land on either side of Unwin was underutilized city land that could be repurposed to sport facilities even though it was contaminated.

Toronto FC Toronto Football Club is a Canadian professional Association football, soccer club based in Toronto. The club competes in Major League Soccer (MLS) as a member of the Eastern Conference (MLS), Eastern Conference. The team plays its home matc ...

used the soccer pitches for practice while their own dedicated training facilities were being constructed at

Downsview Park Downsview Park () is a large urban park located in the Downsview, Toronto, Downsview neighbourhood of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The park's name is officially Bilingualism in Canada, bilingual due to it being federally owned and managed, and was ...

In popular culture

Pukka Orchestra had a local radio hit in 1984 with the song "Cherry Beach Express." The song's name is a euphemism for the alleged police brutality committed on gay, indigenous, and homeless people at the beach between the 1940s and 1990s. The Toronto police tried to have the song banned."Toronto Urban Legends: Cherry Beach Express"
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Torontoist ''Daily Hive'', formerly known as ''Vancity Buzz'', is a Canadian online newspaper based in Vancouver, British Columbia. It began digital publishing in 2008 and became Western Canada's largest online-only publication by 2016. In September 2022 ...

'', October 3, 2012. Parts of the music video for the

Alessia Cara Alessia Caracciolo (born July 11, 1996), known professionally as Alessia Cara (), is a Canadian singer and songwriter. She began posting covers of songs on YouTube at age 13. After uploading acoustic covers of songs such as " Love Yourself" and ...

song " Wild Things" were filmed at Cherry Beach. Parts of the film '' Silent Hill: Revelation 3D'' were filmed at Cherry Beach. Toronto punk band Career Suicide named a 2008 EP after Cherry Beach.

References

External links