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Articles
The War on the Squatters, 19201940: Hamilton's Boathouse Community and the Re-Creation of Recreation on Burlington Bay
Nancy B. Bouchier and Ken Cruikshank
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IN AUGUST 1924 Clyde B. Corrigall, ace
reporter for the Hamilton Herald, Hamilton's reform-minded
daily newspaper, waxed nostalgically about the little colony of
boathouses below the high-level bridge along the secluded edges
of the Burlington Heights and Dundas Marsh areas of Hamilton's
bay waters. The 100-or-so dwellings identified in the newspaper,
occupied chiefly by working men and their families, were described
by Corrigall as "rough fronts." Other Hamiltonians were less sanguine
about the boathouses. Those in polite society derisively called
the tar-paper and tin-roofed places shacks and shanties,
and labelled the little colony at the fringe of the city's northwestern
limits a shack town. To Corrigall, however, the boathouses
posed a rustic counterpoint to the city's more affluent neighbourhoods
and the industrial skyline across the bay, where many of Hamilton's
workers lived in squalid conditions in the shadow of the city's
factories. "To the true artist's eye," the reporter mused poetically,
"those ramshackle dilapidated frame huts are a natural part of
the varied and lovely scenery around the head of the bay and the
foot of the marsh, however unlovely they may seem to eyes that
can see no charm in anything save newness, brightness and order.
On a city alley they would be an eyesore but not in their natural
setting, on the water."
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The hideaway places on the waterfront
where the boathouse colony was located offered a major resource
for Hamilton's workers who fished, hunted, and boated around Burlington
Bay and the Dundas Marsh.
2
Hunters revelled in the water's bounty, with its fish, turtles,
ducks, and the other wild life of the area. Local inns and taverns
catering to the sport hunting fraternity were well known for specialty
game dishes like roast duckling and turtle soup. Much more game
from the area, however, found its way onto the dinner tables of
Hamilton workers who sought to feed their families with cheap,
easily accessible foodstuffs. Populist writers such as Corrigall
turned this grim reality into a celebration of quaint working-class
folk, pothunters for whom fishing and hunting were not merely
sport, and whose makeshift and sometimes dilapidated houses could
be termed rustic.
3
Other reform-minded citizens of Hamilton took a dimmer view of
the boathouse community. For them, the physical appearance of
the boathouses reflected presumed moral conditions within. The
houses supported what reformers saw as the worst features of working-class
culture drinking, gambling, and blood sports.
4
For city planners and urban reformers the boathouse colony was
a problem.
5
It stood in the way of their plans to transform Hamilton into
an aesthetically-pleasing, and therefore a moral and orderly,
"city beautiful." Their cultural vision had no room for the tar-paper
homes of working-class people and they determined that the houses
must go. |
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Historians are beginning to recover
the ways in which workers and people on the margins of society
shaped the urban landscape. Along Vancouver's False Creek and
Burrard Inlet; on Toronto's Island; in Halifax's Africville; and
along the shores of Burlington Bay, people struggled creatively
to provide food and shelter for themselves and their families
and, in the process, build communities.
6
In some cases, marginal houses were built upon land for which
people had legal claim; like the shelters constructed by those
people whom Richard Harris shows sought to build their own homes
in unregulated suburban areas.
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Others were built upon squatted land or were located on waterways,
like boat and float houses that could be moved should the need
arise.
8
Some had good plumbing, insulation, and running water. Others
barely provided protection from the elements as seasons passed.
Regardless of the quality, what Jill Wade says of Vancouver seems
true elsewhere: "many residents of this housing developed strong,
lasting ties to their homes."
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In all of these communities, what
some residents saw as homes, other early 20th-century observers
saw quite differently. Hamiltonian and other Canadian, social
and political leaders appear to have shared a vision of the ideal
urban landscape, something similar to what geographer Brenda Yeoh
has termed the "colonial landscape ideal."
10
They hoped for communities that would be ordered, structured to
enhance the flow of economic activity, sanitary, and amenable
to regulation. Marginal communities challenged these ideals. Having
a haphazard sometimes dilapidated physical appearance, they offended
planners anxious to make their cities efficient and aesthetically
pleasing. Their appearance also suggested uncleanliness, viewed
by planners to be a likely and dangerous source of both disease
and fire threatening the rest of the city. As significantly, city
planners joined with moral reformers in portraying marginal areas
as immoral spaces, where gambling, prostitution, and other crimes
flourished amongst dangerous transients and outlaws beyond the
authority of the city. In Hamilton, as in Vancouver, the location
of the boathouse colony along the waterfront encouraged such views,
since waterfronts have played a particular, stigmatized role in
the sexual and moral history of cities everywhere.
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As would happen in other cities,
marginal areas therefore became the target of those seeking to
reshape the city. In Hamilton, on the eve of the Great Depression,
a coalition of social and political leaders including town planners,
nature conservationists, and moral reformers, sought to raze the
boathouse colony. They wanted to eliminate what they saw as a
physically and morally dangerous place, and replace it with a
carefully-regulated, aesthetically-pleasing, and morally-clean
park along the shoreline of Hamilton's increasingly dirty waters.
An extensive bird sanctuary and well-tended flower gardens would
offer Hamilton residents opportunities for passive recreation,
and would form part of a grand highway entrance to the city. The
elaborate entrance and parkland would advertise and boost the
cultural and aesthetic attractiveness of the industrial city.
That vision, which threatened the homes of boathouse dwellers
and would deny working-class Hamiltonians access to sources of
fish and game, faced serious resistance. The people living in
the boathouses of Hamilton's Cootes Paradise also valued their
natural setting, but saw the area as so much more than the recreational
space proposed by local city beautifiers and environmentalists.
12
They saw it as a home part of a neighbourhood where
their families could live and play, and they struggled to defend
it. The "war on the squatters" was a cultural war, representing
a struggle over the uses of nature, the meaning of home and community,
and proper forms of recreation. The struggle lasted at least two
decades, but ultimately the boathouse colony and residents made
way for a bird sanctuary and the creation of Hamilton's Royal
Botanical Gardens. |
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Marginal communities, like other
urban areas, represented complex, "multi-coded" spaces, whose
value and meaning were and are multiple and contested.
13
As geographer Don Mitchell reminds us, however, all meanings and
values are not created equal, and the contest over meaning is
shaped by profound inequalities in economic, social, and political
power. Urban landscapes, Mitchell notes, reflect the relative
power of various competing groups, and the extent to which these
groups have the power to "instantiate" their image of the world
in stone, concrete, bricks, and wood, and we would add
in flower gardens, parks, and nature preserves.
14
The once vibrant boathouse community is no longer a part of Hamilton's
urban landscape. Nothing survives except a few archaeological
remains and a recently erected historic plaque. In this paper,
we draw on the memories and stories of local old-timers, visual
evidence recorded on maps and photographs, scattered newspaper
articles, and government records to recreate a community that
was lost, in part, in the name of preservation. In Hamilton, the
outcome of the "war on the squatters," and the resulting shaping
of the urban landscape, offers insights into the process of city-building,
and into the meaning of social power in an industrial city. While
the boathouse community disappeared and is forgotten, the struggle
over its existence represented one struggle over the collective
community resource that is Hamilton's waterfront, a struggle that
continues to this day.
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Creating the Boathouse Community
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Hamilton's boathouse colony developed on the geographic, political,
economic, and social margins of the city. As indicated on the
map of
Figure 1
, the houses along the Desjardins Canal area appeared on the shoreline
of Burlington Bay (Hamilton Harbour) and Cootes Paradise (Dundas
Marsh) at the bottom of the steep embankments of the Burlington
Heights separating the two bodies of water. Although the heights
had been the location of some early settlement around the time
of the American Revolution, the port and city of Hamilton had
developed further southeast, a couple of miles away. By the 1830s
the Heights were far enough from Hamilton's settlement to be considered
a suitable location for a cemetery for cholera epidemic victims.
Transportation companies looked upon the area as an important
gateway to Hamilton and Dundas as well as to inland communities
of southwestern Ontario. The political and economic leaders of
Dundas convinced the government to dredge a narrow channel through
the Dundas Marsh in the 1830s, as part of an ambitious canal project
which would improve navigation between their mill town and the
great lakes navigational system. Canal builders used existing
waterways in the marsh area, widening a natural passage along
the northern tip of Burlington Heights. Within twenty years the
area changed again as Hamilton's ambitious business and political
leaders supported the construction of two Great Western Railway
lines across the heights. The natural outlet of the Desjardins
Canal was filled in, replaced by a new channel dug through the
middle of the landmass.
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Figure 1. Map showing the location of the bathhouse
colony alongside the Desjardins Canal in the western
section of Burlington Bay and Cootes Paradise,
1923.
Based upon: Canada. Department of National Defense.
Topographic Map. Hamilton Sheet, Ontario,
1:63, 360. (Sheet number 33 1909; Reprinted with
Corrections, 1923).
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Some sources suggest that the boathouse
colony first developed during these construction projects, as
communities of railway navvies and canal workers. If so, the accommodation
must have been temporary, for visual sources from the 1850s and
1860s show no dwellings in the area.
17
Although nearly 500 labourers were required to construct a third
rail line across the heights in the 1890s, photographs from the
period still do not show any dwellings along the shore.
18
Instead, the photographic record would suggest that the boathouse
community emerged sometime during or after World War I, likely
in response to serious housing shortages in the city. The best
and most complete visual record of the boathouses comes from a
series of aerial photographs taken by the famed local aviator,
Jack V. Elliott in 1928, like the one found in
Figure 2
.
19
Elliott's photographs show a pattern of about 120 contiguous buildings
running alongside and into the canal on both its bay and marsh
sides. Other photographs taken from land and the water in the
1920s and 1930s show the boathouses as typically two-story buildings,
some of which stood atop stilts over the water. As can be seen
in
Figures 3 and 4
, several of them appear to have been fairly substantial, housing
boats downstairs and people above. Second-story porches overlooking
the waters provided great sunset vistas and a handy diving platform
for swimmers. Perhaps because of this design, only occasionally,
like during severe storms, did water get into the living quarters.
20
Not all places, however, were so comfortable, as in the case of
the shack pictured in
Figure 5
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Figure 2. Aerial shot of Hamilton's boathouse
colony showing the houses along the shores of
the Burlington Bay, the Desjardins Canal, and
Cootes Paradise, 1928. Credit: Jack V. Elliott
Air Services Ltd., 1938; Source: Royal Botanical
Gardens, Burlington, Ontario.
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Figure 3. Boathouse homes on Dundas Marsh (Cootes
Paradise) just before their demolition, c. 1936.
The first building on the left side of the road
has been identified by an old-timer as the Owls
club house, a place for boys in the area who hung
out there, sneaking smokes and the odd drink of
beer. Source: Hamilton Public Library, Special
Collections.
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Figure 4. Boathouses in the winter, with people
walking on the ice of the bay, 1930. According
to stories told by local old-timers, boathouse
children would skate across the bay to attend
public school in the city's North End during the
winter months. Kerosene heaters kept boathouse
homes warm in the winter. Credit: John Boay, 30
January 1930; Source: John Boyd Collection, NAC
PA-89484.
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Figure 5. Shack in Cootes Paradise across from
Raspberry House near the railway, nd. This tin
shack is an example of the lower end of the scale
of makeshift housing found near the Desjardins
Canal area. Raspberry Farm, on the north shore
of Cootes Paradise now houses the Roayl Botanical
Gardens Arboretum and Lilac Dell. Source: Royal
Botanical Gardens, Burlington, Ontario.
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The boathouse community, therefore,
was a product of Hamilton's rapid industrial growth during the
first two decades of the 20th-century, at a time when social and
political leaders promoted their city vigorously as the "Birmingham
of Canada." They supported the creation of the Hamilton Harbour
Commission in 1912 by a Special Act of Parliament to help local
industry through a program of land reclamation and port development.
Local boosters supported the filling in of swampy inlets and ravines
on the harbour's southeastern shoreline for waterfront industrial
locations, and built wharves for shipping raw materials and industrial
goods. On the eve of the World War I, the city contained more
than 100,000 people nearly twice as many as were there
just a decade before. One-half of the Hamilton's workers were
employed in some 400 factories, located mostly on the waterfront
in the northeast end of the city, some 200 of which had opened
within the previous 10 years.
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The city's industrial expansion
attracted more people to Hamilton, with some 6,000 arriving every
year after 1906. Beginning in 1909, the city's Board of Health
regularly reported and warned about the consequences of overcrowding
to the health of Hamiltonians. In 1912, the local Medical Officer
of Health reported that "Every available four walls that under
ordinary conditions of city growth would never be accused of being
part of a home is eagerly seized upon and occupied, no matter
how outrageous the rental."
22
Although there was a housing construction boom before the war,
it did not keep pace with the demand. Skilled and semi-skilled
workers accompanied the relocation of industry to the northeast
of the city, while unskilled labourers remained in the old northwest
end. Although the northwest end was more crowded, both areas had
mortality rates well above the city's average.
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Facing this shortage in the quantity
and quality of housing, some Hamilton workers settled in or constructed
the boathouses at the western end of the harbour and along the
Burlington Heights shoreline of the Dundas Marsh. Some of them
leased their land from area farmers, the city, and the Toronto
Hamilton & Buffalo (TH&B) railway company for nominal rents of
about $1.25 a month.
24
Others were squatters, whose legal claim to the land was tenuous
at best.
25
While the identities of many of the boathouse residents have been
lost generally from the historical record, sources like city directories,
telephone books, oral histories, and Hamilton Board of Control
reports, offer some clues to people's identities, particularly
those who had their buildings eventually expropriated by the city
for highway construction. At least two of the homes are known
to have had telephone service, and some six boathouse residents
could be found listing their Dundas Marsh address in local city
directories.
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Not all boathouse owners were permanent
residents however. The secretary of the city's Works Department,
who also served as a member of the Board of Parks Management,
owned a boathouse, but he lived in a well-to-do neighbourhood
not too far from the water. Others, like a fireman whose address
is listed in the city directory as 111 Dundas Marsh, may have
rented his home from someone who leased the land since his name
is not listed with those who received money from the city for
the expropriation of the buildings. Given its proximity to the
rail lines, it is perhaps not surprising that railway yard workers,
not necessarily the most skilled workers within that industry's
workforce, were among those living in the community. Other boathouse
dwellers held jobs like machinist, teamster, hydro worker, and
painter.
27
One individual worked as a parks board caretaker and one African
Canadian man worked mortar for the local building industry. Some
boathouse dwellers were presumably financially better off than
others; one man living on the marsh side, for example, owned a
large mahogany inbound motor boat, which, owing to its high cost
would have been a rarity for any worker on the bay.
28
Many, however, may have been attracted to the area because in
this borderland between urban and rural governments, they could
live in or construct their own forms of affordable housing.
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Although middle-class Hamiltonians
might find the outdoor privies, well water, and kerosene heat
of the boathouses too primitive for comfort, most of the boathouse
dwellers saw comparatively comfortable houses in an area offering
important resources to help support their families. Some boathouses
had small gardens and all provided access to plentiful fish and
game. Compared to the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions of
the North End, the boathouses looked attractive, and had the benefits
of their natural setting, well upwind from the stench and grime
of the factories. Perhaps not surprisingly then, boathouse dwellers
came to take considerable pride in their community, which grew
large enough to support its own local grocery store. As one man
recalled sentimentally of friends who lived there, "this marsh
was not a marsh to them, this was truly paradise to them, these
people. Believe me it was, because it had everything there. Out
just beyond it, they had a couple of wells that they sank. Fresh
water all of the time, you know. Outdoor toilets, but everything
kept clean. Everyone took care of everybody's house."
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Residents of the boathouse colony
appear to have developed a strong sense of community. They looked
out for each other's children and participated in social events
like summertime picnics and bonfire celebrations, as well as pickup
hockey games in the winter.
31
Neighbours organized events that featured and took advantage of
their physical prowess. For example, they delighted in an unusual,
but hilarious entertainment called "donkey baseball." As one observer
described, "they'd have a little donkey, eh, and when you hit
the ball, you had to pick the donkey up [over the shoulder] and
carry him to the base. And these firemen were all big ... they
didn't get them for their brains, they got them for their strength,
eh, and that's what they did in donkey baseball."
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Boathouse children shared their
parents' sense of community identity. Clashes between gangs of
kids from the marsh area versus kids from the North End were as
sure as changes in the seasons: "Every early summer. We used to
have our fight [against the North End kids] ... and we used to
meet each other at school in different days, and we'd get along
just fine. But every bloody year we'd have a meeting. No one got
hurt bad, you know."
33
Generally the boathouse community had more innocuous activities
for kids of the area. "It seems to simply swarm with children,"
a reporter from the Herald noted approvingly in 1924, at
a time when Hamilton, like many other urban places throughout
the country, wrestled with the problem of determining what
sorts of recreations were morally appropriate for the city's youth.
Recreational programs sponsored by the parks board aimed to get
kids off local street corners and into socially-sanctioned activities
on supervised grounds. The area provided "a great natural playground"
for them. The Herald argued that overall, kids living in
the boathouses did not do all that badly by their unsupervised
surroundings. For example, they fared quite well when it came
to nautical pursuits, and they swam far away from Hamilton's dangerous
industrial waterfront and its busy wharves that so concerned city
officials.
34
Clad in makeshift bathing suits (though more often au naturel),
they took to the water at a very young age. Many were said to
be experts in swimming back and forth between the canal and Carroll's
Point on the north shore. This activity helped certain boys on
to victory in Hamilton's annual Playground Association Swimming
Championships. Best of all, the high level bridge provided a superb
platform for their well-executed dives and spectacular, wave-crashing
cannon balls.
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Most boathouse colony boys would
cut their teeth on outdoors pursuits at a very early age
something that they would remember for a lifetime. Some used sticks
for fishing poles and string for fishing line that was pilfered
from the wreaths left at the cemetery on the heights. They would
fashion fishing hooks from old nuts, bolts, and scraps of metal
that lay along the tracks. Much could be learned about outdoors
life simply by observing the sportsmen or pothunters like the
ones shown in
Figures 6, 7, and 8
, who frequented the area. Since game was so abundant one did
not need much prowess to hunt successfully and count on a good
bag.
36
The area had everything sunfish, catfish, shiners, bass,
carp, ducks, partridges, woodcock, snipe, muskrats, deer, and
other plentiful game. |
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Figure 6. Pot Hunters at the Canal basin, Dundas.
Using shotguns and homenmade fishing poles to
bag their catches, working men and their families
of the boathouse colony survived ont he plentiful
game in the area until the designation of Cootes
Paradise as a bird and wildlife sanctuary in 1927.
Source: Hamilton Public Library, Special Collections,
FW HAMAR-025.
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Figure 7. Men fishing under the Longwood Bridge
at the Desjardins Canal. These fishers appear
to be on the northern shore of the canal under
the bridge that eventually made way for the building
of the 403 highway in the early 1960s. Today fishers
still frequent the area, but they do so typically
on the opposite shore, along the city's new waterfront
trail near a barrier that prevents carp from entering
Cootes Paradise. Source: Royal Botanical Gardens,
Burlington, Ontario.
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Figure 8. Ice fishing on Burlington Bay with a
hand line, 1920. Every winter working-class Hamiltonians
fished through the ice on the frozen western portion
of the bay between the Desjardins Canal and Carroll's
Point near the boathouses to feed their families.
This area was typically covered with ice huts
during the winter months; however a few souls,
like the man pictured above, made do with whatever
was at hand. Credit: John Boyd, 11 February 1920;
Source: John Boyd Collection, NAC PA-84014.
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Many middle-class reformers, however,
focussed on what they saw as the darker side of the boathouse
community. Given its close proximity to the waterfront and to
railway lines, the boathouse colony would be forever linked in
the minds of Hamiltonians to rough culture. When, in 1920,
the Medical Officer for Health declared that "immorality was being
practiced in boathouses and that this did much to spread venereal
diseases," no distinction was made between the boathouses of the
busy North End waterfront where the prostitution trade
would be within easy reach of dock workers and sailors
and the family homes of the colony far across the bay. Indeed,
even though the paper pointed out "the fact that there was no
supervision of those places was because undue supervision would
be resented by the respectable owners of boathouses," it became
possible to view all boathouses as "retreats of those immorally
inclined."
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It also did not help that the Burlington
Heights was a popular stop for hoboes, something that troubled
reformers and members of Hamilton's more stable population. The
Canal Bridge, located just before the city's busy railyards, was
a convenient place for rail riders to disembark from freight trains,
lest they be picked up by vigilant railway police.
38
Even today, the railyards, like the docks on the industrial waterfront,
are a most carefully-guarded space in the city. Jail or violent
beatings at the hands of railway police could be expected by those
who were caught. Despite these harsh realities, workers travelling
in search of jobs would take their chances. One Hamiltonian, who
spent much of his youth in and around the boathouses in the 1920s
and 1930s, recalls that transients would travel between Windsor
and Kirkland Lake, between work in the auto factories and the
northern mines. They would gather on the heights nearby the boathouse
colony, use the resources of the bay, and live off of the land.
They would camp in circles and "have tin cans that they heated
their water in, and they washed in the streams and they stayed
there for days and days and days and days, until all of a sudden,
they heard something and they'd catch a freight train and move
on."
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Readers of Hamilton newspapers were
kept well apprised of these hoboes, who were frequently presented
by the press as a potentially dangerous and disruptive force to
Hamilton's social landscape. While the railway transients were
clearly not boathouse dwellers, their presence in the area doubtless
coloured many Hamiltonians perceptions of the entire community.
40
The boathouse dwellers and the transients did share some common
traits. Both took advantage of the natural resources of the area
to hunt and fish, and males in both populations shared an interest
in rough working-class recreations.
41
Of the role of alcohol in the marsh environment, a man who as
a child knew many boathouse dwellers recalled, "A lot of heavy
drinking went on in the marsh. Because in them days, that's what
they did. The men worked hard all day and then they drank. That's
the way life was." He was quick to point out, however, "... but
that's no different from what we were in the city neither, you
know."
42
Drinking took place in people's homes, out-of-doors, or in inns
and taverns located on the top of the heights on York Street.
Run by sportsmen of no mean repute, such establishments catered
to travellers along the Toronto to Hamilton corridor and the sport
hunting and fishing fraternity of the area.
43
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The boathouse community had a rough
side, for sure. One of its attractions was that it was nicely
secluded from the gaze of Harbour Commission and city police authorities
that workers on street corners and in busy city taverns often
felt.
44
Places like Cockpit Island in the marsh provided a well known,
but difficult to get to, landmark for men in the boathouse community.
45
Some of the boathouses in the marsh colony also were home to other
working-class diversions that offended middle-class reformers,
because they frequently included gambling and drinking. According
to one more sympathetic observer, gambling was mostly innocuous,
penny-ante stuff. It could be found everywhere, "each and
everyone [of the boathouses] ... probably had a card game going
... nickel and dime, like that."
46
While this may have raised some eyebrows, it was a well-known
secret, like the crap games that were mainstays of North End workers'
Sunday afternoon entertainment.
47
Basically, as one man recalled, boathouse dwellers were good,
hardworking people: "I never heard of anyone doing any robbery,
no rapes, no killings, no nothing like that; I never heard of
nothing like that out there. Of course [there were] fights
lots of fights. But then nothing happened."
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The Valley Inn, at the northwestern
tip of the bay where the Desjardins Canal had once emptied into
it, developed a notorious reputation among reformers, a reputation
that tarnished the image of the nearby boathouse colony. In the
1830s it was a way station for grain and other cargo being shipped
down the canal on scows and then transferred to lake boats. By
the mid-1850s, it would become a favourite watering hole for weary
travellers on their long trek to Hamilton from Toronto. It would
dominate this traffic flow until 1922, when the Toronto-Hamilton
highway redirected motor traffic to a new western entrance to
the city along the top of the heights. After that, the Valley
Inn would be abandoned until it burnt to the ground in 1928.
49
But until that point, its location just outside the corporate
limits of Hamilton, at the junction of Wentworth and Halton Counties
as well as the Townships of East and West Flamborough, ensured
that with its roulette wheel, the Inn held quite the reputation
as a place of rough amusement. Since it lay just beyond the reach
of Hamilton police, it easily became "known as a place where beer
or liquor could be obtained on sundays [sic], or other
times that the local liquor laws did not permit."
50
At the first sign of trouble from the law, people would take to
the bush-covered hills. No one seemed surprised when the Hamilton
Spectator reported in 1897, of a raid led by the SPCA and
county constables on a cockfighting main held in a secluded area
way back behind the Inn. There lay "a nicely-fixed pit covered
in sawdust, with raised edges of earth, and all the etceteras
of a main."
51
In a rare event, authorities captured 32 birds and 13 rigs. While
the names of individuals were recorded by authorities, the SPCA
Inspector declined to give them out to the local press, apparently
because "a few respectable young Hamilton citizens" or
"fancy men," as the popular pejorative for such types went
were in the crowd.
52
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The notorious reputation of the
Valley Inn, the presence of transients, and the rough elements
of working-class recreation among boathouse dwellers, combined
to make the area a prime target for reformers seeking to clean
up Hamilton's moral atmosphere. Moral reformers, including some
middle class sportsmen and conservationists, joined with city
planners in efforts to remake Burlington Heights. They sought
to reshape the human and natural environment of Dundas Marsh,
and the west end of Hamilton Harbour, where some working-class
Hamiltonians were struggling to build a community on the margins
of urban society. In place of what they regarded as the unsightly
and immoral boathouse colony, they hoped to develop a bird sanctuary,
game preserve, gardens, and a monumental western entrance to the
city. |
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The City Beautiful, Parks, Conservation,
and the Boathouse Community
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The same industrial and population growth that ravaged the physical
landscape of Hamilton and prompted the development of the working-class
boathouse colony also stimulated middle-class Hamiltonians to
think about creating special spaces that would preserve some of
the natural beauty of their city. Town planners, urban reformers,
and parks promoters developed a scheme of city beautification
that aimed to elevate Hamilton's moral tone by changing
the look of the city. Although factory smoke stacks, busy
wharves, and even unsightly slums, reflected the success of urban
boosters in promoting industrial development, planners sought
to create special places that would be more appealing to middle-class
aesthetic tastes. As early as 1909, "city beautifiers" pinpointed
the waterfront as an area ripe with opportunity for aesthetic
planning. Addressing the local horticultural society, one professor
from the Ontario Agricultural College commended Hamilton because
it, "above all cities was favoured by nature."
53
He urged that factories be kept away from the Dundas Marsh, an
area which had long been eyed for development by industrialists
and engineers.
54
Ironically, planners believed at this time that the filling in
of the swamp for industrial use would not be necessary, since,
it was argued, "time alone would fill the swamp at a rate of 8
acres per annum."
55
As it turned out, they were wrong; water pollution killed the
vegetation of the marsh and transformed it into a shallow, open
pond. |
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By 1917, urban planners and reformers
won some important victories in their quest for a "city beautiful."
They first convinced Hamilton City Council to appoint a municipal
advisory Town Planning Board. This the new board proceeded to
hire Noulan Cauchon, a pre-eminent Canadian urban planner, to
study ways to rationalize Hamilton's transportation system and
beautify the city. In his report, Cauchon suggested how Hamilton
might realize its functional and aesthetic potential. He produced
a grandiose urban design that featured garden suburbs, a high-speed
electric commuter railway, and a boulevard from the bay to the
mountain face. The trees of an elaborate parks system would clean
the city's dirty air while providing a "wilder and freer" parkland
around the heights and the marsh. This would be an area that "allowed
access to the unsullied realm of nature for citizens bound up
in the urban realm of culture."
56
Unsullied nature, however, was to be carefully cultivated and
framed by the arches, colonnades and balustrades of a proposed
new northwestern entrance to the city.
57
Cauchon's plan for Hamilton aimed for social betterment through
beauty.
58
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While Cauchon's precise design never
was implemented, his overall vision nonetheless influenced the
city's aesthetic future. The Town Planning Board, which held only
advisory power, proved politically ineffectual and was soon abandoned
by urban reformers.
59
Several local political leaders, including Thomas Baker McQueston,
a stalwart ally and friend of Cauchon, found other ways to champion
elements of the 1917 urban plan. As a prominent lawyer and staunch
Liberal, McQueston sat as a Hamilton alderman from 1921 to 1930
before taking up a cabinet position in the Hepburn government,
where he would mastermind the creation of the Niagara Parks system
and the Queen Elizabeth Way from Toronto to Niagara. He used his
1922 appointment to the city's Board of Parks Management to pursue
Cauchon's plan.
60
Unlike the advisory Town Planning Board, the parks board enjoyed
its own independent source of municipal funding, a guaranteed
one mill on the tax levy, giving it a relative freedom in the
world of fiscally-constrained public works. |
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Cauchon's plans for "wilder and
freer" parkland near the city received a boost from nature conservationists,
ornithologists, and members of the local social élite who were
anxious to protect the Dundas Marsh from development.
61
In May 1919, 60-or-so bird lovers including Robert Owen Merriman,
the wheelchair-bound son of a local wire manufacturer, met in
Hamilton's new public library to form a naturalists' club.
62
By the time the Hamilton Bird Protection Society, later renamed
the Hamilton Nature Club, sought incorporation in 1920, its membership
had risen to 147 bird-lovers and concerned conservationists. The
society received the steadfast support from Adam Brown, its honourary
president and the city's former postmaster. Thomas McQuesten also
heartily supported it, along with his older brother and sister,
the Reverend Dr. Calvin and Miss Mary. They, like their mother,
Mary Baker McQuesten, the noted matriarch of one of the city's
grand homes, Whitehern, believed that "morality was directly related
to beautiful surroundings, and to the quality of public spaces."
63
A dozen-or-so other members of the Bird Protection Society were
of a similar high social status, from prominent families listed
in the city's Social Register.
64
Holding solidly-respectable middle-class professional occupations
physicians, lawyers, merchants, bank managers, accountants,
and teachers they were socially worlds apart from the people
living in and around the boathouse colony. The society's connections
with local teachers would serve its interests well in its efforts
to educate the public about the need for nature conservancy while
naturalizing its authority on matters of conservation and
land use. Within a year of the society's creation, some 9,000
Hamilton schoolchildren were Junior Bird Club members, involved
in birdhouse building and essay writing on conservation topics.
65
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From its outset, the naturalists'
organization had an ambitious agenda; one which held grave repercussions
for the people of the boathouse colony. It aimed to have Cootes
Paradise designated as a bird sanctuary, protecting the marshlands
from development and hunters.
66
In a strategic move to garner support from strategic groups, the
society sent copies of its plans to Hamilton's Board of Commerce
and City Council, the County Council, the dominion and provincial
governments, and local MP and MPPs. Hamilton's hunting community
responded quickly and decisively to efforts to curtail local hunting.
The Hamilton Gun Club, led by a local small-scale entrepreneur
Nelson Long, spearheaded a petition bearing 100 signatures.
67
It presented a working-man's perspective of the marsh, contending
that, "hundreds of men went up at dawn to shoot ducks before going
to work, and when they returned home at night they went out to
try to get some more."
68
Unlike wealthier sport hunters, who had the time and money to
travel north to hunt, local hunters argued that Hamilton's working
families needed access to marsh resources for their food. Further,
with the limited time workers had for hunting they could not possibly
endanger game stocks. Indeed, they contended that a local sanctuary
in Hamilton would only fatten the birds before they would be slaughtered
by wealthy American hunters, operating without restriction at
the private game preserves maintained at nearby Long Point, on
the well-known bird migration path.
69
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At a meeting between city officials,
naturalists, and hunters, one proponent of the bird sanctuary
underlined the connection between conservationists and local moral
reformers. He was a prominent local doctor who championed the
value of birdwatching, suggesting that "the histories of many
patients showed that no outside interests in childhood and youth
had led them to center their thoughts too much on themselves.
If given healthful, natural interests ... many of these would
not drift into venereal clinics." An outraged gun club leader
responded heatedly to the implication that an "outside" interest
in hunting was both unhealthy and unnatural. "Do you mean," he
asked, "that sportsmen are depraved because they kill?"
70
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Advocates of the bird sanctuary
generally sought to avoid a direct confrontation with local sportsmen,
and even looked for ways to win support from them. The local society
marshalled the support and expertise of ornithologists throughout
North America like Jack Miner, the famous bird conservationist
from Kingsville who oversaw the making of Ontario's first provincial
crown game preserve in 1917.
71
Miner praised the idea of having a bird sanctuary in Cootes Paradise
as a sound investment in Hamilton's hunting future. He wrote:
"for a very small sum of money ... you are only building up the
sportsmen's opportunities in other ways, because from a sanctuary
like this, there would always be an overflow of birds that are
brought there. You cannot do wrong by helping bird lovers, because
we take nothing from the shooter, but we increase their opportunities
tenfold."
72
Assuming that the hunters speaking out only represented a minority
perspective, Miner also tried to turn the tables on their attempts
to frame their opposition to the sanctuary by appealing to the
interests of working people. He challenged their democratic manliness,
claiming: "I don't see how any delegation of real men could object
to it as there are only about 7 per cent of people who want to
shoot. Why should these few deprive the other 93 per cent of their
enjoyment?" He claimed, "What we Canadians want is the most good
for the most people."
73
Miner thus helped local reformers to frame their arguments in
a manner that did not directly challenge sport hunters. |
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Buoyed by the publicity surrounding
Jack Miner's involvement with the cause, and by the resulting
donations of money and bird food from the Ontario Fish and Game
Association, Hamilton's naturalists sought to cultivate wider
support for their proposal, including from the local Trades and
Labor Congress.
74
In January 1922, one member of the Bird Protection Society reported
that interviews had been conducted with the property owners whose
lands were in question, and he confidently predicted that "the
matter would soon be settled."
75
Proponents of the bird sanctuary, however, soon learned that settling
the matter would not be so simple. No one was certain about who
had jurisdiction over Cootes Paradise itself, or some of its surrounding
lands. Those with potential claims to the area included several
railway companies, the Hamilton Cemetery Board, various departments
within the dominion and provincial governments, a dominion-appointed
but locally-representative harbour commission, and the local governments
of two counties, three townships, the City of Hamilton, and the
Town of Dundas. |
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Into this jurisdictional confusion
tread George Midford, a local entrepreneur interested in taking
advantage of the situation by developing local tourism through
a hunting business on the marsh. Just a year after the bird society
lobbied the Dominion government's Minister of the Interior to
designate the area a bird sanctuary, Midford leased portions of
Cootes Paradise from the Dominion Department of Marine and Fisheries,
for the purposes of developing a private duck farm for hunters.
76
He had developed a similar operation in New Jersey, and was supported
in his plan by "an old-style politician who looked after his constituents,"
Hamilton Tory backbencher and former mayor, T.J. Stewart.
77
With Stewart's assistance, Midford struck a deal with the Department
of Marine, agreeing to spend $5,000 developing Cootes Paradise,
in exchange for a lease of the property at the nominal cost of
one dollar!
78
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Incredibly, Midford and Stewart
appear to have sidestepped the city, the Board of Parks Management,
and the Hamilton Harbour Commission, all of which had been carefully
cultivated as allies to their cause by the advocates of the bird
sanctuary. The Midford deal also alienated potential supporters
among Hamilton hunters. Having already argued that a bird sanctuary
would threaten the hunting rights of Hamilton workers, gun club
leader Nelson Long opposed the Midford plan for the very same
reasons. Although Stewart claimed that no shooting would be allowed
at the duck farm, Long worried that Midford was simply creating
a private hunting preserve for rich sportsmen. A commercial duck-farm
that outlawed hunting, or worse, made hunting available only to
those who could afford the price of admission, was no better than
a bird sanctuary, from the perspective of working-class hunters.
79
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The ensuing political controversy
undid the Midford deal. Stewart actively distanced himself from
the agreement claiming that he had acted out of ignorance. "If
I had known that anyone in Hamilton wanted the property, I would
have not been in favour of it," he claimed, appealing to local
sensibilities, "I did not know what the parks board wanted."
80
With emotions running high, and with Stewart accusing Long of
threatening him over his support of the Midford deal, Stewart
got into it with him. The Spectator recorded their heated
interchange at a lively parks board meeting: "Did I threaten you?"
asked Mr Long. Stewart replied, "You fight me and I will give
it to you back." To this, Long taunted the MP, "I can take all
you can give me." Whether the machismo expressed in the verbal
sparring ever turned physical, is not known. However, in response
to the query of T.B. McQuesten, "Now that your eyes are open Mr.
Stewart, will you reconsider your position?" Stewart replied obliquely,
"I don't want to make a double-shuffle. I will think the matter
over." Then, in the next breath, the MP backbencher added, "...
but I won't support Capt. Midford."
81
Within a week, harbour commissioners were in Ottawa getting Midford's
lease laid over indefinitely.
82
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While Midford's scheme was being
derailed, the Board of Parks Management, led by McQuesten, quietly
orchestrated a land deal that helped secure the creation of the
bird sanctuary, and ultimately would seal the fate of the boathouse
colony. The McKittrick Properties Company, developer of the Westdale
suburb at the west end of the city, was in financial distress,
and needed cash to pay a large sum of money owed to the city.
The ailing company also owned property adjoining the south shore
of the marsh, an area identified in an internal report as having
"no value from a residential standpoint," and thus had been earmarked
as parkland by the company.
83
Under McQuesten's direction, the Parks Board arranged for the
transfer of 400 acres of this property to the city of Hamilton,
in lieu of the taxes owed. By the spring of 1927, local provincial
politicians, supported by the Parks Board, City Council and conservationists
successfully petitioned to have this land designated as a sanctuary
for animals and birds. Within days of the provincial decision,
the city turned control of the area over to the parks board, who
would supervise this "wilder and freer" part of its parks system.
84
In designating the land as a game sanctuary, politicians carefully
protected the hunting rights of other bona fide owners
of the land adjoining the marsh. They could continue to hunt,
although they needed "a special permit, free of charge, to trap
on their own lands, in accordance with gun regulations."
85
No thought was given to the boathouse squatters, who traditionally
had hunted and fished in the marsh, but would not be considered
legitimate property owners. With "No Hunting" signs like the one
pictured in
Figure 9
posted everywhere, the bird and game sanctuary scheme threatened
to deprive the working-class families of the boathouse colony
of one of the main attractions of their community, easy access
to the fish and game of the Dundas Marsh. That is if they were
to obey the signs. |
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Figure 9. Dundas Mash Game Preserve-No Hunting.
The designation of Cootes paradise as a sanctuary
for birds and animals in 1927 threatened to deprive
boathouse colony families of one of the main attractions
of their community access to the abundant
fish and game of the area. Source: Royal Botanical
Gardens, Burlington, Ontario.
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The residents at the boathouse colony
faced a second and even more serious challenge as the Parks Board
began to develop plans for the marsh area. McQuesten and his colleagues
sought to realize a portion of Noulan Cauchon's city beautiful
vision, by developing plans for a monumental entrance atop the
Burlington Heights at the northwestern end of the city to replace
the existing entrance along Cootes Paradise pictured in
Figure 10
. This area where boathouses lined the waterfront a longtime
bane of city planners and moral reformers became in 1928
the focus of a grand design competition sponsored by the parks
board.
86
While the harbour commission already had declared a "war upon
the squatters" in the boathouses, the parks board initiative proved
even more ambitious and ominous.
87
The competition attracted the work of famous Canadian, American,
and Swedish architects, including former Hamiltonian John Lyle,
a graduate of the Ecole des Beaux Arts school of design in Paris,
and a sometime member of the Toronto Civic Improvement Committee.
88
Three cash prizes, ranging from $500 to $2,000 were to be awarded,
however, it was the prospect of the winner carrying out the construction
of the design that attracted the twelve meticulously laid out
entries. Among them were visions of fantastic proportions, with
colonnades, obelisks, and a shoreline developed for aesthetic
beauty and grace. The Parks Board awarded the first place prize
to a Toronto firm, led by the noted Swedish-trained architect,
Carl Borgstrom. The Parks Board estimated that it would take a
staggering $1.3 million and twenty years to complete the monumental
entrance.
89
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Figure 10. The view of Cootes Paradise boathouses
from the highway, c. 1931. The cars in the foreground
are travelling out of the city on Longwood Road
along the shoreline of Cootes Paradise. In 1928
the Parks Board created a design contest for architects
to develop a beautiful new north western entrance
to the city. Source: Hamilton Public Library,
Special Collections.
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In 1928, the Parks Board successfully
sought the approval of Hamilton rate payers for a $50,000 debenture
to support the construction of the bridge and entrance. The board
cleverly linked the vote on the debenture to another more popular
recreational plan, the construction of a public indoor swimming
pool in the center of the city.
90
To help overcome continuing opposition to the project, Parks Board
chairman McQuesten invited a Toronto journalist to tour the area
and view the plans, in an effort to appeal to the urban pride
of Hamiltonians. In November 1929, Toronto Star Weekly
columnist R.C. Reade extolled the vision of Hamilton's city beautifiers.
In his, "Hamilton Shows Toronto How" (
Figure 11
), which itself must have been something that piqued many a Torontonian,
Reade outlined the Hamilton parks plan as it had been presented
to him by McQuesten. Clearly he was impressed: |
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Figure 11. Star Weekly article extolling
the plans for the North Western area of the Bay
by Hamilton city beautifiers, 1929. Author Reade
commented of the design's advantages over Toronto's
"garish Sunnyside," Hamilton "will be able to
make whooppee without making a public exhibition
of itself." Credit: R.C. Reade, "Hamilton Shows
Toronto How," Star Weekly, 16 November
1929.
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Hamiltonians have been long conspiring secretly to
show Toronto how to construct stately portals and thresholds
that will compel the speeding tourist to jam on his brakes and
pause and look about him in awe and wonder. Toronto thinks it
has done that in garish Sunnyside, which is only a bottleneck
entrance to a glorified midway. The soul of the city reveals
itself at first glance as the soul of a merry-go-round and a
hot dog stand. But far different is the soul of Hamilton, if
one can judge from the introductory vistas it is in process
of developing.
91
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Praising Hamilton for its approach to city beautification, Reade's
comparison's continued, "Toronto may desire to sell the tourist
something as soon as he crosses the welcome sign. But you will
go a half a mile into Hamilton without the least taint of commercialism,
as the plush carpet that leads guests to a wedding at a fashionable
church."
92
The proposed plan would offer a variety of sedate and morally-acceptable
recreational spaces, including a picnic park, model yacht pond,
botanical and rock gardens, zoo and art museum. Hamilton was to
gain cultural mileage on its larger neighbour by eliminating those
vestiges of working-class leisure that shaped "garish Sunnyside."
"Do not think that Hamilton is going in for pure austere landscape,
with no admixture of amusements," Reade was quick to note, "Hamilton
... will have this advantage over Toronto. It will be able to
make whoopee without making a public exhibition of itself."
93
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The working-class families who inhabited
the boathouses that lined the shoreline of the harbour and the
marsh had no place in these city beautiful designs. Their "whoopee
contrivances" working-class pleasures considered unsightly
and offending to middle-class moral sensibilities were
unsanctioned by those in power locally. Although the Harbour Commission
had declared "a war on squatters" as early as 1926, the creation
of the bird sanctuary and the plans for some version of a monumental
entrance to the city prompted city officials to move in and remove
the boathouses with the full force of the law.
94
Life in the borderlands of the city had provided working-class
families with some real advantages, as a family survival strategy,
and as a means to escape the surveillance of city police and moral
reformers. Now they were to learn the disadvantage of life there:
they were in a weak position to defend their homes against planners
and reformers eager to create aesthetically and morally clean
spaces alongside Hamilton's dirty waters. The "war on the squatters"
had truly begun. |
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The War on the Squatters
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The Depression struck just as city officials and the Parks Board
determined that they should evict the people of the boathouse
community from their homes. The collapse of the international
economy complicated the lives of those people in the working-class
boathouse community, but it also provided them with some room
to resist the city's plans. Both the City and the Parks Board
now had little money to invest in their enormous beautification
project on the Burlington Heights which justified the removal
of the boathouses. The Depression, however, did make some money
available from the dominion and provincial governments for public
works projects, which allowed for some scaled-back construction
to begin. The grand park design was reduced to a sedate rock garden
constructed by relief workers out of an abandoned gravel pit.
This garden would form the basis of the Royal Botanical Gardens.
After a stormy local debate, which pitted "city beautifiers" against
local politicians, in 1931 city council approved the construction
of a much more modest bridge than that found in any of the design
competition plans. Created by John Lyle, it featured four 40-foot
limestone pylons with spaces left for statues to be erected later,
when better financial times permitted.
95
Importantly, neither of these more limited projects on the Burlington
Heights required the wholesale removal of the boathouses. |
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