Winnipeg Beach: Leisure and Courtship in a Resort Town, 1900–1967 by Dale Barbour (review)

Dreamed up by the Canada Pacific Railway as a way to fill trains at the beginning of the twentieth century, Winnipeg Beach for a few decades became Manitoba’s Coney Island, a popular resort that catered to anyone who could afford the seventy-minute ride. Winnipeggers flocked there in droves, up to 40,000 a weekend. Not only could they enjoy beautiful Lake Winnipeg, a midway, and the largest dance hall in western Canada, but, as Dale Barbour shows, they could also pursue courtships away from chaperoning eyes. Nicely balanced between oral and academic history, Barbour’s Winnipeg Beach is an excellent account of the town’s rise and decline. Winnipeg Beach remains a pleasant beach community, but it is much more sedate now – cottagers far outnumbering young thrill-seekers – than in its 1920s glory days.

Beginning with a brief, tantalizing reference to aboriginals who fished in the area before 1875, Barbour moves quickly into the town’s coming out as a tourist destination, into the social histories that made and were made by Winnipeg Beach. The trajectory of courtship rituals exemplifies this double process. On the one hand, courtships at Winnipeg Beach were part of a society-wide shift from private, family-overseen matters to public, business-sponsored affairs. On the other, Winnipeg Beach contributed to the changes by opening a public space where the sexes could mingle without parental surveillance. Young men and women would typically arrive at the boardwalk in single-sex groups for an evening of fun but, once there, could leave the group and pair off. Barbour ably describes ‘the endless circling of the boardwalk, where people strutted like “peacocks.”’ Light and entertainment ruled the boardwalk and the almost-open-air Dance Palace summer nights, yet a few steps off the path lay the dark beach, to which lovers – both heterosexual and same-sex – fled.

Many histories are woven into Barbour’s account: Prohibition and its repeal, Sunday closing laws, female emancipation, and race. Unlike Victoria Beach on the east shore of Lake Winnipeg, which explicitly excluded ‘unwanted people,’ the mass-market aspect of Winnipeg Beach on the west ensured an ethnic mix. The homes, cottages, and boarding houses rose within separate ethnic enclaves – British people in one area, Icelanders and Ukrainians in another, and Jews in a third. Nevertheless, on the boardwalk, anyone with cash was welcome. Barbour recounts back-street clashes between poorer Ukrainians and well-heeled Jews. Jews could not own cottages north of Boundary Park, where, in the 1930s and 1940s, fistfights took place between beach youths and young Winnipeg Jews. The Boundary Park line was breached in the 1950s when the Jewish partner of an Anglo businessman was prevented from buying a cottage in the British section. The Anglo businessman bought the cottage and immediately resold it to his partner.

Apart from some repetitiveness, the only drawback of the book is its kowtowing to the sociological fashion of labelling everything a ‘construction.’ ‘The lake is a socio-cultural construction,’ we read, as if the human interpretation of the lake were quite arbitrary. One should stay well away from the waves if one wants to lecture about ‘Lake Winnipeg’s discursive power.’ But these are minor complaints in a book that is both readable and interspersed with well-chosen photographs of life at the beach.

Particularly useful is the way that Barbour sets developments at Winnipeg Beach alongside parallel developments among the crowds at Coney Island, Blackpool, and Toronto’s waterfront parks. He broadens the book’s reach by bringing in such issues as changing ideas about swimming and bodily modesty – men could get jail time for wearing topless bathing suits at Coney Island, and police ordered women wearing bathing suits off Winnipeg Beach’s Main Street.

And then the automobile came. It ‘atomized the travel experience,’ while the sexual revolution initiated a decline in dating culture. Barbour probably should have added that, as Robert Putnam’s Bowling...