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

Dale Barbour’s Winnipeg Beach is a compact account of the evolution of a Manitoba resort town from its founding by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1901 until 1967, the year the dance hall, roller coaster, and boardwalk were demolished. It pays particular attention to the intersection of heterosexual courtship and leisure at Winnipeg Beach. Barbour makes clear that the history of sexuality is not ancillary to other aspects of everyday life in the past. To the contrary, the book is evidence of the ways in which sexuality is central to the constitution of space, the creation of community, and the development of cultures of leisure. As visitors made their way to the boardwalk at Winnipeg Beach on the Moonlight Train, they were not just constructing the town as a space of leisure, but also as a heterosexual space.

Winnipeg Beach is Barbour’s master’s thesis transformed, aided by the author’s training as a journalist. As a work of local history, it provides an engaging and colourful account of Winnipeg Beach that focuses on the early part of the 20th century. The book is organized thematically. In the later chapters, Barbour considers the transportation corridor that moved people to and from the beach, the tourism infrastructure that developed to house visitors, and the activities that occupied them in the leisure zone (the beach and boardwalk). The book concludes with an examination of the changes wrought by the car and the decline of Winnipeg Beach as an amusement area.

Whereas other historians have located both the rise and fall of the resort in relation to the changing fortunes of the railway, Barbour maintains the importance of different courting rituals for understanding the evolution of Winnipeg Beach. Barbour divides the history of the town into three periods. Prior to World War I, the community was a model of British middle-class leisure devoted to the pursuit of healthful recreation in nature. Courting was the dominant mode of heterosexual encounter and was typically located in the private spaces of the beach, including the homes and verandahs of campers. The “transition from calling to dating helped to launch the resort’s golden years”: the 1920s and 1930s. (13) In this period, the commercial boardwalk replaced private spaces as the focal point of the emerging practice of dating. In the postwar era, Winnipeg Beach waned as a space of mass amusement. While the decline of the railway and the rise of the car were not insignificant to this transition, Barbour argues that it was also related to the shift from dating to “the more sexually active form of courtship that is linked with the sexual and cultural changes of the 1950s and 1960s.” (13)

Barbour positions his study alongside work conducted on other amusement spaces, namely New York’s Coney Island and England’s Blackpool, while also making connections to similar leisure spaces in Canada that have received less scholarly attention, such as Toronto’s Sunnyside Beach and Regina Beach in Saskatchewan. Somewhat surprisingly, Barbour omits any substantive discussion of Karen Dubinsky’s The Second Greatest Disappointment (Toronto 1999), an important account of mass tourism and heterosexuality at Niagara Falls. Like the international literature, Barbour’s analysis of Winnipeg Beach centres on the liminality of the resort as a place not only where water met land and nature met culture, but also where “rules and boundaries could be challenged.” (3) It is a familiar interpretative framework, both for beaches and leisure spaces, and one Barbour might have interrogated further. Not only were there limits to challenging the rules and boundaries of the beach, but also Barbour’s evidence suggests that order and discipline were as common, if not more so, than disorder and freedom. The very fact that men and women needed to seek out the darkness of the beach or play husband and wife to gain access to a rented room suggests the limits of an interpretation that emphasizes an inversion of...