From a carless cluster of brightly coloured cottages, past the countless docks and over the numerous bridges, through the unconscious approximation of cottage country by immigrant residents in the gardens and on the picnic grounds, past one of the oldest pieces of city architecture at Gibraltar’s Point —where you can sneak a peek at the upper crust of Royal Canadian Yacht Clubbers and then sneak a different kind of peek at the clothing-optional queer-culture favourite, Hanlan’s Point beach — all the way around to a miniature international airport, one small neighbourhood in Toronto contains much of what defines the city. The Toronto Islands are an intriguing place, a ferry ride apart from the city, but somehow encompassing it.

Island residents understand the physical and psychological distance better than anyone, and accept the idyllic setting with reduced pace sometimes required for island life. “You have to be crazy to live here,” says Algonquin Island Association president Doreen Hamilton of life without variety stores and streetcars. “It’s totally inconvenient. You’re exposed to the elements and have to live like you’re in the wilderness.”

With somewhat more temperance, Bill Freeman, an islander for over 20 years, adds simply, “You accept a different lifestyle.” Still, islanders, and anyone who visits the island for that matter, also get to experience, without a doubt, the best place to view Toronto’s skyline — to take in “the city.” In this way and others, the unrepresentative island is a microcosm of the strange evolutions that overtake a neighbourhood, a city council’s constant growing pains, small victories and stubborn defeats and, most of all, the kind community that, when multiplied, gives us our identity.

“If the city of Toronto was a brain, the island would be its wildest thought,” said author/poet Claudia Dey, in a recent interview with the Danforth Review about her island-situated book Stunt. When I asked what exactly she meant, she wrote back, “A city’s thought process is under constant revision. Because of this tic, the island has faced bulldozers and sheriffs — wild thoughts being, in the city brain, a constant threat. Not that wild thoughts are dangerous, but that concrete ones are so much more lucrative; this being, despite its wilful imagination, the guiding propulsion of a city.”

Toronto didn’t always have islands. As recently as 150 years ago this month, you could have walked from the port lands all the way around to the City Centre Airport. Of course, neither the port nor the airport existed at the time. And the “island” itself was just a thin, sandy peninsula; an oversized sand bar created from the eroded bits of the Scarborough Bluffs that collected in the harbour. Toronto didn’t have an island proper until April 13, 1858 when a massive storm severed the peninsula’s easternmost link to the rest of the city once and for all.

While Mother Nature continues to exert her transformative whims on the physical shape of the islands as parts occasionally melt away into Lake Ontario, another elemental factor has had an equally erosive effect: city hall. When the city decided against rebuilding the gap in favour of an easterly entrance to Toronto Harbour those many years ago, it was but the first resolution in a long history of unreliable policy shifts concerning the island and its relationship to the rest of the city. If the island is a symbol of anything, it’s the city’s amnesiac attitude toward planning.

Take the most recent appropriation of the symbolic island: David Miller’s 2003 bid for mayor. Promising to kill the planned bridge to the island airport to prevent its expansion for commercial flights figured prominently into his philosophical catch-all, “What kind of city do you want to live in?” The island community and airport expansion stood as handy symbols of environmentalism, of community vs commercialization, of our relationship with the lake and the David and Goliath battles between small-time activists and back-room business brokers. Islanders and mainlanders alike agreed that reattaching the island was not conducive to the city they wanted.

However, only a few short years later, upstart Porter Airlines secured the landing strip and began service to various Canadian destinations. Recently Porter started flying to American destinations. In their own ways, both Porter and Miller got the city they wanted to live in. But the islanders still have to live with an international airport.

Of course, this kind of defeat, grasped from the jaws of victory, is familiar. A read-through of island history (courtesy of Sally Gibson’s comprehensive More Than an Island) reveals a geographically defined testament to visionary indecision. Over the past 150 years the sandy, swampy land mass has gone from an unlikely summer getaway destination to an 8,000-strong community to an almost resident-free public park. During the mid-1800s, the influx of wealthy Torontonians summering on the island, combined with the construction of hotels and yacht clubs inspired the moniker “The Coney Island of Canada.” But as the island expanded its seasonal entertainment allure with an amusement park and a baseball stadium (the stage, famously, for Babe Ruth’s first professional home run), the city promoted residential development by leasing lots for permanent residences.

Between 1912 and 1935, the pastoral existence of those who already lived on the island came under developmental threat as the city began construction on a tunnel to the island (eventually abandoned mid-excavation) and demolished the amusement park to make way for an airport. But the dark age of contradictory planning descended on the island after 1955. When the proposed apartments, hotels and parking lots of Mayor Allan Lamport’s emboldened attempt at “turning a civic deficit into an asset” were scrapped and the island came under the jurisdiction of the newly formed Metro Council, its residents faced the most unlikely of threats: a public park. Under this new direction, everyone living on the island would have to go, and their hotels, movie theatres, businesses and homes — the infrastructure of an entire community — faced the Metro bulldozers. By 1993, when the ensuing fight to save their community was finally settled, only 250 houses remained.

This kind of drastic experimentation with neighbourhood planning seems extreme, but it’s not entirely uncommon. Just look at the Etch-A-Sketch approach to Regent Park development and the ongoing indecision surrounding waterfront revitalization; when an entire community is forced into redevelopment against its will, the question of “what kind of a city do you want to live in?” becomes frustratingly moot.

Like any neighbourhood undergoing transformation, the unwanted change both alienates the residents from the rest of the city and forces them to consider their relation to the whole. Just as the St. Clair right-of-way supposedly threatened businesses along that street yet was essential to improving cross-town transit, the City Centre Airport is part of the larger waterfront community even if it is located on the island. Should neighbourhoods be able to oppose outright any development that they see as unfit for their community, or is it their role as part of the city to submit to the greater will? Or are the islands a different kind of symbol of community evolution altogether?

Despite a long history of alienation and instability, and what for a long time was an obviously strained relationship with city hall, the residents of the islands might be the city’s ideal citizens. Speaking with Freeman shows that despite their physical remove from the city, the islanders are actually more engaged with the necessities of city living than most. By choosing to live in a community where ferries and public transit are the only means of transportation, and common sense and volunteerism are the primary resources for making the neighbourhood a functioning community, their experience shows inescapably how a livable city is actually possible.

Though the island represents a lesson in everything that could go wrong with community planning, it’s also a shining beacon for how to make it right. Against all odds, and maybe even because of them, the 700 remaining island residents retain an idyllic existence of car-free streets and community involvement the likes of which the rest of the city can only dream about. The Toronto Islands may not be the best example of a community experiencing natural evolution, but the small population’s endurance is proof positive of successful adaptation.

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