There’s a story you hear not long after settling into a bar on Ward’s Island about a man who mistook the place for a nude beach. Granted, the man wasn’t too far off his bearings. There is a nude beach at Hanlan’s Point, off Centre Island, and the nudists there are known to let everything hang out. Still, that doesn’t just mean you can ferry over from Toronto, find a piece of dry land, and whip off your pants. There are rules to the nudity. Nakedness — even on the island — follows a code.
“I was running to the snack bar to wait for the school bus when I saw him. I was like, dude, put on some clothes!” says Val Cook, a Ward’s Island parent, who works at the island’s only place to grab a drink, the Rectory Café. The guy, who was buck naked at the time, was surprised when he heard Cook’s warning. He had assumed, rather presumptuously, that once you leave the ferry anything goes.
“I’m imagining the face of a bunch of nine-year-olds when they see him — like, wow, you know?” says Cook, who hustled the man back into his swim trunks and sent him on his way before he could scare the youngsters.
Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti is like that man lying out naked by the Ward’s Island schoolyard. In March, he proposed turning the island into a red-light district, à la Amsterdam. It’s certainly an idea worth exploring: Should there be brothels on Toronto Island? And just how naked do the hippies get out there? And what of the rumours that all those island dwellers with the funny bicycles smoke weed? So I set aside judgement and hopped on a boat.
“You’re going to bring johns over on a ferry?” asks a woman I meet on the top floor of an evening ship on a night so cold it takes everything I have not to keep riding the boat to the island airport and take off for a warmer climate.
When you get the islanders talking, consternation for Mammoliti is delivered with the force of a UFC blow.
“Mammoliti wants to open a brothel, but here’s my question: How did he know that we don’t already have one?” asks Jacqueline Hogler, making her way home after working all day in Bayview Village. Hogler tells a quick story about Mammoliti’s friend Rob Ford visiting the island in April. Apparently, the mayor didn’t pay his fare.
“You get away with nothing over here,” says Hogler.
And when the ferry docks on the island, I immediately like what I see: someone has replaced three lights at the dock with red bulbs. I guess if the island’s going to become a red-light district, the residents want to be prepared. Of course I’m looking for a place to get into trouble, and the best person to help with that is 81-year-old Jimmy Jones. I tell him people in Toronto think there might be marijuana on the island.
“Marijuana on the island?” retorts Jimmy, who looks a bit like a dapper pink leprechaun. “Oh my God, you can grow it on the island if you can find a spot.”
Jimmy Jones is the son of a circus clown who grew up on the island back when it was the place to be. He talks about Babe Ruth coming over to play baseball and the amusement parks, grand hotels and dances, where he had his first kiss and then the various bushes where he got into other things. At 81, there’s not an inch of the island that Jones has not caused mischief in.
“If there’s a brothel on the island,” he says, “I certainly want to know where it is.”
Since the island is basically dry except for the Rectory Café — although a liquor licence hangs in the balance at the Island Snack Bar — a healthy bootlegging industry exists.
I know this because Val Cook told me it’s true.“There’s two of ’em, but one sells to the underaged, so when I first got to the island, I was told, ‘don’t go to him,’” says Cook, who would take me to the bootlegger, she says, but then, “I’d never be able to buy cigarettes again.”
Cook has a real cool disposition. She’s originally from Alberta, and her husband works on the island fixing bikes. She once owned the Rectory, but now she’s happy to let someone else deal with the hassle. She has a theory about island life: “The boys stay and drink a beer and then they smoke a joint and then they miss the boat and then they’re 40,” she says, bringing me and Jimmy Jones into the café after hours where we sit at a wooden table and look out at the moon’s reflection on the shimmering lake.
“I think the city would have a hard time getting the prostitutes over here in the winter — it’s pretty cold,” Cook says, with a smile.
The islanders seem to have a pretty permissive attitude. After all, they’ve had to work hard to make life work on an island where there’s no stores, beat cops or cars. Many of the residents are artists, and one guy I meet says he feels perfectly comfortable with Toronto opening up brothels. He just isn’t sure why it has to be on the patch of land where he raised his son.
“I’ve been in Amsterdam, and it was fine, but what I worry about is this: why would the councillor make a connection between a nude beach and the sex trade,” says Peter Freeman, working hard to get the Toronto Island Café ready for summer.
Freeman and his wife, teachers, aim to sell fresh bread and farm-fresh food from their restaurant. He believes the red-light district idea won’t float.
“Would a client want to come over on a boat and have everybody looking at them?” he asks. “I’m all about better protection for sex trade workers, but this idea is a joke.”
It’s freezing when I leave the island. Since Jimmy Jones doesn’t invite me to sample his stash and Val won’t take me to a bootlegger, there’s nothing else to do but take the ferry back home.
The idea of having a red-light district in Toronto is a hot debate, and Toronto Island isn’t being used to its potential. A group of kids,older guys maybe, sort of tough, are drinking tall boys of Canadian in the smoking section of the ferry as we brace ourselves against the cold for the ride back home. One of the kids lights a joint, and all I am thinking is thank God we’re not expecting a bus full of nine-year-old boys.
Ben Kaplan is a features writer for the National Post