Queen's Wharf Lighthouse

Another of my "CurioCity" series, reprinted courtesy of the National Post.

What’s a lighthouse doing in the middle of a landlocked park across from the Princes’ Gates? Actually, Queen’s Wharf Lighthouse once stood on a pier more than 200 metres offshore. (Back in the day, that was north of its present site; the shoreline has advanced about 900 metres.)

Because shipping was once so important, lights were installed by 1838 on the end of Queen’s Wharf, near the foot of Bathurst Street, to guide ships safely into the harbour. Edward M. Hodder’s 1857 book The Harbours And Ports Of Lake Ontario describes “a fixed red light” to the north and “a bright beacon light” at the west end of the pier. “These lights when brought into line indicate the entrance to the channel.”

In 1861, a pair of towers was built for these “range lights”. The taller one, painted white, housed the beacon light. The shorter one, for the red light, was the 11-metre octagonal building that still stands in Gore Park. It was decommissioned in 1911, and in 1929, it was moved about 450 metres southwest to its current location. The Toronto Historical Board restored it in 1988 (the brown-and-red paint job is authentic), but the light itself no longer works.

No one ever lived there, but the lighthouse keeper had a cottage nearby. “It’s pretty bare; it has wood floors,” says Jo Ann Pynn, Supervisor of Cultural Assets for the City of Toronto. “There’s no insulation; it’s a frame structure, and in the centre there’s a rather steep open-riser staircase.” The second level (proportionately smaller, of course) has windows and a “still steeper” staircase to the third level: the glass lantern itself. A hatch leads to an exterior walkway, which, says Pynn, “is a pretty cool place to be.”

Image: Postcard from 1940, from Wikimedia Commons, originally from Halton Hills Public Library, Local identifier no. 302.