Men vault, women play basketball, fountains go cupless

Toronto spent a lot of time in 1909 discussing supervised playgrounds. A discussion that finally led to the creation of St. Andrew’s Square Playground at the corner of Brant Street and Adelaide Street West. Playgrounds touch the edge of what I’m interested in, and historians have already had a pretty good look at them already. Still, I couldn’t resist digging into this when I came across it in the city council minutes.

The following excerpt is from the city’s Parks and Exhibition Committee’s final report for 1909. It catalogues the equipment that was placed in the park and gives us a sense of some of the city’s expectations for the new park. The sexy part of this story is the gender division that is staked out so bluntly, but there are other interesting things going on as well.

St Andrew’s Square Playground

The first fully equipped and supervised Municipal Playground in the City was established during the year in St. Andrew’s Square, which is centrally located in a thickly populated part of the City. The special appropriation for this work did not pass the Council until June 14^th, and the playground was duly opened with imposing ceremonies on August 11^th. The grounds contain an area of two and one-quarter acres, and this has been enclosed with a high wire fence, and divided into two equal sections, one for the apparatus suitable for boys and the other for girls, with separate entrances. The apparatus provided for boys consists of 

1 set See-Saws,
1 Outdoor Circle Swing,
1 Vaulting Horse,
1 pair Parallel Bars,
1 pair Jump Stands,
1 set Rope Ladder, Flying Rings, Trapeze, Climbing Rope, etc.,
1 Sand Box,
1 Toboggan Slide (Provided through the kindness of Mr. G. Dillon Mills). 

And that of the girls of 

1 set Swings,
1 set See Saws,
1 Outdoor Circle Swing,
1 pair Basket-ball Frames and ball for out-door play,
1 Sand Box 

All of it of the very best manufacture. A sanitary cupless drinking fountain was provided for each side. The appropriation voted did not admit of shelter accommodation or comfort stations being constructed, although these are essential to every properly equipped playground. 

As the Council made no appropriation for the supervising of this work, the Playgrounds Association generously undertook to provide for this want and paid for an athletic or supervisor for the boys, and two lady supervisors for the girls and very small boys.

The action of the City in providing this initial Municipal Playground was most heartily taken advantage of by the children of the locality, and not withstanding the brief period during which the grounds were open a strong tendency to good behavior was manifested by many of the boys whose reputation for orderliness and obedience had not been very marked.[1]

Bylaw no. 5353, an amendment to bylaw no. 4313, which looked after the management park and exhibition grounds in the city, was brought in to deal with the particular quirks of the city’s new supervised playgrounds.[2] And in this case, it looks like the bylaw, dated Sept. 13, 1909, came in after St. Andrew’s was up in running. Likely in this case the city was following the lead of its progressive citizens, the aptly named Playgrounds Association, in getting the park off (on?) the ground. The new amendment stated that the supervised playgrounds would be open between 9 a.m. and 8:30 p.m. each day, except Sunday, or “at such hours as may time to time be appointed by the council, and no person shall enter or remain therein except during such hours.” But while the playground was opened during the day the bylaw noted that “no child shall be permitted in the said grounds who should be at school, and any such child may be ejected or given in charge of a truant officer.” The person in charge also had the authority to “enforce order and to insist on rotation in the use of the apparatus.”

Here is what The Toronto Daily Star had to say about the new playground:

“The New Playground”
“Civic Dignitaries Spoke and Children Play at the Opening.”
 Hundreds of small boys and girls had their day’s fun on Toronto’s first equipped and supervised playground, St. Andrew’s Square, yesterday afternoon. 

Scores of older folk, too, attended the opening ceremonies, over which controller Hocken, who has taken a great interest in the playground movement, presided. The controller intimated that soon the City Council would provide swimming tanks for the playground. 

The most popular form of fun on the ground yesterday, as far as the little tots were concerned, was the chute or slide, and they kept it doing a record business. The larger boys have the westerly half of the playground to themselves, the girls and wee boys being separated from them by a wire fence. The whole ground is enclosed by a wire fence and the cost of equipment and fencing was $1,000. Parallel bars, teeters, giant stride on maypole, trapeze, swinging rings, and rope ladders are provided for the boys and the girls have sand courts, swings, maypoles, teeters, basketball, and the chute. 

Miss. E. McRoberts is supervisor of the girls, and Donald G. McGillicuddy, former physical director in the Stratford YMCA supervises the boys. After the ceremonies yesterday, the children gave hearty cheers for the men who have spent time and money in the playground movement.[3]

The Star and the city council record disagree on some matters. The council handed the chute to the boys and the Star gave it to the girls.  The city council record doesn’t mention a giant stride on maypole but this link suggests what it would have looked like.

The park looked like this in 1913:

“St. Andrew's Square,” October 14, 1913, Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 52, Item 196, Toronto City Archives.

The picture was taken from the girl’s side of the playground. There are girls on the swings and the basketball court is nearby. We can just make out the fence a little farther on that divides the park in half and kept the boys from straying into the girl’s side. The segregation of the sexes would not have seemed unusual at the time. School grounds and gymnasia in Toronto during that period often faced the same division.[4] It strikes me as odd that the girls got the basketball court but in the first decades of the twentieth century basketball was considered one of the acceptable sports for women to play, not overwork themselves and still maintain a feminine demeanor.[5] Similarly the rest of the equipment on the female side is intended to keep the girls from overexerting themselves. (Given the abundant amount of equipment on the boys side, I almost wonder if the girls got the basketball court as a wall of balancing out the playgrounds amenities.)

In contrast to the girl’s equipment that focused on play or, at best, running, the boys were supposed to keep busy and the equipment they were handed reflected that orientation. As Craig Heron has noted in his study on turn-of-the-century boy culture in Hamilton, the programs organized by businessmen and their wives were aimed at addressing the “boy problem” by keeping the male youth physically active, and “distracting boys from the thrill of the streets and preventing the drift into juvenile delinquency.”[6] The supervised playground fit in with a pantheon of sports programs, an increasingly youth oriented YMCA, and Scouts.[7] The link with the YMCA is apparent here given that the supervisor for the boys was a YMCA instructor.

Certainly, the behavior of the boys seem to have been on the minds of city officials who noted in the report shared above that “a strong tendency to good behavior was manifested by many of the boys whose reputation for orderliness and obedience had not been very marked.” Apparently they felt the system was working or at least the city wanted to suggest that it was. The concern about the boys certainly gives meaning to the sturdy fences, which were intended to keep the children within the controlled setting of the playground, but also to keep the males penned up in their side. Often, we think of the girls as being the objects of display to a male public when ringed in by a fence like this, and to a degree I’m sure they were; fenced in and intended to display proper feminine behavior within their yard.[8] Feminine behavior could, apparently, include a good dance around the maypole:

“St. Andrew's Playground — Maypole dancing,” August 26, 1914, Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 52, Item 429, Toronto City Archive.

But I think it’s clear that the males were also intended to be on display; supervised, well behaved and circulating through their athletic equipment they could provide a vision of how male youth were supposed to behave. They’d do that, or get turfed out of the playground. The Star and council records note that the young boys were kept on the girl’s side and it raises the question of when they got to leave the girls side and become a “boy.” No specific age is mentioned. There was likely a practical aspect to this; the young boys might have gotten in the way of the athletic endeavours of the older boys. But this division by age speaks to the notion that proper masculinity as produced by and displayed within the playground was something that had to be taken on and earned. It wasn’t something bestowed at birth.

I’m interesting in this playground story because it speaks to the gendered landscape that operated in 1909 Toronto and that speaks to how people could and did move through and experience the city. It’s highlighted here because it seems so deliberate, but the playground they constructed reflected their expectations for men and women and their efforts to create those ideal identities.

I don’t want to overstate that gendered landscape as something alien to what we experience today. Even now gyms, such as the University of Toronto’s Athletic Centre set aside distinctive women’s only hours in an effort to meet the needs of their female clientele and create a comfortable space for them to exercise in. Anyone who was walked into the Athletic Centre during regular hours can appreciated how very male a terrain it can be.

But my take away from St. Andrew’s Square might be one of the least significant details; how the kids got their water. Traditionally they would have used something like this, which also supplied water for horses:

“Drinking fountain at College Street and Spadina Avenue, ” April 26, 1899, Fonds 200, Series 376, File 2, Item 49, Toronto City Archives.

The “sanitary cupless drinking fountains” that were provided for each side of the park were a new innovation for Toronto. But they were catching on. The next year Ald. Graham presented a motion asking, “that the drinking cups be done away with and sanitary drinking fountains placed in the various Parks and other public places as far as possible.”[9] I’m interested in this cupless fountain because I think it says something about the city’s reorientation from dealing with the individual to the masses. It was a practical matter. Fountains that forced people to use a cup to drink the water created sanitary concerns about the germs on the shared cups; increased concerns in an increasingly medicalized society. The Toronto City Archives have this neat picture that points that out:

“Drinking fountain – plumbing,” April 4, 1912, Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 32, Item 110, Toronto City Archives.

I'm not even going to bother trying to tackle why a man is kissing the female fountain in the above illustration. That's a project for another day. But the “sanitary cupless drinking fountain” also suggests how the city increasingly moved away from dealing with “a” body, the one that drank from the cup, to bodies, the ones that drank from the fountain. To stretch the concept, it’s a little bit like the shift from an individual gas light to an electrical light system.

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[1] Final Report of the Parks and Exhibition Committee, Jan. 6, 1910, Page 158-159, Toronto City Council, 1909, Appendix A, Toronto City Archives.

[2] Bylaw 5353, Sept. 13, 1909, Page 361, Toronto City Council, 1909, Appendix B, Toronto City Archives.

[3] “The New Playground,” The Toronto Daily Star, Thursday, Aug. 12, 1909, Page 14.

[4] Helen Lenskyj, “Femininity first: Sport and Physical Education for Ontario Girls, 1890-1930,” in Readings in Canadian History Post-Confederation: Seventh Edition, ed R. Douglas Francis and Donald B. Smith (Toronto: Nelson Thomson Learning, 2006), 289.

[5] Lenskyj, 288.

[6] Craig Heron, “Boys Will Be Boys: Working-Class Masculinities in the Age of Mass Production,” International Labor and Working-Class History No. 69, Spring 2006, pp6-34, 15.

[7] Heron, 16

[8] For a dramatic look at women being displayed for the men check out Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849-1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 155-161.  Perry is looking at a particular colonial display in her work.

[9] Meeting of Council, Item 94, Jan. 10, 1910, Page 22, Toronto City Council Minutes, 1910, Toronto City Archives.