Cherry Beach: A Drowned Island and a Name the Police Tried to Ban
Cherry Beach has had three histories running underneath it at once: a geological one, where the land itself has moved and disappeared; a civic one, where a park was created, nearly destroyed, and renamed; and a darker one, carried not in city records but in a song, a lawsuit, and a homemade plaque. None of the three is fully resolved.
A Sandbar That Used to Be a Peninsula
The land under today's Cherry Beach was not always separate from the rest of Toronto's waterfront. It was once part of a peninsula connected to what became the Toronto Islands. Around 1852 that connection broke, leaving the future beach site as its own sandbar. Then, in 1858, a storm carved out the harbour's Eastern Gap, the channel that now separates the Toronto Islands from the mainland. That storm didn't just reshape the islands — it orphaned the sandbar section that would come to be known as Fisherman's Island, cutting it off from the growing island chain and leaving it to fend for itself as an isolated strip of shoreline.
Fisherman's Island was not empty land. A small community lived there for decades, with homes, a commercial fishery, and even a church. People got to and from the city by boat or by crossing a breakwater built in 1882 to link the island to the mainland. The community lasted roughly another half-century before it disappeared entirely, a casualty of the same industrial waterfront expansion that eventually produced the Port Lands.
For most of the twentieth century, that history was simply buried, literally. It wasn't until Waterfront Toronto's Port Lands flood-protection construction — a project that excavated 1.4 million cubic metres of soil in the area — that any of it resurfaced. Archaeologists from the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, working alongside the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, monitored the excavation to document historically significant material. In September 2020 that work turned up the 1882 breakwater itself, along with everyday artifacts from the lost community: shoes, ginger ale bottles, century-old newspaper clippings. People visiting Cherry Beach today are standing on ground that spent more than a century as a drowned settlement before anyone dug it back up.
From Clarke Beach Park to a Near-Elimination
The park itself has a separate, more bureaucratic history. It was created in the early 1930s by Harry Clarke, the city alderman responsible for it, and was named Clarke Beach Park in his honor. That name held for seventy years, even as the site around it kept changing: the area had been a marshy bog, then land-filled and given over to heavy industry, before slowly being handed back to public use.
The park almost didn't survive to see that handover finished. In 1974, Toronto's central waterfront planning process floated a proposal to eliminate Cherry Beach altogether in favor of industrial use — a plan that, had it gone through, would have erased the beach from the map entirely rather than merely renamed it. It didn't happen, and by 2003 the city moved the opposite direction, officially renaming Clarke Beach Park to Cherry Beach, formalizing the name residents had already been using for years.
The Name Nobody Put on a Sign
The renaming in 2003 gave Cherry Beach its official identity. But the beach had already picked up an unofficial one decades earlier, and it had nothing to do with alderman Harry Clarke or city planning documents.
"Cherry Beach Express" is a euphemism for alleged police brutality reported to have taken place at a deserted stretch of the beach from the 1940s through the 1990s — officers allegedly driving people out to the isolated, industrial shoreline and beating them somewhere no one downtown would see it. The story existed as local knowledge for years before it broke into culture: in 1984 the Toronto band Pukka Orchestra turned it into a local radio hit, "Cherry Beach Express," and the Toronto Police tried to have the song banned. Whatever the merits of that effort, it didn't erase the name. If anything, a police force trying to suppress a song about itself only reinforced the idea that there was something to the story.
The allegation later intersected with an actual legal case. In 2003 — the same year the city renamed the park — Thomas Kerr, a homeless man, was awarded a settlement after claiming Toronto police had beaten him at the Port Lands location in 1996. A settlement doesn't establish guilt in the way a criminal verdict does, and it typically carries no admission of wrongdoing. But it is a real, documented outcome tied to a specific, dated claim, not just an urban legend. On the other side of the story, Craig Bromell, former head of the Toronto Police Association and one of eight men accused in connection with the beating claims, called the story "just bullshit" in 2007 and was exonerated — a named denial, on the record, from someone directly implicated.
The name has kept surfacing in Toronto's culture since. Toronto punk band Career Suicide named a 2008 EP after the beach. And in 2013, artist Tim Groves' Missing Plaque Project put up an unofficial poster on Cherry Street specifically commemorating the Cherry Beach Express as a piece of the city's untold history — an acknowledgment that no city agency has put up itself.
Two Histories, One Beach
What makes Cherry Beach's history unusual is that both threads — the drowned island beneath it and the alleged violence associated with it — involve things that were deliberately hidden or unofficial for decades before surfacing. Fisherman's Island stayed buried under landfill until a 2020 excavation dug it back up. The Cherry Beach Express stayed outside any official record until a song, a lawsuit, and a guerrilla plaque kept it alive in the absence of one. Neither story is fully closed: the excavation was tied to a specific construction project, not an ongoing dig, and the police-brutality allegation remains exactly that — an allegation, settled in one documented case and denied in another, without an official inquiry to resolve it either way.