I lived, for one long winter, on the edge of a large, grey lake. In the afternoons, I walked along the water, kept company by a few hardened runners and midlife-crisis cyclists, the odd confused tourist, and equally incongruous swans: huge, angry, and beautiful. By three o’clock, streaks of fuchsia cut the steely sky above the smokestacks in the industrial west, illuminating the coral-hued stucco of Sunnyside Pavilion.

Various peoples have moved and fished and lived along the north shore of Lake Ontario since it filled up at the end of the last ice age, some 12,500 years ago. Communities began to build and farm a millennia before Étienne Brûlé’s Wendat guides paddled him down what street maps now call the Humber River in the early seventeenth century. There would be no city without the lake. But Toronto—at least the section bordered, for the last seventy years, by the crumbling Gardiner Expressway—often feels cut off from this body of water the size of the state of New Jersey.

There are exceptions, such as the white sands in the city’s east end where, on an August afternoon, the boardwalks and a sea of volleyball courts summon an aroma of salt. Or the Toronto Islands, where a short ferry ride grants entry to a community of whimsical bungalows and a clothing optional beach that somewhat dubiously labels itself the “oldest Queer space in Canada.” For that pandemic-walled winter, however, reaching my Lake Ontario required crossing a series of concrete bridges and impossible stoplights. Traffic and exhaust subsumed any waves and breeze. It did not welcome, but gravity pulled me across the frozen goose shit in search of the sublime.

By early March, I noticed a small congregation of older men in front of Sunnyside’s empty outdoor swimming pool. Shirtless in the near-freezing air, they propped up tinfoil to capture the watery sun. The technique worked; bronzed torsos glistened beneath silver hair. A few engaged in some Charles Atlas-era calisthenics, replete with medicine balls and balancing acts, in a routine that complemented the building’s art-deco façade. Their open smiles temporarily replaced my hunger for horizons with a gentle ache for a Toronto of the not-so-distant past.

The name “Sunnyside” can, some say, be traced to 1848 when a wealthy local man built his home on the “sunny side” of a hill. Another less literal (but more literary) story is that it took inspiration from the name of Washington Irving’s home in Tarrytown, New York. Either way, “Sunnyside” stuck. In 1884, the optimistically titled Ocean House Hotel was built at the corner of Queen Street West and Roncesvalles Avenue, just blocks from the beach, and was soon surrounded by candy and cigar shops. The eponymous pavilion and an amusement park replete with a roller coaster opened in the 1920s. Streetcars began running, with a free “bathing car” for children during the warmer months. Parkdale, for a time, transformed into a bustling beach town; this narrow, scrubby piece of shoreline functioned as an affordable escape from the heat and grime of a quickly growing North American metropolis.

The party did not last. By the 1950s, the midway was cleared to make way for an expressway, as were some of the stately Victorian houses that lined the streets north of the lake. Those still standing are a hodgepodge of regentrified, prohibitively expensive single-family homes and illegal rooming houses that sit between crowded mid-century apartment towers—rare sights in a downtown bursting with jerry-built (and increasingly unsellable) glass-walled condominiums.

All options expose and exploit Toronto’s housing disaster. City guides and well-off inhabitants often describe Parkdale as vibrant and diverse, and it certainly has tenacity (a recent rent strike, for example, showcased the dignified power of collective action), but local food bank usage in the area has nearly doubled in this past year alone. From my living room above a cannabis shop, I could see a sagging, cockroach-ridden art-deco walk-up where pigeons flout the spikes to nest amid the letters of “The Lakeview.” Next door, a late-night takeout spot now occupies what had once been the ground floor of the Ocean House Hotel—kitty-corner from a McDonalds that functions as an ersatz shelter from lake-effect winds and ambulance screeches. On a cold day, the beach at the bottom corner of Parkdale feels less reprieve than seductive threat: a siren song for this sinking ship of a city as it barrels towards the end of the world.

By June that year, the outdoor pool at Sunnyside overflowed with children and lane swimmers. The teenage lifeguards perched on the beach below almost let one overlook the toxicity of a lake I had been frequently told, growing up, never to dunk my face in. Weekend picknickers, lacking the padding of generational wealth needed to escape north to the cool, green waters of Ontario’s cottage country, set up barbeques and boom boxes. The shirtless crew continued to flaunt their aging muscles and tans. A happy scene, no doubt, but I could not shake my own sense of trespass. The summer light exposed a misplaced nostalgia; the golden figures outside Sunnyside Pavilion were nothing but reminders of another chapter in an absurd urban experiment—false shadows of a peaceful past that never existed: not in 1615, not in 1925, not today. A paddleboarder became Étienne Brûlé in Adidas slides. I preferred winter’s harsh reminder: these shores are not my shores.

I didn’t have another turn of the seasons by the lake. Or at least not today’s lake. I moved a few kilometres up the hill to another shoreline, where the sharp incline of Davenport Road marks the scraping out of the basin that has become the city’s centre. The prehistoric Lake Iroquois drained when the ice melted and the water rushed through the long St. Lawrence River. A mere drip in time, really, as 11,000 year old footprints  in what once was the mud continue to resist both geologic and human erasure. The new apartment has a balcony where I sometimes sunbathe in the summer months between silly pots of cherry tomatoes and wilting parsley. Passing trains rattle my burning ribcage as the kitchen cabinets fill with clinking shells. With eyes closed, I see fisherman and fur traders, runners and lovers, cotton candy stands, pigeon feathers, imported swans, and overflowing trash bins. The beautiful Sunnyside bodybuilders dance like sea-monkeys and then vanish in the glacial deep. The expressway turns archeologic. This is no place for such petty constructions of pleasure and grime. The sky is blue, and the freshwater rises clean and cold, as the sediment—my sediment—cascades over Niagara Falls and into the wide Atlantic as I indulge, for a moment, in an aquatic absolution that I’ve done little to deserve.