HomeMy WebLinkAbout720"Photocopy of an article from the Ajax/Pickering News Advertiser, February 1, 1989,
page 7.
"
"Pickering/Ajax Bay News, February 1, 1989 7
Time Has Stood Still Around Frenchman's Bay
By: Norman Philippsen
THERE'S A FEELING that time has stood still for a moment at Frenchman's Bay.
If you look past the plastic debris washed up on shore as you stroll west off the end of
Liverpool road, towards the narrow channel connecting the Bay to Lake Ontario,
you wouldn't know it's 1989.
Looking into the Bay, you can't ignore the presence of tightly bunched marinas jockeying
for space, but the spattering of weather-worn houses that surround the Bay lend a certain
nostalgic ambience to the scene.
Over the years the Bay has seen plenty of changes. In the 1850's the Bay was booming.
It served as a port of export for timber and wheat. But the coming of the Grand Trunk
Railway led to the decline in harbor trade only several decades later.
Of the lighthouse,wharf, and bushel elevator built in the 1870's, only a skeleton of wharf
pilings remain. David O'Brien, long-time resident of the Bay, says there haven't been
many changes.
""I was talking to a man at the hardware store the other day. He said, 'look at the
progress we've made. We've got the GO train now.' And I said, 'hell, GO train,
whey when I was a kid we had the train right in Frenchman's Bay.' So things go and
come again, nothing really changes,' he said.
O'Brien was born in Frenchman's Bay in 1921, and has lived there for most of his life.
His grandfather was a seaman from Ireland, and later became the Captain of a
""stoner"" dubbed ""The Madeline"". A picture of ""The Madeline"" hangs over O'Brien's
oak desk in his grandfather's house at 699 Front St., built in 1870.
A hand-crafted ship's lantern, an original Tiffany lamp and his grandmother's rocking
chair (which
has seen so much use that the rockers needed to be replaced) are just a few of the
interesting collectables that evoke echoes of a former age.
O'Brien's father also made his living from the water as a commercial fisherman,
before pollution in the lakes cut short that trade.
When O'Brien was a kid growing up in the area, most of the houses were summer
cottages for Torontonians.
They travelled in by train, and then later by Grey Coach.
There were only 12 or 13 families living permanently in the Bay, not unlike the
Muskokas now, where masses of city slickers descend on small local communities,
O'Brien said.
After the war, in 1949, O'Brien became an electrical superintendent in Toronto,
and one of the first ""modern"" day commuters in the area.
At 67 he still makes the trip everyday, and admits that traffic today is a lot worse,
but he hasn't got the time to quit.
After the war, the cottages also declined in number as more residents moved in
permanently, many drawn to the area by full-time employment by the Defense
Industries Ltd. in Ajax.
Over the years, as leisure time increased, ""pleasure"" marinas sprang up and a
nuclear plant was built in the Bay's back yard, but that kind of growth has never
bothered O'Brien.
I don't think what's happened here is any different than any place else.
The world doesn't change,"" he said, adding that people still carry on
conversations about crooked politicians and the price of cabbage.
- Frenchman's Bay ""Yesterday"" Looking south off the end of Liverpool Rd."