An amusement park complete with merry-go-round and coaster. Large, elegant homes with welcoming wraparound porches and quaint gingerbread trim. A school, drug stores and church.
And people. Lots of people.
They're not images one thinks of in connection with the Beach Strip. Yet in its heyday some 3,000 people called the Beach Strip their home and thousands visited on weekends for its array of hotels and, of course, the beach.
"It was a completely self sustaining community," says Gary Evans, who chronicled the Beach Strip's history in a new book, Memories of the Beach Strip, being released this weekend.
Lakefront cottages were summer resorts for the wealthy looking for an escape from the city heat, many of them families from Hamilton and Burlington. And hotels, built as early as 1792, played a major role in the War of 1812.
The stories are among the many historical highlights in the book, which was written by local authors and published by North Shore Publishing.
How the strip looked in past years and what were its defining moments are the subject of those stories, more than half of which were written by Evans.
"It was really a fascinating place," says Evans, who founded North Shore. "I knew there was a story to be told but sometimes I had to talk to 12 people just to get one piece of information."
Train crashes, boats colliding with bridges and major floods are part of the strip's history and also chipped away at the thriving community, says Evans, who has written 18 books on local history but says this is one of his favourites.
He describes the Beach Strip as "one of the most unique pieces of land anywhere." By its geography, it's simply a narrow sandbar that separates Lake Ontario from Burlington Bay.
In its earliest days, the seven-kilometre strip of land was used as an Indian trail before it became a summer resort, then a year-round community.
"Thousands of people would visit on the weekends," says Evans, whose interest in the area was piqued while writing another book. That led to months of research, which included chatting with current and former homeowners along the beach.
Stories in the book highlight such historical gems as the Dynes Hotel, Royal Hamilton Yacht Club and Brant Inn, which, in its glory days, attracted musicians like Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and Liberace.
A fire destroyed the Brant Inn in 1925 but it was rebuilt two years later and enjoyed many years of fame until 1964 when it was sold by owner John Murray Anderson.
Stewart Brown, who wrote the book Brant Inn Memories (also published by North Shore Publishing) for the Burlington Historical Society in 2008, also wrote a chapter on the Inn.
The transformation of the Beach Strip began in 1952 when the bascule bridge, built in 1922 and the only bridge that provided access across the Beach Strip, was rammed by a large sandboat named the W.E. Fitzgerald.
The Hamilton Spectator wrote that, "a tenuous though vital link in the province's highway network was severed."
With no bridge, all traffic stopped and so did business. A temporary span was built and there were discussions about building a tunnel. However escalating costs for a tunnel pushed it aside.
Margaret Houghton, local history and archivist at the Hamilton Public Library, writes in the book that the need for a new bridge was increasingly obvious as some 2,000 cars per hour drove through the Beach Strip during summer months.
So plans began for the building of the Burlington Bay Skyway Bridge, which would open in 1958.
Brian Henley, Peggy Armstrong, Mark Wilson and Jim Petrie, who grew up near the Burlington Canal, are among the 14 historians who contributed to the book.
One of the most interesting stories is about the so-called buggy brigade, named after the group of women who, in 1964, pushed strollers onto the middle of the road and stopped traffic.
They were determined to bring attention to the high number of trucks lumbering down Beach Boulevard, a concern that was well placed as two toddlers had been struck and killed by trucks within one month.
It was 1958 when the city moved forward to expropriate 86 acres of land along Lake Ontario, all part of a plan lead by a young alderman named John Munro, whose dream was to build a summer playground that would become Confederation Park.
What was then known as Burlington Beach was amalgamated into Hamilton as part of the city's plan to take control of the waterfront.
The book launch for Memories of the Beach Strip will be held in the Hamilton Room at the Central Library on Sunday, October 23 from 2 p.m. till 3.30 p.m. Books will be available for purchase and some of the authors will be on hand for signings.
