Beaty Boulevard Parkette

Beaty Boulevard Parkette is a long, finger-like patch of grassy, manicured land situated near the intersection of Queen Street West, King Street West and Roncesvalles Avenue:

There’s plenty to see and do in this historic neighbourhood; if one crosses the Pedestrian Bridge over busy Lakeshore Boulevard West, you will find the Palais Royale, the Boulevard Club, Budapest Park, Marilyn Bell Park and Sunnyside Beach.

A Bit Of History

Beaty Boulevard Parkette is the former location of the Sunnyside Railway Station, located at this King/Queen/Roncesvalles intersection. The Sunnyside Railway Station operated passenger service from 1910 until 1971.

The station was built by the Grand Trunk Railway in 1910 and was well-placed, with access to nearby streetcars and the Sunnyside Amusement Park.

GO Transit began service in May 1967 and took over CN’s Toronto to Hamilton route. While CN’s Hamilton train had stopped at Sunnyside, GO’s Lakeshore West line bypassed the station resulting in a significant drop in its use. CN closed the station in 1971 and its buildings were demolished in 1973.

The Katyń Monument

Beaty Boulevard Parkette is home to the Katyń Monument, which commemorates the 1940 Katyń massacre in Poland:

Made of bronze and erected in 1980, the monument was created by artist Tadeusz Janowski. The monument’s location here is quite appropriate in this, a largely Eastern European, neighbourhood.

But what was the Katyn massacre you may ask? The Katyn Massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD (“People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs”, the Soviet secret police) in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by German Nazi forces (Source: Wikipedia).

The Smolensk Tragedy

Also in Beaty Boulevard Parkette is a secondary monument related to the Katyn Massacre. The inscription on the plaque for this memorial reads:

In memory of the 96 person Polish delegation headed by the President of the Republic of Poland Lech Kaczynski, who all died tragically in a plane crash at Smolensk, on April 10, 2010, en route to the official commemoration ceremony of the 70th anniversary of the Katyn Massacre. Without the Katyn Massacre there would have been no Smolensk tragedy.

Canadian Polish Congress, April 10, 2011

Memorial For Perished Polish Soldiers & Civilians

A few feet away from the last two monuments there is a third: this is the Memorial For Perished Polish Soldiers & Civilians:

The plaque on the memorial reads:

1940-2000

In Memoriam… Lest We Forget

May the tragic death of tens of thousands of Polish citizens in Soviet forced labour camps, political prisons and execution sites, always remind the world that freedom is bought with great sacrifice.

Dedicated to the memory of over one million seven hundred thousand Polish soldiers and civilians arrested in eastern Poland by the Soviet Secret Police (NKVD) in 1940-1941, for the only reason that they were Polish citizens and were departed to the far reaches of the Soviet Union (Siberia), where many were executed or died of hunger, cold, disease and exhaustion during World War II.

Alliance of the Polish eastern provinces in Toronto, February 10, 2000

Stay tuned for the second part of this post – a look at Budapest Park, which is on the other side of Lakeshore Boulevard West beside Lake Ontario.