Guest: Brighton Beach, Windsor, Ontario

Brighton Beach in Windsor, Ontario, occupies a solitary strip along the Detroit River, metres from the US/Canada border. It lies within a neighbourhood that has become almost entirely an industrial landscape. The physical beach was never a grand resort but a working-class destination, with a scrubby, sandy waterfront bordered by scattered cottages, unpaved lanes, and the smokestacks of industry visible upriver and down. For decades, the water’s edge was a place for fishing, mooring small boats, and impromptu summer picnics - the sand blending into patches of grass and, in later years, the untidy sprawl left behind as homes disappeared.

Windsor’s Brighton Beach has kept a wild, transitional character. Waves lapped the narrow strand, overlooked by remnants of wooden docks and, eventually, the steel infrastructure of major industrial plants. The physical shoreline shifted over the years due to both natural river currents and city-led expropriation and demolition. By the 2000s, the beach was bordered more by silence and wildflowers than by families, except for the occasional urban explorer, local birdwatcher, or fisherman. Yet the riverfront view - freighters sliding past beneath blue or stormy skies - has remained an enduring, haunting place.

Historic and contemporary photographs give a stark sense of this shifting landscape. The most comprehensive series is in ‘Brighton Beach Through The Years’ on International Metropolis, which features aerial images from 1949 through 2006, charting the steady disappearance of homes and roads as the area reverted to prairie and open shore. There are also evocative ground-level photos and travelogues from blog photographers - such as JB’s Warehouse & Curio Emporium - who captured the crumbling streets and river’s edge as late as the 2010s. The adjacent photo, for example, carries the caption: ‘Brighton Beach continues to offer up the finest in abandoned couches. Treasure hunters or connoisseurs of neglected boat hulls, car seats and furniture would have smiles on their faces after a quick scouting trip of the neighbourhood.’