Green Room move is end of a Bloor-strip landmark for students, slackers
Call it grody, call it grungy, but it was paradise, as comfortable as a friend’s basement rec room
For well over 20 years, university students encountering The Green Room café for the first time have felt like they have stumbled upon a secret clubhouse.
You’d turn off Brunswick Ave. into a graffiti-covered laneway, and then turn again into a narrow lane where you’d find the door. Inside was a shabby warehouse space lit by candles nestled in booze bottles, where you could sit on old couches drinking coffee for hours, or drink sangria by the (exceedingly cheap) pitcher, or feast on Thai noodles that cost less than a fast-food burger.
It was grunge paradise born in the Reality Bites era, as comfortable as a friend’s basement rec room, preserved more or less the same (with its mismatched furniture, brightly coloured ceilings, broad- strokes original artwork and extremely relaxed service) from at least the mid-1990s until this weekend, when the business is scheduled to move to a new home at 414 College St. Whatever the atmosphere at the new place, however successful or otherwise it may go on to be, its move out of the alley marks the end of a Bloor strip student landmark — every- one’s early-adulthood, best-known-secret, hideaway spot.
In the 1990s, I lived in an apartment across the interior-block courtyard from the Green Room — my kitchen and bedroom windows looked out onto its patio. At the time, I was equally likely to be irritated by the late-night noise emanating from the place or to be inside making some of that noise, depending on how early in the morning I needed to get up.
It was a hangout more than a destination, the kind of place where people would sit reading or doing homework through the afternoon, and then maybe have a few drinks before heading to see a band at Lee’s Palace, or a movie at the Bloor Cinema.
One drink might turn into another — someone would come by your table offering Tarot card readings or selling used books out of a suitcase or peddling smuggled cigarettes from a backpack. These people might join you for a drink and friends might come and go as you watched afternoon become night become morning before anyone ever invited you to leave.
Its shabby-chic — or maybe just plain shabby — dive atmosphere has been as famous and remarked-upon as its laneway location. In 2004, the Star’s Raju Mudhar wrote it could be “favourably described as ramshackle.” A 2007 Star article by Linda Barnard said its “well-worn embrace” was “hot, grungy and like something out of a New Orleans back street.” This week, Now magazine noted its impending move by calling it “loveably grody.”
This element of its identity has not always been charming. It closed at least once before, in 2010, after being cited multiple times by the city’s health department for violations, as was documented at the time in Watergate-scandal-level detail by the Torontoist.
Its re-opening in 2011 under new management who insisted they wanted to keep it pretty much the same was equally well documented by blogs such as BlogTO and the student press, even if the archives show its comings and goings have been deemed less newsworthy by dailies and mainstream press.
Indeed, I admit I hadn’t been there in years — though I had overseen periodic coverage of it as an editor at an alternative weekly in the ’00s — when I learned from BlogTO of its planned relocation. Reportedly, the building it is housed in has been sold, necessitating the move.
I went back to check in on it, curious and a bit nostalgic. The neighbourhood there, where I spent so much time in my youth, as generations of university students have, is changing, the old landmarks being replaced slowly, sometimes to great fanfare, sometimes less so. The Tap, a favourite beer and bubble-hockey joint once upon a time, gone. Book City, a favourite place for buying literature and often meeting the local authors who both wrote them and staffed the cash register, gone. Honest Ed’s, gone. The Brunswick House, gone. Dooney’s, a favourite of an earlier generation of newspaper and literary types, long gone but revived over near Christie Pits. The Victory Pub, gone for now, but returning in a new home on the strip. It’s fine, really. Places change. Although, for a long time, The Green Room didn’t change a whole lot. I went back this week and found it much the same as before: the walls still burgundy under lime-green and indigo ceilings, the paintings and upholstery and strings of Christmas lights still there. The prices were a throwback, too — a pint of beer for less than $5, a sandwich and fries for less than $6. The sound system blasted Wu Tang Clan and the Beatles back-to-back in the middle of the afternoon. Obviously, elements of it had been updated, the floors replaced, the washrooms renovated. But boy, it felt the same. Paradise for someone with time to kill and not too much money available to do it with. The definition of laid back.
The city needs places like that. Where every generation of student and slacker and aimless wanderer can duck in for a few hours and relax and hang out and feel at home. Secluded enough to feel like insider knowledge, but cheap and casual enough that anyone can feel immediately comfortable. “Grody,” or “grungy,” it may have been, but The Green Room has been a ramshackle back-alley oasis.