LION PURRS TONIGHT
Rob Salem laments on the closing of the Masonic Temple,
I wrestled a lion in the basement of the Masonic Temple. But we’ll get to that. First the matter at hand: MTV is leaving the building.
In just a few weeks, MTV Canada will vacate the Temple, its studio home since 2006, to move in with its former archrivals, the MuchMusic channels, at 299 Queen St. W. (The house that Moses Znaimer built, the former CHUM City Building, is also home to CP24, BNN, Space, and the marquee CTV shows eTalk and Marilyn Denis.)
It is the end of an era. Several eras.
In its long incarnation as a concert venue, the Temple has hosted everyone from Frank Sinatra to Iggy Pop. Led Zeppelin stopped there in 1969, on their first North American concert tour, when it was briefly known as The Rockpile.
It was later redubbed the Concert Hall, where I once saw Cyndi Lauper and Weird Al Yankovic on the same bill, perhaps the quintessential ’80s pop concert experience. I’m pretty sure I wore parachute pants. The Rolling Stones used the venue as a rehearsal space in 1997. CTV bought the building a year later, for $2.4 million.
I actually used to work there. Under the CTV banner, one of the upper floors of the Temple was occupied by the short-lived specialty channel Talk TV, on which I did some live chat with a couple of young first-timers, Ben Mulroney and Seamus O’Regan. I always wondered what happened to them.
Canadian Idol would later tape there, as did the Elvis Costello talk show Spectacle, including a memorable appearance by U2.
Mostly, though, CTV had purchased the place as a studio for the late-night talk show Open Mike with Mike Bullard.
And if you still weren’t sure whose show it was, there was the enormous illuminated image of Bullard’s giant head, grinning down at you from the streetside corner of the building. It was quickly decapitated the moment Bullard announced he was leaving CTV for Global.
It was, however, during the Bullard era that I had the opportunity of a lifetime: late one night, in the building’s basement, I got to wrestle a lion.
I have the pictures to prove it. OK, so it wasn’t exactly wrestling, per se. It was more like a giant furry hug. But the lion hugged back and knocked me flat on my ass.
This was the late and lamented Bongo, one-time resident of the Bowmanville Zoo and one of the world’s leading animal actors. It was November of 2001and Bongo was on a (human-chaperoned) publicity tour for the Discovery Channel series Working Animals.
They had brought him to visit the Star newsroom earlier that day, but he was stopped at the lobby. I don’t imagine there’s anything in the security handbook about the admittance of large predators without a valid building pass, but better safe than sorry.
We finally met him in person that night. Everyone in the Bullard green room gave him plenty of space, most backed up against the furthest wall. But we’re cat people. Throwing caution and common sense to the wind, we descended upon and embraced the shaggy superstar with cries of “Oooh, big kitty!” Fortunately for us, he was.
You haven’t lived until you’ve heard a lion purr.
The iconic Masonic will sit idle with MTV gone, though surely not for long. Its Yorkville-adjacent location is just too tempting.
Like everything else in this city, it will likely eventually be converted into condos, though thanks to the Ontario Heritage Act it will be “preserved,” which is to say it will mostly look the same, at least on the outside. The original Mason meeting rooms — essentially untouched since the early 1900s — are also protected. Sharing a floor with eTalk and Space, MTV will finally have the high-definition production capabilities for which it is long overdue. Refitting the Masonic was not financially viable. Unfortunately, some staff have been rendered redundant. Eleven full-time employees and 16 contract workers have been let go; 60 will make the move southwest. Email: rsalem@thestar.ca; Twitter: @robsalem