Closing time
The death of Toronto’s big-box nightclubs
A decade ago, the lines would snake for hours. Girls with platinum hair and push-up bras. Guys in white loafers and muscle shirts. You could hear the bass thumping, even from outside. It was Saturday night on Richmond St. and the clubs were bumping.
But yesterday’s club district has today fallen into eerie late-night calm, with huge rowdy clubs replaced by condos, clothing stores and, at best, smaller supper clubs.
“What is different now is that there are less venues and there are definitely less large venues,” says Denise Benson, author of Then & Now: Toronto Nightlife History. The mega-club used to be a staple of Toronto’s nightlife scene: sprawling venues, often with capacities of well over 1,000, each more or less indistinguishable from the next and all blaring Top 40 tunes into the early hours. They were mostly in the Entertainment District, along Richmond and Adelaide Sts. east and west of Spadina Ave.
“The closing of a number of venues in the early to mid-2000s, to me, signals a serious change that we haven’t entirely recovered from,” Benson, a DJ and music journalist, says. The death of these venues — epitomized by spaces like Turbo, System Soundbar and the outlying Guvernment — was multi-faceted.
Clubs had initially moved into the once-desolate area in the early 1990s because of its large vacant warehouses, cheap rents, and proximity to hotels, the subway and Queen St. The heyday lasted until the early 2000s, with dozens of clubs operating in the area. By 2005 or so, things began to turn around. Stricter zoning laws made it more difficult for the clubs to operate. Rents skyrocketed. Lucrative condo projects began to move in. When Circa — the city’s last true mega-club — opened in 2007, the peak had long passed.
“For Lease” signs and condo billboards already hovered over former hot spots, like System Soundbar and Turbo. Circa was shuttered in 2010.
Today, the one-size-fits-all Top 40 mega-club is more or less dead in Toronto. To experience that kind of relic , you have to travel to new venues in Vaughan, like Avenue Nightclub and Ivy Social Club. Or visit the massive yet troubled Muzik Nightclub on the Exhibition grounds.
“There’s a constant flux in terms of nightlife, in terms of where venues are, in terms of what sizes they are and so on,” Benson says. A driving force behind that flux is gentrification. “Artists move in, venues move in, music moves in, restaurants move in, people flock to the areas for social experiences, then they want to live there and then they don’t want it to be as loud.” As millennials grew into the clubbing scene, popular tastes and interests also began to change. Today’s clubgoers, Benson says, are craving more exclusive, tailored and intimate experiences. Things like Tinder also made the nightclub pickup a relic of the past: instead of spending the night prowling around a massive dance floor, you can have a date lined up before leaving home. An intimate space thus becomes paramount. With apps like Spotify, you also don’t need to head out to groove to the latest dance tunes. But for those with Top 40 tastes and itchy feet, there are still downtown venues offering the club experience.
With the old club district mostly dismantled, the downtown scene has migrated slightly southwest, in and around King and Spadina. Smaller supper clubs and pubs with dance floors dominate, as do more scenespecific venues with distinct flavours and themes. That’s partially due to tastes, but also due to zoning bylaws and the unavailability of large spaces to rent.
“It’s an area that’s happening,” Benson says. “And it’s an area that’s packed with people with a lot of spare cash.”