Shine on, you tacky spinning record sign
Wednesday night, the famous neon spinning discs Sam the Record Man sign was officially re-lit at its home overlooking Yonge-Dundas Square. It’s about time. The lights have actually been on for more than a month, but this week the mayor and some dignitaries and members of late record mogul Sam Sniderman’s family were there for a ceremony to mark its permanent new home.
To get it out of the way: It looks a little odd there, way up atop a building at the corner of Dundas and Victoria Sts., when it should be nearer the ground at the corner of Yonge and Gould Sts., where it became famous and where Ryerson initially promised to re-install it back when the school tore down the building the sign hung on. And in the daytime, with the sun shining through it, its former glory is hard to detect.
But with the black of night behind it, it looks great up there, in blinking white and red. A memento of local music and retail history, at home amid the blinking screens and blinding lights of Toronto’s main drag.
Once upon a time, those spinning discs helped define the Yonge St. strip. The Sam the Record Man store itself was a musical landmark for some generations of Torontonians, the biggest, coolest and easiest source of both hot imports and local independent music in the province. It was in the heart of the country’s live music hotbed — the clubs along Yonge St. the local home to jazz greats, rock legends and every other style of music you could want along the way.
In a town famous for buttoned-up moral restraint, it was a loose, lively, somewhat seedy party zone, painted in flashing neon. And the Sam’s sign was among the most noteworthy brushstrokes. I remember as a school kid, getting out of a movie with my friends after dark and walking up Yonge from Dundas to College or Bloor before catching a streetcar: The head shops and arcades and T-shirt factories and bookstores called out to us for exploration. The glittering lights all around seemed to spell freedom and big-city sophistication. There was a Pizza Pizza with a sign made up of mirrored discs, a jean store that hung merchandise two stories high on the outside of the shop, the World’s Biggest Bookstore, the giant orange A&A Records logo, the mysterious (to us) strip clubs. And there were Sam’s neon spinning records.
I know there are people who say that old sign for a closed-up shop is tacky and worthless and should have gone to landfill. I’ve heard jokes about how the aging hippies for whom it is meaningful are stuck in some hazy past. It is kind of tacky, I’ll give them that, but gloriously so. And it’s because it is a relic of the past that I think it is worth keeping around.
I have this idea that I’ve written about before — it was the introduction to my first book — that in a way cities are collections of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. That our idea of what Toronto means to us, and to the world, is made up of our memories of what has taken place here. That our memory and idea of what that past means shapes somewhat the things we think about our identity right now, and the things we do because of what we think that identity is.
Too much of Toronto’s history involves forgetting — bulldozing the past without leaving so much as a marker to remind us. For our original Upper Canada Parliament build- ings (for generations an unmarked parking lot), to whole neighbourhoods such as the Ward (commemorated recently, including with an archeological exhibit at City Hall now), we have been in the habit of throwing our history into the dustbin.
Until recently. Like elsewhere in the city, you can walk down Yonge St. now to see some welcome nods here and there to what came before.
Some are full-fledged heritage preservation glories: The LCBO location at Summerhill is in a beautifully restored and refitted railway station, for instance.
Some are more subtle: The red dot on the floor of the Loblaws at Carlton St. shows where centre ice used to be in the old Maple Leaf Gardens. You can stand there and get a quick reminder that Wayne Gretzky and Gordie Howe and Dave Keon all lined up for faceoffs on that spot.
Many of the gestures to history are not as obvious as an entire building and not as subtle as a red dot on the floor.
Sometimes it’s as sophisticated as the historic Bank of Montreal building at Yonge and Front that is incorporated wholesale into the Hockey Hall of Fame and Brookfield Place around it. Sometimes it’s as obvious as the mural near Granby St. depicting moments in local music history. And sometimes it’s just a plaque with text explaining the past.
And increasingly often, it might be an old retail sign, preserved and mounted and lit. Like the Sam’s sign.
Yes, these things do serve the nostalgia of those of us old enough to recall what they stood for firsthand — like snapshots in a family photo album, they offer a flood of memories and emotions at a glance.
But they also serve as markers on the trail for those of us who didn’t travel its previous routes. They are subtle invitations to ask, “What’s that thing? Why is it there? What does it mean?” And then to hear, or read, about how the city we live in came to be. Who was here, once upon a time. What they did. How the city felt to them. And how we got here. They are simple references back to earlier chapters in the story of the city that we continue to help write.
The Sam’s sign is back, higher and brighter than ever. In its new location, it fits right in. Long may it spin.