One constant is that we can’t buck change
Once upon a time, the Queen West summer patio season was signalled by the sound of the pipes.
Loud, roaring, rattling pipes. The ones on the backs of motorcycles with modified exhaust systems, so that they could be heard and felt for blocks around. The weather would warm up and then all up and down the strip you could hear those pipes, and feel them, rattling restaurant windows and shaking the ground and setting off a trail of car alarms in their wake.
The pipes were calling people to the Black Bull Tavern at the corner of Queen and Soho, where you’d see the Harleys parked in rows alongside the most epic patio on the strip.
Not that it was a biker bar. Or not only. It was the kind of place where bikers and bankers and punks and artists would rub shoulders and raise a glass beside each other. Where the beer was affordable and the energy was as big and loud as the patio.
It’s almost patio season in Toronto now, but those pipes have played their last. Last call has come and gone. Earlier this week, the Black Bull closed for good.
“Queen West is changing and sadly, what was once one of the biggest, sunniest patios in Toronto is cast in the shadows of highrise buildings. After the owner Bobby Taylor passed, it was time for our family to say goodbye to the corner of Queen and Soho,” Taylor’s granddaughter, Janine Bartels, wrote in a Facebook post announcing the end. “The Black Bull’s closure marks the end of an era.”
The end of a whole string of eras. The place has been there since 1833. Since before there was a Queen West. Since before there was a city of Toronto.
The Queen West strip (between University and just west of Bathurst), which for a time defined most of what was cool and interesting in the city, is indeed changing — there’s no Beverly Tavern and no Speaker’s Corner but there is a Chick-fil-A and a Shoppers Drug Mart. Surrounding blocks that used to be abandoned warehouses or clubland or dilapidated student housing are more and more filled with highrise glass condos.
But it’s always been changing. When I worked and hung out on that strip in the 1990s, artsy types were already telling me the place had lost the punk soul that had defined it through the 1980s, and still older relatives were telling me they still thought of it as the skid row it had appeared to them in the 1970s.
There had been, of course, a heck of a lot more change in the century and a half before that — the introduction of electric lighting and indoor plumbing and cars, for a start. The emergence of a city out of the mud. The Black Bull had seen it all. In its earliest days, Toronto historical journalist Jamie Blackburn wrote, it was a stopping place for farmers who watered their animals at a wooden trough out front. Through the years, it was a rough kind of place, subject to attention for the fights that drew police. Then in the late 1970s, the “toughest athlete in Canada” bought it: Bobby Taylor, the former professional football and hockey player famous for once punching out his own quarterback on the gridiron and for giving future Leafs coach John Brophy 30 stitches on the ice.
As a bar owner, he was a largerthan-life personality, famous for his foul mouth and generous heart. Bartender Sheldon Chow worked at the Bull for more than 40 years and, in a memoir he wrote last year for Toronto Life, noted that Taylor took in people like he was protecting strays: renting rooms above the bar to people who were down on their luck for $50 a month, and giving jobs to those, like Chow, who needed them.
Under Taylor, it became a street-defining destination. The patio that first opened in the early 1980s became the centre of the Queen West summer nightlife. The bar became a hangout for people from all walks of life, a place to watch CFL games or watch the scene on the sidewalk, whether you were wearing a football jersey or a three-piece suit or ripped jeans. “It was the perfect place to go and hide out for a while,” Chow wrote.
Taylor died last year. His family announced last week the bar would close, with Wednesday set to be its last day.
I had a plan, dear reader, to go witness the last last call. But they ran out of booze to serve on Monday night and locked the doors early. Ah, well. It was cool and rainy on Wednesday night. The patio would have been miserable. Better that it went out in a blaze of beer sales with a full patio over the weekend, I think.
Maybe it’s a sign of the times. Even when you know this city is changing, it all happens quicker than you think. So quick you don’t get the chance to take one last look. To say goodbye.
The Queen West strip is indeed changing — there’s no Beverly Tavern and no Speaker’s Corner but there is a Chick-fil-A and a Shoppers Drug Mart