If music venues continue to be displaced, where should the members of a music community within a city like Toronto go if they want to listen to music or dance during the nighttime, evening hours of the day/night continuum? As marginal and unwanted spaces in the city, old industrial land, and underused Employment Industrial Zones are “retaken” by a city’s redevelopment projects and spaces become desirable and commodifiable for commercial redevelopment and to those able to and interested in property ownership and commercial
redevelopment in the area, there are increasingly less places in the city for subcultural music and dance spaces to exist. Decreasing availability and affordability of subcultural music, dance, art, and performance space is exacerbated by an unwelcoming environment within certain
73 Kenyon Wallace, “From Party Central to Good Neighbour,” The Globe and Mail (21 December 2007), online:
<beta.theglobeandmail.com>; Patch, supra note 69; Baute, supra note 72; “Liquor Licence Application Powerhouse Corporation currently operating as Polson Pier - 11 Polson Street - Licence Number 804501 by Councillor Pam McConnell, seconded by Councillor Paula Fletcher”, Member Motion MM7.23 (2015), online:
<www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2015/mm/bgrd/backgroundfile-81252.pdf>.
74 See “Victory Soya Mills Silo Master Plan”, SvN (website), online: <svn-ap.com/projects/victory-soya-mills-silo-
master-plan/>
75 For an excellent account of life in Tent City see Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, Down to This: Squalor and Splendour
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neighbourhoods, exemplified by NIMBY (Not-In-My-Backyard) sentiments, especially when a city’s legal frameworks—liquor licensing, zoning, noise legislation, and so on—do not
effectively balance, let alone encourage, protect, or value, the interests of a city’s music venues and music communities. These types of sentiments tend to eschew the inconvenience of
welcoming or maintaining a local music venue and music and dance subcultural community based on the rationale that they would be better placed elsewhere, within someone else’s neighbourhood or space in the city. A scenario that exemplifies this played out at the February 13, 2017 meeting of the Toronto Music Advisory Council at City Hall.
As discussed previously in Chapter 3, the February 13th meeting was originally intended to focus on the rapid onslaught of music venue closures that took place at the beginning 2017 in order to discuss potential steps towards protecting these music venues and, at least, curb further losses. While many members of Toronto’s music community had been mobilized to attend the meeting and make deputations, a few people also turned out to make deputations against the attempts to reopen one of Toronto’s historic music venues—The Matador, which had been closed for seventeen years. While the meeting attendees—both members of the Toronto Music Advisory Council as well as members of displaced music communities—tried to discuss how to halt the increase in lost music venues, a large portion of the meeting ironically wound up being monopolized by a small galvanized group of individuals from the Dufferin Grove neighbourhood who consecutively spoke at length about how much they did not want this music venue to reopen in their backyard. That is, unless it were operate more akin to a low-capacity event center,
preferably without a liquor license, and with closing hours safely shy of midnight. The owner of the (dormant) Matador music venue was also in attendance to provide a deputation that
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vanishing music venues problem when his efforts to reopen The Matador were consistently met with barriers and conditions via bureaucratic red tape, ongoing licensing and zoning issues, and the vocal protest of those who had moved into the area surrounding the Matador.
The Toronto Music Advisory Council had absolutely no role or power in the decision as to whether The Matador would ultimately open, so the vocal attendance of those opposing The Matador’s reopening remained entirely counterproductive, and some Council members became noticeably frustrated with the ongoing deputations against The Matador, as they provided no contribution to the principle agenda item on the table regarding how to better protect existing music venues. At one point, well into the meeting when another public attendee from the
neighbourhood surrounding The Matador again began to speak out against the venue, one of the Council members pointedly asked the speaker where nighttime music venues and their attendees should go. To this, the speaker responded that a good place for these people and spaces to go would be “down by the docks” or “over by the railroad on Dupont”—which caused a noticeable murmur of protest from music community members in attendance.
Beyond the prejudice underlying these kinds of comments, as we can see, “the docks” no longer accommodate the existence of venues like the Guvernment, or where venues like
(formerly) The Docks (currently Rebel), which are located “down by the docks” have been shut down in the past due to noisy disruptive effects on communities that are no longer so distant. As for the “railroad” the speaker referred to, it is located in the Geary Avenue area, which had in fact been the site for a growing number of DIY (Do-It-Yourself) music venues and transgressive DIY music culture and community.76 But the area continues to be zoned as an E2 Employment Industrial Zone (Zoning By-law 569-2013), and specifically, is zoned for “Performing Arts
76 See e.g. Stuart Berman, “Geary Ave: The Secret Life of an Ugly Street”, thestar.com (4 February 2015), online:
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Studios” for dance, theater, and show rehearsals—a zoning category that does not currently include music and music performance space and use.77 Furthermore, this area “over by the railroad on Dupont” has also already felt the effects of encroaching residential developments via noise complaints.
These noise complaints in relation to a couple of Geary Avenue venues eventually led Municipal Licensing and Standards Officers to visit the area on March 17, 2015 and issue by-law infraction notices due to the particular zoning of the area noted above, which does not allow for “nightclubs” or “entertainment facilities”, which is what music output during evening hours with accompanying audience attendance (often supplemented with dancing) would appear to fall under.78 This by-law effectively outlaws live music on the street “over by the railroad on
Dupont”, has already led to the temporary or permanent closure of a number of the music venues located there, and has begun the dismantling of the nascent music community that had begun to grow there.79 But no member of the Council was able was able to cite these situations in reply. While a few members of the Council commented in vague protest of this speaker’s comments, the comment were largely left hanging in the air as Council members tried to move on with the meeting and avoided commenting specifically on the remark—thus perpetuating the acceptance of marginalizing treatment of music and nighttime culture in Toronto even though the comments were made in the presence of the precise arm of Toronto’s Music City framework designed to champion the cause of music in Toronto and advocate for music community members.
77 City of Toronto, By-law No 569-2013, Zoning By-law (19 August 2014); Interview of Tammy Robbinson (City of
Toronto) in Aubrey Jax, “Geary Avenue Music Scene Under Threat Due to Red Tape” (17 April 2015), blogto (blog), online: <www.blog.to>.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid. Toronto Radio Project, “Music City Town Hall Meeting Streamed Live on TRP” (25 April 2015) TRP
Archives, online: Mixcloud <www.mixcloud.com/trparchives/music-city-town-hall-meeting-streamed-live-on-trp>; Benjamin Boles, “Music City Town Hall Highlights Tension between Council and the Music Community: Could This be the Beginning of a Positive Dialogue”, NOWToronto (27 April 2015) online: <nowtoronto.com>.
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D) Desiring the Undesirable: The Post-Industrial Shift, Creative Placemaking, and