The Horseshoe Tavern: the bar that refused to die

Every city has a room that outlived every trend that was supposed to kill it. Toronto's is the Horseshoe Tavern, open on Queen Street West since 1947, and the story of how a rough neighbourhood bar became the most important small stage in Canada is really the story of the city learning to make its own noise.

A bar with no stage

When Jack Starr opened the Horseshoe in 1947, it was a neighbourhood bar and restaurant with a rough reputation — a hangout for local bike gangs, not a music venue. The music came from the customers. Queen West filled up with recently arrived Maritimers and Newfoundlanders, homesick and used to kitchen parties, and they pestered Starr to build a stage and let the regulars play. Those spontaneous tavern kitchen parties were the genesis of everything that followed: the Horseshoe became a country music room so central it earned the nickname Nashville North.

1978: the year of the riot

By the late seventies, promoters Gary Topp and Gary Cormier — the Garys — had turned the Shoe toward punk and new wave. In November 1978, The Police played their first Canadian gig on that stage to a room of about thirty people; thousands have since claimed they were there. A few weeks later, on December 1, 1978, the Garys threw The Last Pogo, a farewell blowout for the punk era that got shut down by police mid-show and ended with a riot spilling onto Queen West that nearly wrecked the building. It got a documentary. It got a legend. The bar, as always, survived.

1997: the biggest band on earth, in a bar

The Horseshoe's most retold night came in 1997, when the Rolling Stones played a surprise club show in a room a fraction of the size of the stadiums they were touring. The detail everyone remembers — the one that made it myth — is that Dan Aykroyd and John Goodman were working the door and the bar that night. You probably were not inside. Nobody was, statistically. That is the point of the story.

The room today

The Horseshoe is now booked by Collective Concerts, the city's biggest independent promoter, which keeps the stage where Toronto's next bands earn their stripes and touring acts squeeze in on the way up — or come back down for the love of it. Seventy-nine years in, it is still a bar first: low ceiling, sticky floor, the stage at the back. Rooms like this do not survive by accident; they survive because three generations kept deciding, on ordinary weeknights, that this was the place. Walk in on a Tuesday and make it four. no te limites.