Historic Venue Spotlight: The Silver Dollar Room

Update:
As of Tuesday, January 13 Toronto City Council deemed the Silver Dollar Room “of cultural heritage value or interest,” which means that it's going to continue to be a staple of Toronto's live music scene for the foreseeable future!

“Try to come along Spadina Avenue, see that goddam Silver Dollar sign, hundreds of light bulbs in your face, and not be drawn in there.” With the wattage of that enduringly iconic Toronto emblem, American author Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty, 3:10 to Yuma) charged the opening of his 1989 novel Killshot full of electricity and dared an international audience not to get sucked into the orbit of an unabated Canadian cultural magnet’s modern façade. To make good with your surroundings, he continued, you’ll want to “Follow one of those cracks in the ceiling.” The conceit isn’t a complicated one: by the time of Killshot’s 1989 publishing, the Silver Dollar Room had been an established business for over 30 years.

Originally constructed in 1957 as a lounge extension for the turn-of-the-century-established Waverley Hotel—the business with which the Silver Dollar continues to share its Harbord Village property—the Silver Dollar quickly became a beacon for live blues music in Toronto, and today it is both a staple that helps hold together a much thicker, more varied Toronto music community and a thoroughfare for touring musicians.

It’s allowed more than half a century of culture to seep into its nooks and crannies—Killshot is just one of a teeming supply of tales that can be extracted from places like the cracks in the ceiling that Leonard wrote about: Bob Dylan and Levon Helm both played the small bar; Texas jazz saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman and Toronto R&B pianist Curley Bridges both recorded live albums there; and there were those film cameos the bar made in ’80s flicks like Adventures in Babysitting and Police Academy (as a sit-down Chicago blues joint and a gay leather bar called “The Blue Oyster,” respectively).

As with any good watering hole, a few good bullshit stories have slipped through those ceiling cracks, too. A popular yarn has it that convicted Martin Luther King assassin James Earl Ray visited The Silver Dollar while holed up on the lam at the Waverley in 1968. But the Toronto Star debunked that myth in 2008 when Queen’s Park Bureau Chief Robert Benzie dug up an old interview he had conducted with Ray for the Ottawa Sun some 15 years prior in order to write a feature on the 40th anniversary of King’s murder (there’s no firm evidence, but it’s more likely Ray visited the Drake Hotel than the Silver Dollar).

Still, it’s not as if the Silver Dollar is without its own seedy past. In the 60s the cocktail bar began operating as a strip club, but after years spent establishing itself as a headquarters for jazz and blues, even then it was continuing to function as a community meeting place for the musically inclined.

In his book Jazz in Canada: Fourteen Lives, former Globe and Mail jazz critic (1977-2005) Mark Miller noted that saxophonists like Bobby Brough, Jim Heineman, and Glenn McDonald would perform while “the girls would find themselves working to the stains of ‘A Night in Tunisia’ and other jazz classics.”

According to The Grid, the 70s and 80s saw the Waverley and the Silver Dollar subject to police raids, with a February 1978 crackdown and a 16-person arrest in September 1987 involving sex work. 20 years later, the building was raided again, this time for activity in its basement club space, the Comfort Zone.

Since concert promoter Dan Burke took on talent booking in 1996, the Silver Dollar Room has thrived as an asylum for rock n roll and the disparate independent scenes that surround it, but downstairs, the local EDM community also found a safe haven.

Despite its rocky relationship with City Council, today the Silver Dollar Room is receiving its support in what might be one of the venue’s most dire hours. In January, council rejected a development plan from the Wynn Group proposing demolition of the Silver Dollar and the Waverley Hotel in exchange for a high rise student housing hive, and now city staff are recommending heritage protection. Heritage Preservation Services have determined the Silver Dollar Room should be granted Ontario Heritage Act designation for its cultural heritage value, and in March it submitted a report to the Toronto East York Community Council and the Toronto Preservation Board stating its recommendation, emphasizing that the institution is “historically, physically, functionally and, with its large circular sign, visually related to its surroundings.” It couldn’t do the same for the Waverley, however. And now the Wynns are appealing council’s decision to the Ontario Municipal Board.

Tom Beedham is a writer living in Toronto - @Tom_Beedham