The end of Toronto's Imperial Pub is another loss to a city that's had enough loss

One of the very last no-nonsense, non-hipster Toronto watering holes, a two-storey fixture for 81 years in the proper thick of downtown, is shutting down on Nov. 15. It’s reasonable to be impressed that it lasted so long — longer than almost any comparable institution in the city. But the Imperial Pub and Tavern, owned for its entire history by the Newman family, has somehow never seemed more essential. First the Jays lose, now this?

The Yonge and Dundas area the Imperial inhabits has transformed many times over the Imperial’s run. Even in my lifetime, it has been several different kinds of seedy — peep shows and porn shops; video arcades with too many strange men in them — and now it’s every kind of grim. Toronto’s grasping, tragically misbegotten attempt to replicate Times Square was a success: What we’re now supposed to call “Sankofa Square” is a soulless concrete-grey hellscape of gigantic LED screens and chain restaurants, and it’s also one of the best places to see the city’s homelessness and opioid-addiction crises in full bloom . Area hotel rooms start at roughly $350 per night in the summer. Cheap!

But then there’s the Imperial. Jazz on the jukebox, at the right volume to allow conversation. Comfy old couches and barstools to sink into. A bowl of chili, perhaps, or a no-nonsense sandwich, or some chicken fingers. Nothing even approaching attitude, ever, from the staff, even if the clientele can occasionally be, shall we say, challenging. It looks the same as every other time you’ve seen it.

“It’s like a neighbourhood pub in a neighbourhood where nobody thinks there’s a neighbourhood anymore,” says Sam Newman, part of the third generation to own and run the pub.

Toronto is a much more difficult, tiring place to live than when I was a kid: mad housing costs, soul-hammering traffic gridlock, public transit gone to seed , and a politics totally ill-equipped to manage it. The Imperial was an affordable respite from urban stresses for untold numbers of Torontonians, from all walks of life: businesspeople, students from the adjacent Toronto Metropolitan (originally Ryerson) University (TMU) , jazz and big-band aficionados, and those seriously down on their luck.

Probably my most indelible memory: A middle-aged fellow, clearly suffering through a very bad patch, drowning his sorrows with a pitcher of beer to himself at a table in the downstairs bar while sitting in a wheelchair from the Hospital for Sick Children. A guy like that isn’t going to be rolling into Jack Astor’s or Boston Pizza or anywhere else likely to set up shop in the vicinity anytime soon. And he wouldn’t want to. At the Imperial, you met neighbours (literally or figuratively) who you didn’t know you had. Some you didn’t want to know. A lot you were glad to.

Anecdotally speaking, in recent years as the opioid-overdose epidemic reached horrifying new levels, there were certainly more “problem clients” coming through the door. There was often a security guard on site. That’s a a role that Fred Newman, Sam’s ebullient father (think Larry David — but friendly) said he was used to be “super-proud” to be able to fulfil himself. He recalls nipping one pool table-based argument in the bud when one of the combatants, “about eight-foot-one,” announced he didn’t “hit old men with glasses.” Sam says the security was more as an emergency contingency than in response to any specific incidents.

The state of the neighbourhood is not why the Imperial is closing down. Quite the opposite, perhaps. Details of what comes next are vague; the property recently changed hands. Toronto-area developer Bazis has been planning luxury condos on the site for years . Fred says he has heard plans might include a residence for university students. And that would make sense, given the pub’s essentially on-campus location.

But it would also be an ironic outcome, generations of Ryerson/TMU students — especially those on the artsier side, including aspiring journalists — being among the Imperial’s greatest fans. “They’ve been terrific,” Fred says, wistfully.

Students drained plenty of pitchers and made plenty of lowbrow merriment here over the years, but the Library room in particular, upstairs, has been what Fred calls a “refuge” for students. Picture a giant university-residence common room circa 1975, with ratty furnishings and bookshelves, a pool table and a bar.

Fred says students have been telling him in recent weeks how much they appreciated just being allowed “to come and read a book, or come and do my homework. And if I wanted to have a soda water, that was fine. Nobody said, ‘you have to drink the beer’.”

No doubt in part because so many working journalists went to Ryerson (I did not, but those who did introduced me to it) the Imperial’s demise has gotten a lot of local news coverage. “People don’t believe me when I tell them how surprised we are by people’s reaction to our closing,” says Ricky Newman, Sam’s brother, and another partner in the business. “It’s gratifying for sure. It’s like Sally Field at the Oscars : ‘You like us, you really like us!’”

Yonge Street’s best-known lost taverns are mostly renowned for their musical histories: The Hawks, who would become The Band, came together under Ronnie Hawkins’ stewardship at the Coq d’Or . Bob Dylan was bamboozled by the the Hawks at Friar’s Tavern, where Oscar Peterson and Dizzy Gillespie performed as well. Both were steps from the Imperial, which outlasted them all and many more besides.

But the Imperial was never a music venue, except on a much smaller scale. It began as a “beverage room” in what was originally a hotel, and that’s what it more or less remained. But it physically embodies Toronto’s much-ignored history in more ways than you would ever think just by looking at it. The Library bar, upstairs, was originally the hotel rooms — because when the Imperial opened, hotels is where “beverage rooms” were.

Downstairs, a huge aquarium acts as a bizarre but unforgettable centrepiece to the circular bar. Under Ontario’s post-prohibition liquor rules, until 1970, beverage rooms had to be separated by sex. When Fred’s father Jack first installed an aquarium, in the 1950s, it sat between the men’s and ladies’ sides of the establishment, offering each a cheeky glance at the other.

Fred offered another wonderful recollection of Ontario’s famously baffling booze laws: For years the Imperial’s liquor license required it to close from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. every day, to force the menfolk home for dinner. Instead most would decamp en masse to the nearby Brown Derby — 99-cent spaghetti, all you can eat! — whose liquor licence did not require it to close for dinner.

But for reasons lost forever in the mists of time, the Brown Derby’s licence didn’t allow it to serve draft beer. And the Imperial, at first, wasn’t allowed to serve wine or liquor.

The Imperial’s kitchen exists   because at one point, the liquor board decided the Imperial’s licence required it. And the Imperial did with its food menu the same basic thing it did with the rest of the joint: it kept it simple. Ricky’s brainchild, the menu became (for me at least) a rare bastion of basic pub grub in a world of frozen wagyu burgers and chipotle drizzles.

For a reasonable cost, the Imperial will (for a few more days) make you a regular old hot dog, on a regular old bun, with regular old condiments, for a regular old price. It will make you a perfectly good hamburger (albeit made from grass-fed beef, Sam notes) that won’t let loose its contents all over your shirt. It will come on a piece of waxed paper in one of those red plastic baskets you never see anymore.

You can have a bowl of chili — vegetarian or beef — that attempts absolutely nothing fancy and profits from it.

Ricky recalls putting gazpacho on the menu one summer. “People would send their soup back … and I realized that it wasn’t our place to educate people about food,” he says. “The idea was to simply keep our promises low, and let people be pleasantly surprised by the basic food being … better than they expect.”

The Imperial was what I would call one of the last truly democratic establishments in the city. If you had enough of your wits about you to behave, you were welcome. There was no expectation of who might walk through the door except another regular customer.. Toronto is richer, more important, slicker and more delicious than it was when I was younger, and that’s all for the good. I try not to get sentimental about this stuff. But I do insist that we try harder to remember what we have lost. The Imperial would be a loss for a city that doesn’t need another.

The empire might not be over, though. At first blush, the idea of relocating the Imperial struck me as daft. When you relocate something that unique, surely it can’t really be the same thing. It would certainly make no sense as a tenant in a condo building, and there are precious few spaces in the area that would make sense and that aren’t themselves slated for redevelopment.

People didn’t go to the Imperial because of how it looked, though. They went for the communitarian vibe, for the cozy respite, for a feeling you just don’t get in this city very much anymore — and certainly not in that neck of the woods.

That, maybe, you can replicate. And so, basically everything at the Imperial that isn’t structural is going into storage for now, the Newmans say: The ratty furniture from the library room, the pool table, the jukeboxes, the old-school lantern light fixtures. Maybe it will return somewhere, someday. Reinstalling it all somewhere else might not recreate the original Imperial, but it would be a damn sight less tragic than losing it entirely.

“It feels like it’d be hard to stay away forever,” says Ricky.

Here’s hoping.

National Post cselley@postmedia.com