Owners of Brass Rail Strip Club Decide to Sell Property and Close Doors
- Thread starter Charlemagne
- Start date
There is a lot of nostalgia for the place but in reality it was a shittily designed, bad stage sightlines, gussied up hole in the wall. Happy in later years to pack in USA tourists at 12 bucks a beer and hustle them for cheap dances downstairs while catering to sports stars and other rich folk upstars. Grumpy bartenders and servers who put you on a drink clock. Side by side chairs that wedding factory places seem like an acreage and ten times more comfortable.
But we all either broke our stripper cherry there, or made a pilgrimage decades ago for a stag, or started our pooning career after a night there, or have some funny memory of a buddy there. And that's why we lament. Its very much a huge nail in the dirty Yonge street we secretly loved, with its seedy headshops and porn shops, pinball machines and video games, Asian massage places, eats like drunken Big Slice, Hernando's Hideaway and the Gasworks.
Its getting the inevitable Times Square treatment. One of the last gasps of the 70's sleaze corpse in waiting. We mourn not its passing, but our own wayward youth.
I choose to remember it as it was. And if I need a reminder I can head to the Sundowner......
But we all either broke our stripper cherry there, or made a pilgrimage decades ago for a stag, or started our pooning career after a night there, or have some funny memory of a buddy there. And that's why we lament. Its very much a huge nail in the dirty Yonge street we secretly loved, with its seedy headshops and porn shops, pinball machines and video games, Asian massage places, eats like drunken Big Slice, Hernando's Hideaway and the Gasworks.
Its getting the inevitable Times Square treatment. One of the last gasps of the 70's sleaze corpse in waiting. We mourn not its passing, but our own wayward youth.
I choose to remember it as it was. And if I need a reminder I can head to the Sundowner......
Never went to the Brass Rail you are going on about (it's all about you though, right?) but if you are thinking the Downer is anything like it was over a year ago, you probably think you know how to fix politics right now. Oh, that's right, you do...
I am actually curious why you think the variant is so diff?
Still does not effect young people
Still majority of people are asymptomatic
(If people had obvious symptoms it could not spread anywhere near as fast as they would be more likely to quarantine and others would quickly realize they are sick)
As for the early in pandemic paranoia remember all the $800 covid tickets handed out for such egregious things as kids playing in parks or visiting friends homes?
Those tickets are all long gone but google remains
I have similar nostalgia for the Supersexe club in Montreal, which closed a few years ago. I first went there in August, 1979. I had recently started my first non summer only job nearby at another former Montreal landmark, The Metropolitan News Agency at Peel and Ste Catherine streets. One of my co-workers, almost twice my age, suggested we go there after work on a Friday. He didn't have the stones to ask dancers, so they'd dance primarily for me, but he paid them the $5 per song. I saw my first live augmented breasts there.
Many years later, on a visit, I won the 'big card' game. At least once a night, for a specific song, the announcer would give a playing card to anyone would bought a dance from any dancer. At the end of the song, he'd turn over cards from a large novelty deck, until one of them matched one held by a patron. The prize was a bottle of champagne, or other bottle of equivalent cost or less. My dancer liked Black Tower white wine, so that was one bottle I didn't have to buy that night.
"The very lovely Ssssssssssssssssssssylvie, gentlemen. Elle va retourné, shshshshshshshshe'll be back later on....
Ahhh all the great memories....and mamories
Will be missed , I’ll never forget the smell that hits you when you open the front door, kinda like a combo of stale beer, sweaty strippers thunder storm and a pinch of baby powder .
Walking in was like entering another dimension.
You didn’t know what was waiting for you on the other side.
Will be missed , I’ll never forget the smell that hits you when you open the front door, kinda like a combo of stale beer, sweaty strippers thunder storm and a pinch of baby powder .
Walking in was like entering another dimension.
You didn’t know what was waiting for you on the other side.
Wow......so....
I have no idea why you would make this personal.
Obviously you never visited in the 80's, and yes the Downer still has that vibe.
Its not the politics section, we try to be mature and keep it seperate from the rest of the board, so STFU.
Don't take in personally, Butler100. He treats everyone equally.
I think we had the same friends. (And those kind of friends that I had definitely turned me on to a more urban environment and frankly the City of Toronto since I am not native to Toronto.)
Yonge Street and a lot of the cool areas in Toronto had a bit of grit to them. They had feel. They definitely had a street scape.
The new condo blight has none of the above. Faceless banal boxes with nothing but glass frontage. Absolutely NO architectural merit whatsoever. Just a concrete box with spandrel glass bolted to the concrete box.
And if you look at the areas of Toronto where the condos have taken over like weeds, people may live there, but they don't hang out there. They are cold windswept faceless areas. No-one hangs out in the condo jungles around the Rogers Center. Same with Harbour Front. The streets aren't streets, at least not traditional urban streets in a close knit grid pattern. They are more like something you'd see in Mississauga or Vaughan. People simply are not attracted to these areas they are building.
If you look at Toronto, there are pockets / neighbourhoods where people are attracted to. College Street, the Danforth, King West, Kensington, Cabbagetown, the Annex, the Beaches, Bloor West, Leslieville, Yonge and Eglinton, St Lawrence, etc. etc. These places are typified by an eclectic architecture, tight streets, dense, buildings that front the streets. These areas were never really planned in the sense that areas are planned now. They grew organically. The shit I see being built now reminds me of the shit thinking that they came up with in the 50's and 60 with respect to the suburbs.
As far as Yonge Street goes, it never really fit into the "cool neighbourhood" model as I cited above, but definitely there are (or were) very cool neighbourhoods literally around the corner as you walked up Yonge Street. And Yonge Street itself definitely had a feel to it and a history to it.
If you look at the European models, they preserve their old central cores and they build the faceless blight in the suburbs or at least the outskirts. I see no reason that the inner core in Toronto cannot be preserved and the greedy developers can build their boxes in the periphery of the 416. There's nots of land there.
Like they speculate that gyms salons and outdoor patios are the cause of the spread.
It has been proven that close contact within groups of people without face coverings promotes spread. No speculation there.
That is why, without the tracking of every individual at that park, to somehow conclude that there was no transmission, is speculation.
The quality of dancers has declined everywhere in the past 10 years, more tattoos, drug usage, and an overall ghetto or trailer trash "aesthetic" to them. I enjoyed clubs far more in the 90s and 2000s, much better quality women, less hassle and more bang for my buck.
Most strip clubs are in industrial areas now anyways. Not prime downtown areas.
I was using a public washroom, I finished washing my hands and a guy comes out of the toilet after taking a dump and just walks away without washing his hands.
Yupper.
Pretty much only one left is Zanzibar, which is sitting on prime real estate, worth 2X more than the Rail, which will sell soon enough.
Cheers!!
