Don’t bother reading me the statistics. I’ve lived in the club district for 10 years, and the signs of change are written in the cracks in the sidewalks: fewer guys are relieving themselves outdoors in the middle of the night, and there’s less vomit to step around on Sunday mornings.
The neighbourhood is growing up and becoming genteel. That’s a good thing, right? Maybe. But I’m a little sad to see all the tacky glitz disappear.
I miss the club district during its peak – say five years ago. Friday and Saturday nights, especially in the summer, throbbed with sexual energy, making my walk home along Richmond West a veritable Jersey Shore North.
Stretch limos blocked traffic. Bass pounded through walls and open doors. Out on the street, behind makeshift velvet ropes, packs of Red Bull-guzzling guys with too much hair gel tried to get the attention of their micro-skirted female counterparts as they were carded and ushered in. (“Women get in free,” read some flyers.)
In this aphrodisiacal cloud of perfume, cigarette smoke and raging hormones, it was fun to witness the heterosexual mass mating dance overseen by juiced-up doormen and what looked like the entire 52 Division.
Violent? Hardly. As someone who would himself often be coming home way after last call, I never saw as much as a knife pulled out. You simply followed the rule of urban life anywhere: if you sensed someone threatening ahead, you didn’t make eye contact.
Once or twice a month, a car would pull up in front of me, the window would roll down and some 905er would ask the directions to Joker, Frequency or Jade. (Why so many nightclubs with single-word names?) This was in the days before smartphones with Google maps.
Sure, there have been incidents. After a neighbour accidentally tossed something off his balcony, almost hitting a pedestrian below, the guy blasted through security and was making his way up through the building to find the culprit before the police arrived.
Noise remains an issue – one of the remaining clubs still has lineups in the alley behind the building next door to mine – but that’s part of city living. Nobody moved here to be in Forest Hill.
In fact, one of the reasons why my neighbours and I decided to live in the Entertainment District was for the proximity to the entertainment: theatres, comedy clubs, restaurants and, yes, dance clubs.
But every neighbourhood reinvents itself. Along with the shiny new TIFF Bell Lightbox and the Festival Tower, the Ballroom feels like one more sanitized step on the road to boho chic respectability.
I’ve been in these places. But walking by, especially late at night, isn’t nearly as much fun.
