Exterior of The Unicorn Pub, 175 Eglinton Ave. E.
\ TORONTO NORTH \
A longstanding destination room for at least two generations of students, Toronto North locals and live music aficionados, The Unicorn Pub at 175 Eglinton Ave. has closed its doors.
According to a post on a Leaside-based Facebook group the club closed one day last week, apparently because developers who have bought property along the block that includes it, between Redpath Avenue and Mount Pleasant Rd., are planning to erect a condo there.
For many years it has offered live bands on Fridays and Saturdays as well as a variety of live music shows other nights of the week, including Sunday jams once legendarily hosted by the likes of Michael Danckert and Glenn Levine that regularly featured and were sometimes also hosted by Tony “Wild T” Springer and drummer John Bouvette for a period in the 1990s and early years of this millennium.
It was also the scene of one of my SpringRise concerts [in the 1990s --I'm still digging through recently retrieved archives to establish what year exactly] that was notable for performances by Johnnie Lovesin (who famously wise-cracked, when a pretty girl came over to sit on his lap, “I think I’m getting a Spring rise!”) as well as by both Jack de Keyzer and his former wife and star in her own right, Mary de Keyzer -the former couple spent time together at a table in the rear of the upper floor concert room, talking for the first time in years.
The room will be much missed by musicians and fans in the area. A complete obit of the room will appear on this site at a future date, as well as on the forthcoming Musical Legacies Online Museum website that will be launched as soon as enough donations have been received to do so.
-Gary 17, TorontoMoon.ca
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