Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
The downtown was quieter in a way, because it had not been turned into a giant residential district. In the 90's, Toronto's downtown had some of the best nightlife in North America. By the end of the 90's, Toronto had one of the most concentrated clusters of bars and clubs anywhere in the world in that place they still call the Entertainment District. - perhaps ironically. It was a great time to be young. The rave scene was the biggest outside of London, England, and raves drew tens of thousands of young people to the siren sound of the bass drum every weekend. The club and rave scene worked in tandem back then with headliners from the UK and US often playing local clubs Friday nights, after-parties on Saturdays (after the big Saturday night parties - typically four or five different raves going on every Saturday night, catering to different crowds), and then doing Sunday-night sets to packed houses at clubs like Industry, Guvernment, System Soundbar, and others. On Friday and Saturday nights especially, the Entertainment District was so packed with people that traffic was often blocked from spillover from overcrowded sidewalks. There were so many clubs and bars packed into that area that a determined bar-hopper would not even be able to visit 15% in a single weekend. Lines for the hottest clubs snaked half-way down the block, while unique old buildings looked on from overhead, all but darkened and now all but erased from the landscape.
In the 90's Toronto had a thriving underground music scene with homegrown artists who felt no need to go south because they were making enough money playing the club circuit here. In the early-90's there was a lot of punk and grunge bands playing famous spots like the El Mac, The Horseshoe, The Warehouse, The Concert Hall, Lee's Palace, Sneaky Dee's, The Phoenix, The Opera House and many others. These bands included local acts and big names from the US like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Sonic Youth, and other pioneers of the grunge scene. By the mid-and-late-90's, electronic music began to dominate TO's nightlife and the rave and club scenes reflected that. There was also a thriving local hip-hop and reggae scene, and now-famous artists like Capelton actually got their start here. The biggest reggae acts out of Jamaica came to Toronto at least twice-a-year up until about 2007 when new hate-speech laws meant kept them from getting permits due to common anti-gay language in many of their songs. Toronto still has a thriving underground hip-hop scene with a unique sound that reflects the city's deep roots in the genre, going back to the days of Maestro and Meeshy Me.
As for the rest of Toronto - the neighbourhoods where most residents live: Riverdale and Kensington Market, Parkdale and Queen West, Dufferin Grove and the Junction. These neighbourhoods had not been gentrified and were much more diverse economically and ethnically back then. They were mostly blue-collar, with plenty of low-income renters mixed in. They were grungier, but also had deeper community bonds because the residents were mostly first and second generation immigrants whose children grew up on the same streets and went to the same schools. Most of these older residents have long-since cashed in on their homes and decamped to the suburbs. Now the neighbourhoods are livelier, busier, with much more life on the main streets. At the same time, they are heavily gentrified and the culture feels homogeneous - like a bunch of hipsters got together and decided what kinds of politics, fashion, food, music, culture, etc. would be good and the rest of young Toronto decided to follow along. There is much less individuality than there was in the 80's and 90's; much less chance of finding a scene or a crew who really stand out from the pack. A lot of this has to do with the internet, but a lot of it is this middling attitude that a city of new immigrants often has - when so many people consider a place somewhere they live, but their true "home" is elsewhere, there is a tendency to focus on work and family and not really pay much attention to the direction the city is going in (note that when I say "immigrant" I am not referring strictly to people who come from another country, but also to people who move to the city from the suburbs, or elsewhere in Ontario and Canada. These days it seems like hardly anyone you come across was actually born in the city. Most aren't even from the GTA). This has been true of Toronto for much of its history - it is a city that is always in transition. As a result, this city has always been neither here nor there, but somewhere in between. It has no defining characteristics and changes so fast that few identifiable features can really take hold - things that you can point to and say THAT is uniquely Toronto.
So I guess it's hard for me to compare the Toronto of the 80's and 90's to today's Toronto because I was young then and the city was exciting and seemed to offer everything. There were so many awesome gems tucked away, whereas now everything seems to be out in the open and all a different version of the same thing. I think the culture and night life were much more diverse and edgy in the 80's and 90's compared to now. The city has become very tame and boring, especially when one considers that in the 70's and 80's Yonge St. was a major sex industry sleaze strip, filled with strip clubs, peep shows, massage parlours, sex shops (not unlike Times Square of that era) and Queen West was a grungy collection of vintage clothing stores, head shops, record stores, and shops that filled the smallest niches in the youth culture. On Church Street, gay men packed the famous (and long-gone) steps, and the neighbourhood had an unmistakably 2ueer vibe - today it could be any trendy retail strip, just with a few more rainbow flags. Groups of street kids and skinheads hung out on street corners, Electric Circus used to spill out into the street on hot Friday nights, graffiti-covered stairwells would lead up to the most bizarre collections of shops - the Friendly Stranger, which is emblematic of how Toronto has changed, started off in one of these tucked-away second-storey alcoves, where its neighbours were an occult shop, a T-shirt shop that sold records, and one of the first stores in the city to start catering to the new rave scene. Now the Friendly Stranger a mainstream, multi-million dollar "icon" of Toronto. In reality, it is a perfect metaphor for the city. It's come a long way in the last 20-30 years, but in the process it has lost a lot of what made it unique and special. I could go on for pages about how the city was different then compared to now, but I won't. What upsets me is that I don't think it had to be this way. I think Toronto could have grown AND gotten better. Not simply grown.
BTW - that video of Yonge - the old footage of Evergreen youth drop-in centre! If you were young and living in or spending a lot of time in TO back then, you almost certainly bought drugs off someone at Evergreen. Ha! Eventually, cops had that placed staked out 24/7 and even buying $10 of weed could get you arrested. They changed the layout in the mid-aughts to prevent people from loitering outside. The Toronto in those videos is the city I remember, and I really do miss it in many ways.
Photos from the 90s are starting to look surprisingly retro now.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
