Down by the Henry Moore

Cities change slowly, then suddenly, but not completely. Toronto is like this. It grows fast during booms, then stagnates during recessions. Each successive generation builds a mental map of its own personal Toronto, and we all form a possessive fondness for the particular clubs, bars, taverns, music shops and other places we frequent during the brief time in early adulthood when we feel like part of a scene. These geographical memories can become a permanent part of our identity.

Later, when everything inevitably changes, the transformations feel sacrilegious – how could they build a McDonald's there, of all places? How could they let that ugly glass box replace the Sam the Record Man shop where I bought my first album with my own money? It seems as if the soul of the city is dying, bit by bit. But what is a sign of urban decline for one person might be an opportunity for a new scene and new memories for the next generation.

In 1974, not long before I was born, Canadian songwriter Murray McLauchlan recorded Down by the Henry Moore, a melancholic folky snapshot of bohemian city life in the early 1970s. My parents played his cassette when I was a kid in the 80s, but it was only on hearing the song again decades later that I recognized it as an ode to Toronto. I also realized that I was now personally familiar with many of the places mentioned in the lyrics. By the time I arrived in downtown Toronto for university in 1994, the song was two decades old, and the city I was learning to navigate was already very different from the one McLauchlan had written about. It’s even less recognizable now. But, it turns out, some things are timeless.  

The song’s opening lines drop the listener right into the heart of the city.1

I walked down to Kensington Market, bought me a fish to fry
I went to the Silver Dollar, looked a stranger in the eye

In the 1960s, Toronto’s counterculture scene had centered on Yorkville, an area of brick Victorian row houses just north of the financial core. Many of the houses had been converted into art galleries, coffee houses, and music venues, including the famous River Boat, where folk singers such as Gordon Lightfoot and Joni Mitchell got their start, and the Mynah Bird, where Neil Young and Rick James (yes, that Rick James) performed together before moving on to solo fame in the United States.

McLauchlan played at the River Boat, too – in fact, he would close out their last ever night of music in 1978. But in Down by the Henry Moore he was name-dropping a different part of Toronto, one with a bit more street cred. In sharp contrast to the upscale Kensington district in London, Toronto’s Kensington Market was a warren of ramshackle buildings where working class families lived above their ground floor businesses. The neighbourhood had long been the first stop for new immigrants arriving in Canada, and each wave of arrivals reflected the global geopolitics of their time.

When Kensington Market was first settled in the 1800s by the Irish, established Protestant Torontonians were no doubt happy to keep the Catholic newcomers at arm’s length in what was then the fringe of the city. By the turn of the century, Russians and Eastern Europeans began to arrive, fleeing poverty and pogroms in their homelands. As the mood darkened in Europe before WW2 so many Jewish people settled in Kensington Market that, according to Shawn Micallef, it became known as the “Jewish Market”. In the 1920s and 1930s there were roughly thirty synagogues within walking distance of the neighbourhood (today, a quick search on Google Maps suggests there are four). Many more Jewish people would probably have joined those earlier arrivals had they not been rejected on arrival by the Canadian government and sent back to Europe, some to their eventual deaths.2

Kensington Market was a slice of the Old World. Fruit and vegetable stalls intermingled with bakeries, fishmongers, and shops selling spices and other ingredients that would have been difficult to find in mainstream grocery stores of the time. Skinned animal carcasses hung in butcher shop windows, and chickens squawked in coops on the sidewalk, ready to be slaughtered on purchase.

The residents fought regulations against sidewalk vending and won, creating a vibrant streetscape that partially survives today, even if the fishmongers and butchers have hipsterized and are now outnumbered by trendy bars, cannabis vendors, and third wave coffee shops.

By the 1970s, the demographics of the area had changed again as new waves of residents arrived from the Caribbean, Asia, India, Italy, Portugal, and Central America. Peking duck, Jamaican patties and bacalhau were now sold next to the cabbage and pierogies.3 For a young person trying to launch a music career, Kensington Market likely provided a convenient place for affordable food and cheap rent – and also, presumably, the sort of vibrant and chaotic street life that was in short supply elsewhere in stodgy Toronto. A 1974 New York Times article commented on one positive impact of Toronto’s newly-diversifying population: “the city was bound to develop restaurants that serve something besides beef and Yorkshire pudding; and indeed it has.”

Just around the corner from Kensington Market, on the northwest corner of Spadina Avenue and College Street, was the Silver Dollar Room. This venue was awkwardly attached to the Waverly Hotel, a somewhat dubious operation most notable for (maybe) serving as a hideout for James Earl Ray when he fled across the border after assassinating Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Both the hotel and the music venue stood mostly unchanged until 2017, when they were demolished for a very Toronto reason: a giant condominium was being constructed in their place. Marketers added insult to injury by naming the new development The Waverly.4

When I last visited the original Silver Dollar in the early 2000s, to see a band I’ve now forgotten, the opening act played a rambunctious punk rendition of Bob Dylan’s Maggie’s Farm. I learned later that Dylan himself had once played there. I recall a narrow room, with the stage positioned along the side, rather than at the end, as I would have expected. No matter where I stood, I felt I was right in front of the stage. If I’d wanted a reprieve, I could have retreated to one of the slightly mysterious booths around the dark perimeter of the room.

A friend of mine says that he don’t think this town’s so out of sight,
But he’s got shades all round his soul and he thinks he’s seen the light

Toronto has always struggled with an inferiority complex. In the earliest days, it was a literal backwater to the distant metropolis of London, and newly arrived colonial government appointees spent much of their time dispatching letters home complaining about the physical and cultural comforts of civilization that could not be found in Muddy York. Toronto is now Canada’s biggest city by a comfortable margin, but in 1974 it was still playing second fiddle to Montreal. Not until the 1981 census did Toronto’s population officially surpass Montreal’s, the change fueled in part by separatist government policies in Quebec that spurred major corporations to transfer their Canadian headquarters to English-speaking Toronto.

But no matter how large its population grows, Toronto perpetually lacks the easy self-confidence of Montreal, or the cultural relevance of cities to the south. New York, Detroit and Chicago all conjure the sorts of instant imagery and popular mythology that have no equivalent here. Anyone who expresses too much pride in Toronto is quickly shot down by detractors ready to mock any pretentious claims of “world class” status.  “Toronto is just like New York but without all the stuff,” exclaimed a character played by Steve Martin on the sitcom 30 Rock, as he tried to lure Liz Lemon to Toronto with the bland charms of the Metro Toronto Convention Center. The joke was no doubt contributed by a Canadian comedy writer who’d headed south for better creative opportunities.

But even without all the stuff, Toronto has other qualities – its distinctive neighbourhoods, its genuine patchwork of integrated cultures – that McLauchlan seems to have picked up on long before many others. He noticed what made the city special. McLauchlan went on to a successful career: in 2022 he was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. But despite a short stint living in New York and multiple international tours, McLauchlan’s career and audience always remained primarily in Canada.

I went down to the Palm Grove, I was jumpin’ around the room
I was wearing my sneakers down and castin’ away my gloom
This fat girl came up and grabbed me, she sat me on her knee
She said you wrote that Farmer’s Song and she spilled her drink on me

When I hear McLauchlan mention the Palm Grove, I immediately think of the El Mocambo, a storied music venue just a short walk from Kensington Market that prominently features a palm tree on its recently-restored neon sign. But it turns out, the Elmo was only one of several Toronto bars in the 60s and 70s named after vaguely tropical themes: the Bermuda Tavern (long gone) and the Zanzibar (now a strip club) were two others. McLauchlan was actually referring to the Palm Grove Lounge, a music room located within the larger Embassy Tavern in Yorkville, where music greats such as Louis Armstrong and the Everly Brothers performed. 

But the sloppy night on the town McLauchlan describes could just have easily have happened at the El Mocambo; or the Horseshoe Tavern, or Ted’s Wrecking Yard, or the Phoenix, or any number of other clubs and music venues that have come and gone over the decades, tucked into basements, back rooms, and warehouses in parts of the city where the noise and drunken patrons would bother relatively few people in pre-condo Toronto.

I went down by the Henry Moore and skated on in the Square
The moon was on my shoulder and the ice was in my hair

Toronto’s New City Hall opened in 1965, occupying a pair of office towers so futuristic-looking that they still routinely feature in sci-fi movies. The buildings face the vast concrete expanse of Nathan Phillips Square, named after Toronto’s mayor from 1955 to 1962. Phillips – the first Jewish mayor of Toronto, and also the first non-Protestant mayor of Toronto – was proof that the city was, in fact, changing. The square itself remains unloved by Torontonians: it is objectively ugly, frigid and windswept in the winter, and scorching and shadeless in the summer. But its saving grace is the public ice rink that appears each December. Skating on that rectangle of attentively groomed ice under the picturesque arches is a rite of passage for many Torontonians, new and old.

At the northern edge of the square, nearest to the towers, stands an abstract bronze sculpture shaped like two curved bone joints, balanced precariously on one end. Colloquially known as the Archer, it was unveiled in 1966 with the artist Henry Moore present. Moore was an English artist, already well into a prominent career. His work had helped to define the modernist movement, and his sculptures already stood in galleries and cities around the world. The unveiling in the square was the beginning of a long relationship between Moore and Toronto: between 1971 and 1974, he donated many works to the Art Gallery of Ontario, and he himself helped design the gallery that would display them. Their Moore collection still remains one of the world’s largest showcases for his art.

The choice of Moore’s art for the new city hall was controversial, but symbolic: it clearly represented Toronto’s desire to look to the future and break from Victorian traditions. A more conventional statue of Winston Churchill that was installed near the square in 1977 was shunted to an adjoining garden during refurbishments in 2014. The Archer, on the other hand, still maintains its place of pride.

Alone but never lonely, that’s how I like to be
If I wanna have fun like a rock’n’roll bum, don’t think the worst of me

McLauchlan had written about country life as well – his most famous recording might be the aptly-named Farmer’s Song, which reflects on the diminishing and thankless role that family farms play in modern life. In that song he describes himself as “a kid from the city” and Down by the Henry Moore shows this to be true. It is in large cities that people are most free to be themselves, to mind their own business, to find their people, and to live life on their own terms. For a new immigrant from a far away place, a misfit from a claustrophobic small town, or a young musician looking to make their mark, the anonymity and chaos of urban life can provide both escape and opportunity. The architecture and the music continually change, but the lure of the big city never grows old.

Notes & References

Cotter, C. (2004). Toronto Between the Wars: Life in the City 1919-1939. Firefly, p 118.

Micallef, S. (2024). Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto (Updated Edition). Coach House, p. 147.

Globe & Mail: The music dies at the Riverboat

Historic Places: Kensington Market National Historic Site of Canada

New York Times: Toronto, Once Dull, Is Becoming First City of Canada (1974)

YouTube: Toronto is Just Like New York (30 Rock Clip)

Toronto Star: James Earl Ray and the enduring myth of Toronto’s Silver Dollar Room: Public Editor

CBC: The El Mocambo's neon palm tree is back on Spadina Avenue

Stabroek News: Tradewinds in the Making

Spacing: Star Trek and Toronto City Hall

City of Toronto: Three-Way Piece No. 2: Archer - sculpture - Nathan Phillips Square

AGO Insider: The Henry Moore Sculpture Centre: Re-opening Summer 2016

CityNews: Sir Winston Churchill statue at Nathan Phillips Square gets new home