I have lived along St. Clair Avenue West in Toronto for over 30 years. It is a heavily travelled street in a densely populated part of the city, a city which has a high residential density. Nevertheless, in the mid-1970s there were all of four taverns on St. Clair West in the mile and a quarter between Bathurst Street and Dufferin Street, with a beer hall round the corner on Dufferin. There were two lounges in the mile and a quarter between Yonge Street and Bathurst (both within two blocks of Yonge – people in Forest Hill didn’t drink, it seems). Furthermore, in the two and a half miles between Yonge and Dufferin there was one beer store and one liquor store.
There were in those days three types of drinking establishment in Ontario. Lounges were the poshest type of establishment. Since they were Ontarian that means they were posh mainly in comparison with the other types of drinking establishment. Anyway, they served all types of alcohol to people who could afford higher prices. Taverns also served all types of alcohol but the bulk of their receipts had to consist of food orders. The beer parlours were usually called hotels. For a long time the licensing regulations had restricted new drinking establishments to hotels, so all sorts of fleabag hotels sprang up with a dozen rooms or so and a gigantic beer parlour.
The beer parlours were intended for the lower orders, and in keeping with the traditional Ontario fear of those orders drinking in beer parlours was made as unpleasant as possible. For one thing, men on their own were not allowed to drink with women. God only knows what those lower-class hooligans would have got up to if that had been allowed, eh? Beer parlours were divided into two rooms, the ladies and escorts’ side and the men’s side. The ladies and escorts’ was usually pleasant enough, but the men’s side was usually appalling.
For a while in 1971 my local was the Chateau Dufferin (the aforementioned beer hall round the corner). The escorts’ there was a pleasant room with flocked wallpaper and subdued lights. The men’s side consisted of two rooms. The back room contained a long table around which a dozen or so men would sit glumly while they watched a black and white television on a shelf in the corner. The front room was bigger, full of the standard pedestal tables, each with a terrycloth slipcover on which sat a salt shaker and an ashtray. You sat down at one of the tables and a waiter with a tray of draught would appear. At the Chateau (no circumflex accent, of course) they used to wait for you to order a pair of draught. At many places they just put two in front of you without asking. The chief drawback of the Chateau’s front men’s room was its men’s room – when you went to the can it was a good idea to take your waders.
No one could drink outdoors. No one could drink indoors if someone outdoors could see them (most beer halls featured windows of glass block). No one could transport an open bottle of liquor or an open case of beer. Most restaurants were dry, and on Sundays you could only drink with a meal, so if you ran out of booze on Sunday you had to hunt around for one of the few licensed restaurants,
Such were the good old days. Government – and respectable opinion – considered a large segment of the population to be in need of paternalistic protection; its members could not be trusted to act responsibly. To control them, government established different standards of service for different social groups. Men got worse service than women, working people got worse service than the well-heeled.
These days there are more bars and licensed restaurants, and men on their own are actually considered to be others’ equals. The old hotels are almost extinct, and the survivors no longer enforce segregation. Blanket rules are being replaced with measures that address specific problems, such as spot checks of drivers.
Some of the blanket rules remain (where you can drink remains fairly restricted, although you can now drink outdoors where the public can see you), but life is altogether more open and egalitarian in Ontario these days. On the whole, people drink less abusively, too. A common way to pass a long weekend on the old days was to lay in a store of booze at home and spend the weekend drinking it. One of the reasons people don’t do that any more is probably that there are more things for people to do, but surely another is that drinking outside the house has been made much easier.
People still feel the need to drink, though. Drinkers are more responsible these days, but to me that is a worrisome development. Binge drinkers drink to enjoy themselves. Responsible drinkers drink for reasons that seem more sinister to me – relaxation, for example. Maybe we could start some research now on why people now need chemical help to relax. Me, I can relax at the drop of a hat.
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