Meet the Garrison, your new
home away from home

I haven’t been able to get to the next installment of Ex Week yet, but this is tangentially related, as news breaks that Toronto’s Wavelength music series (which presents the Ex this weekend) is moving to the soon-to-open Dundas-&-Ossington watering hole The Garrison, after five years at Sneaky Dee’s. The Garrison - whose name I love as it at once evokes some kind of steamy masculine military barracks and pays tender lyrical tribute to the lost waterway that once ran beneath its locale (images of flowing liquid being a pretty good omen for a bar, after all) - is a project of Shaun Bowring, the former booker at Sneaky Dee’s and, in essence, all of the indie-culture activity that went on at Sneak’s the past several years looks very apt to move there. And, it being almost cater-cornered from hopping rocky-tonk The Dakota and adjacent to the madly burgeoning Ossington strip, clearly Toronto has a new live-music centre of gravity.

Eye Weekly has the whole Wavelength angle of the story today (that’s also their pic of the venue-to-be above), but I wanted to add a few remarks on the basis of having been inside the place mid-renovation: It’s a former Portugese sports bar, being divided up into a smaller sit-and-chat bar in front and a larger show bar in back. It has a larger capacity than Sneak’s but will also actually be a more intimate venue as it’s that rarest of finds in this town, a venue that is wider than it is deep. Thus, much more of the audience can be close to the stage (which itself hadn’t been built yet when I was there, but should be a good mid-height). More than any concert spot in town except the aforementioned Dakota, design-wise I suspect it will have the current shabby-chic look common to all those Ossington hangouts, with perhaps a little more sense of humour than some (which could go either way).

I expect to be spending a lot of time there; best of all it basically it puts an end to every reason I have to ever go to the College St. strip after sundown, which is fantastic. (Oh, every reason except the new Caplansky’s, I guess.)