What happened
Benjamin Hinchcliffe, a Yorkshireman who had managed hotels at Yonge and Richmond and at Queen and York, sold two properties on Chestnut Street in 1873 to buy three pieces of land at Bloor Street and Brunswick Avenue, and began building in 1874 on a lot of 66 feet by 118. The assessment rolls describe what he put up: a two-storey rough stone building, fifteen feet by thirty, with a stable behind it, for immigrants, labourers and wagoners who wanted food, drink and somewhere to keep a horse. The taproom doubled as a ballroom and, for meetings, as Hinchcliff's Hall. Edward Jackson rebuilt it in three storeys after 1907. Kate Davidson renamed it Ye Olde Brunswick House in 1920 and was fined more than once for selling beer stronger than the Ontario Temperance Act allowed. Under the Nightingale brothers from 1961 it sold more beer than any tavern in the province, and Albert's Hall upstairs booked Etta James, Muddy Waters and k.d. lang. In 1974 four women, remembered as the Brunswick Four, were ejected and arrested, an incident Canadian historians of gay and lesbian activism treat as a turning point.
What is there now
A second-hand clothes shop. OpenStreetMap records a Value Village Boutique at 481 Bloor Street West, in the building. Between the pub and the shop came a Rexall pharmacy, which the Star had predicted on the day the bar closed and which opened in the restored ground floor with a medical centre in what had been Albert's Hall and lawyers' offices above; Torontonians noted the irony of being vaccinated against Covid-19 there in 2021, the year it closed.
Location recorded from OpenStreetMap node 261714581, 481 Bloor Street West (https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/261714581).
Sources
- Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
- thestar.com, via the Internet Archiveweb.archive.org
- toronto.ctvnews.ca, via the Internet Archiveweb.archive.org
- nowtoronto.com, via the Internet Archiveweb.archive.org
- openstreetmap.org
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