culture Vintage Toronto Ads: Stopless Topless

Serving food, 1970s Yonge Street–style.

By the late 1970s, Yonge Street was synonymous with sin and sleaze. Despite growing calls to clean up its adult cinemas, arcades, and rub-and-tugs, especially in the wake of the murder of shoeshine boy Emanuel Jaques in 1977, businesses dealing in titillation continued to launch along the strip.

Take the Pancake Bakery Group, which began as a purveyor of flapjacks at its Pancake Bakery Restaurant and Creperie near Yonge and Eglinton. Browsing the entertainment sections of Toronto’s dailies throughout 1978 and 1979 shows a business with aspirations. First came novelty pancakes—pizza pancake, anyone?—then circus-style entertainment. In Yorkville, they launched Daddy’s Money & Apron Strings, billed as “a unique food & beverage establishment where you never know who you’ll meet.”

Down at one of the Yonge strip’s legendary music venues, the Colonial Tavern, the group operated a series of increasingly naughtier concepts with names like Daddy’s Folly, O’Daddy’s Restaurant, the Pussycat Patio, and the Black Bottom Lounge. One ad suggested that the venues were being run by “an unbelievably true Sugar Daddy,” even if it was officially a reference to a free pizza-pancake giveaway. The Black Bottom promised acts like “Hot Tamale and her breathtaking Fire Dance accompanied by X-rated live shows.”

Daddy’s Folly offered topless servers, which—along with other venues across the city that provided similar service—upset provincial officials. In October 1978, consumer and commercial relations minister Frank Drea warned lounge owners to cover up their staff or else be hauled before liquor authorities for a license review. While some bars, such as the House of Lancaster, resisted Drea’s call, Daddy’s Folly complied. Walking by the Colonial after Drea’s request, Star columnist Peter Gzowski observed several Daddy’s Folly staffers picketing, holdings signs which read “WE’RE NOT PRISONERS” and “WE ABIDE BY THE LAW.” Gzowski heard one of the sign-holders yell, “Where’s CityPulse News?”

Daddy’s Folly and its siblings advertised “stopless topless” servers until February 1979, when Metro Toronto council banned the practice. Management was not happy about the move, claiming staff cringingly dubbed “Daddy’s Girls,” would earn less covered up. As a manager told the Globe and Mail, “[T]he public will be unhappy because this is the kind of entertainment they want.” Not everyone bought that line—a patron interviewed, while the Rolling Stones’ “Beast of Burden” played in the background, felt that partial covering was sexier (“It leaves more to the imagination”).

By spring 1979, ads for all of the Pancake Bakery Group’s enterprises vanished from the papers. A Star classified the following year listed their Yorkville location as a distressed property. The Colonial Tavern lingered on for a few more years before it was demolished in 1987 for a parkette.

Additional material from the December 18, 1978 and February 12, 1979 editions of the Globe and Mail; and the August 3, 1978, October 24, 1978, October 25, 1978, and May 29, 1980 editions of the Toronto Star.