Fans of live music have witnessed a lot of casualties on the local scene lately — with one club after another closing or threatening to — so they might understandably fear the worst.

But lurking behind all the talk of a “venue crisis” — which reached a fever pitch when the beloved Silver Dollar Room went dark in May after remaining a fond fixture on the Spadina Ave. strip since 1958 — there’s also some pretty good news.

We might have lost places like the Dollar, the Hoxton, the Holy Oak, the Central and the Hideout over the past year or so, and watched Hugh’s Room and Cherry Cola’s barely achieve stays of execution.

At the same time, though, the Horseshoe Tavern just celebrated its 70th birthday, the 69-year-old El Mocambo looks to finally reopen in the spring, and the revamped Danforth Music Hall turns 99 next year.

Plus, after seven years of fighting for the 102-year-old ballroom’s survival, the new(-ish) owner of the Matador is cautiously optimistic that he might finally reach a compromise with the City of Toronto that maybe, just maybe would see the doors open again in some capacity in 2018.

Next year will see the city’s most famous music venue, Massey Hall, close its doors for at least two years for extensive renovations — but when it reopens there will be two additional live venues in the building besides the restored main hall.

Deane Cameron, president and CEO of the Corporation of Massey Hall and Roy Thomson Hall, admits it’s going to be very strange to be without that 123-year-old theatre while it undergoes its extensive makeover. But the short-term pain is all in the service of long-term gain.

When Massey reopens, not only will it have removable seating on the main floor to expand its capacity to nearly 2,900 for general-admission shows, it will have remodeled the basement bar known as Centuries into an extra, 500-capacity venue downstairs and added yet another 500-cap space on a

fourth floor that will be part of its expansion into an adjacent property.

Those rooms fall in a capacity range Toronto “really needs” right now, says Cameron, and will enable Massey Hall to operate most days of the year in the future “with some activity in one of the rooms.” We’re coming out of this ahead in the long run.

“It’s unfortunately been left too long and it’s quite run-down, but honestly when people see that building with 100 stained-glass windows all cleaned up, it’ll still look like Massey Hall — we’re not trying to overdress it — but it will look beautiful and it will be ready for another 125 years,” Cameron says.

Massey Hall’s temporary closure will leave a 2,750-seat gap in the busier-than-ever Toronto concert market — the third largest in North America — but that could translate into a boom for other midsize venues in the city, such as the 1,400-capacity Danforth Music Hall.

Venue manager Michael Sherman says he’s already had some preliminary discussions with the Massey folks about providing a home for some of their concert programming during the downtime, although it’s not like the Music Hall has been hurting for business. The theatre hosted 202 shows in 2017, up from only 36 in 2012 when local concert-promotion company Embrace — which also recently acquired the Velvet Underground on Queen St. West — first took over running the space and subjected it to significant upgrades that included removable seating on the main floor, a powerful new PA system and new lighting.

“We’re already up 40 percent in bookings in the first quarter of next year, which hasn’t even been affected by Massey closing,” says Sherman.

Not bad for a former movie theatre that had fallen into grave disrepair through the 1980s to the 2000s in the hands of a succession of owners “who didn’t care.”

Sherman attributes the Music Hall’s new lease on life partly to being “at the right place at the right time,” but also to Embrace’s investments in turning the place into “a turnkey venue” that bands and promoters are entirely comfortable booking.

“We’ve really made our house PA and our house lights amazing, where bands can come in and only augment it a touch and have an amazing show,” he says, adding that their efforts to resurrect the venue — which now include an adjacent restaurant and plans for a small boutique hotel next door — haven’t gone unnoticed by actual owners of the building.

“The landlord, who’s been here since the early ’70s . . . has made a very strong commitment to us for a long time, so that’s allowed us to invest in the business without fear of being kicked out because of high rent or whatnot. And we’ve become incredibly close with the landlord family. It’s their love of music and entertainment that’s kept it here. The kids come to three concerts a week, honestly, and those are the ones who are going to be inheriting the building.”

A sympathetic landlord and/or stable ownership of the property is, of course, key to any “legacy” venue’s survival in this city. Even the Horseshoe Tavern survives on the good graces of the descendants of the building’s original owner Jack Starr, who purchased the property in 1947 and — as a legend recently retold by David McPherson in his book The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern has it — first brought music into the venue at the behest of migrant workers from the East Coast who suggested it might be nice to hear some country tunes while they drank in the tavern.

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“The temptation is always there for people to get their money and move on,” says McPherson, crediting the ’Shoe’s agreeable landlords — in addition to talented venue operators — from preventing it the fate dealt so many other vintage venues in this city, from the Gaslight and the Colonial to the Diamond and the Penny Farthing, where “all they are now are plaques and the memories in people’s heads.”

In El Mocambo’s case, mind you, a change of ownership was exactly what it took to keep the place alive.

When the future looked grim for the landmark live spot at Spadina and College in 2014, tech trader and Dragon’s Den star Michael Wekerle rode in at the 11th hour and snapped up the place for nearly $3.8 million. It’s been shuttered since for renovations that have proven more challenging than initially expected, says Wekerle spokeswoman Kelly Pullen, but the plan is to reopen in May 2018 — exactly a year later than was originally planned — and to have a rebuilt version of the club’s famous “neon palm” sign returned to its rightful perch above the entrance and relit by March or April.

“The sign is ready to go up but there’s no point in putting it up for the winter,” says Pullen. “And hopefully by then the ground floor will be done so people can actually come in.”

The revitalized El Mocambo “is essentially a new venue” or “a new building within the pre-existing building,” she says, but the format — smaller room downstairs, larger room upstairs — will be familiar to regulars of the bar in its older incarnations. The major difference is that the third floor has mostly been removed to form a balcony overlooking the second-floor stage that should extend the venue’s capacity, City of Toronto willing, slightly above the 500-ish mark at which it’s current set. There’s also a standalone studio in the building, already operational, designed by American audio engineer extraordinaire Eddie Kramer with the capability of recording live from the stages on both floors, simultaneously if need be.

“It’s funny, when you go up to the second floor you still feel kind of like you’re in the old space,” says Pullen. “You remember the old space, but it’s just like a grander version.”

And what of the Matador, the once-infamous after-hours boozecan at College and Dovercourt that owner Paul McCaughey has been trying to reopen as a legitimate event hall and concert space against much neighbourhood and institutional opposition, since he purchased it from the late Ann Dunn seven years ago?

“I’m giving the city the benefit of the doubt and I believe the city is perhaps now willing to give the Matador the benefit of the doubt,” says McCaughey, who has sensed a slightly more conciliatory tone on the part of the city as he prepares for yet another round of zoning and pre-plan reviews in early 2018.

This is a remarkable change for McCaughey, who was ready to give up the fight by the middle of 2017 and sell what he’d hoped to reopen as a 650-cap live venue and event space with a bar/restaurant in the front to a developer. Then fate intervened in the form of Canadian rock icon Robbie Robertson, who wanted to shoot part of a documentary on his life in the Matador.

“I spent the summer soul searching, and I decided that I had to see this thing through — again,” says McCaughey. “When I stood in that room I could not see that room becoming a Shopper’s Drug Mart or a Rexall or any of those other things. So once I decided that and once I turned that corner, I thought ‘What am I going to do?’ And not three days later did White Pine Pictures walk in the back door and say, ‘We want to shoot a Robbie Robertson documentary in your hall.’”

The first music to echo ’round the Matador’s walls in seven years thus arrived in October in the form of an acoustic version of the Band’s “The Weight,” and Robertson made sure he added his signature to the backstage wall that already bears the names of Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and Stompin’ Tom Connors before he left two days later.

The experience proved a “turning point” for McCaughey, who went back to the city willing to bend further to its whims if need be in order to, he hopes, have the room back open in time for a planned premiere party for the Robertson documentary in 2018. He has since received some “positive feedback” from the city and feels “there’s room for some practical optimism on this.”

If the century-old Matador — which let’s not forget, almost became a City of Toronto parking lot a decade ago — emerges victorious, Toronto will have been spared the anguish of watching yet another historic venue demolished at the hands of a condo developer. And music fans in this town will have a much-needed piece of good news to celebrate.

“How many venues do we have left that are of this age and of this stature?” says McCaughey. “In this particular case, we have a venue that generations of people have moved through. We’ve lost so many venues in just the last year, and it’s heartbreaking. So at this point in time, saving a heritage, ‘legacy’ venue, I think, is something of core importance to who we are as a city. Where are the places that we can go to and show the children where we grew up?”

Fourth in a series celebrating the silver linings in a dark year of entertainment.