Unnoticed by passersby and often unmarked by plaques, numerous Toronto addresses with big parts to play in cultural history sit mostly uncelebrated. In our series Local Legends, we tell you about them and put them on your mental map.

Aykroyd, an Ottawa native, came to Toronto in the summer of 1969 with writing partner and comic collaborator, Valri Bromfield, and moved into 505 Queen St. E. near River St.

The pair had been hired by legendary Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels, who was then developing comedy for the CBC.

“We moved into 505 and it became sort of the headquarters for after-hours parties,” Aykroyd recalled in a recent interview.

When Aykroyd joined Second City in Toronto in 1973, Club 505, as it was known, became the comedy troupe’s “after-hours hangout.”

“I lived upstairs and my brother (Peter) lived under the pinball machine,” Aykroyd cracked.

But he dismisses the term “booze can” for the main-floor antics, preferring the more genteel term “key club.”

“We were open after 1 a.m. (last call at the time). It was more like a ‘key club’ — it was friends of ours, friends and family, that could get in. We rocked, we raved. It was a great experience to have a window open and having a party going on at 4 in the morning,” he said.

Besides the comedy talent, special guests over the years included actors like Jack Nicholson and musicians like Paul Shaffer and fellow Canadian composer Howard Shore.

Aykroyd can’t remember the exact date in 1974 when he first met the late John Belushi, later to become Jake Blues, but it was a snowy winter night.

Belushi was in town from New York, where he was working the National Lampoon Radio Hour, a syndicated comedy show spun off from the humour magazine, and hoping to “raid” Second City talent, like late comedian and future SNL castmate Gilda Radner.

“He wanted to get Gilda and me to come down to New York to the Lampoon. We didn’t want to go; we had a good life here. (Second City alumnus) Dave Thomas and I had a radio commercial company that we were doing. We were writing stuff and having so much fun, so we didn’t want to leave. He managed to get Gilda to go,” Aykroyd said.

(It’s a matter of historical record that Aykroyd, Belushi and Radner were all part of the original cast of SNL, the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, when the show premiered in 1975.)

But on that cold wintry night at 505, Belushi heard some cool music and asked his new friend what it was.

“The Downchild Blues Band record Straight Up was playing and John asked me, ‘What is that?’ I said, ‘It’s a local blues band.’ And he said, ‘I really like that,’” Aykroyd recalled.

“And I said, ‘Well, you’re from Chicago, you know about the blues.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m into heavy metal and that.’ The next time I saw him, he had 300 (blues) records.

“That was really the night we came up with the Blues Brothers,” Aykroyd said, referring to the wildly successful 1978 musical sketch on SNL that later spawned the 1980 movie co-written by Aykroyd, as well as the band, which has continued to tour intermittently since Belushi’s untimely death in 1982 from a drug overdose.

Back in the 1970s, Toronto was still a fairly sedate and buttoned-up town, so the parties did not go unnoticed by local police.

“I met many nice police officers who would say, ‘What’s going on here?’ One of them, Richard Kruk, he was a cop on the beat. One night, we were having this raucous party and I look outside, it was a blustery night, and there was this old Polish woman or Ukrainian woman walking by,” Aykroyd said.

“I said, ‘Who’s that poor old Ukrainian woman?’ And it was Ricky. He was bundled up with a scarf around his head and gloves and I said, ‘That guy’s going to freeze to death.’ We brought him inside and we’ve been friends ever since.

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“We had some beautiful parties,” Aykroyd added wistfully.

Isabel Gadsden, who has owned the property since 1995, is well aware of its storied past.

“It was Dan Aykroyd’s booze can,” Gadsden said, with a laugh.

Gadsden said she met Aykroyd on the set of Blues Brothers 2000, which was filming a short distance from his former home, and the comedian regaled her with stories, including a night when Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger jammed with American blues-rockers ZZ Top while director Francis Ford Coppola tended the bar.

The distinctive 505 letters denoting the building were commissioned by Aykroyd and Gadsden liked them so much, she kept them.

Correction – July 24, 2017: This article was edited from a previous version that incorrectly referred to “the late” Valri Bromfield. In fact, Bromfield is alive and living in the United States. The Star apologizes to Valri Bromfield for this error.

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