It became a Halloween night tradition — an ugly one — in the mid-1970s.

Collecting behind barricades, citizens would jeer and throw toilet paper and eggs at the drag performers gathered in front of the old clock tower of St. Charles Tavern. Taking advantage of one of the few nights when the public display of queer culture would be ignored by law enforcement, the queens paraded along the sidewalk, dodging the projectiles and ugly taunts, and drawing focus from the bar patrons sneaking in through the same back entrance.

The event was an important early example of gay visibility in the city, but also one that exposed the rampant homophobia and violence directed at the community at that time. As the crowds ballooned and violence became more extreme, activists and police eventually succeeded in deterring the crowds, siphoning them down to Church Street for a more controlled event that continues to this day.

But the clock tower remained and many nights throughout the fall of 2017 — including Halloween — I would sit inside of it and try to connect to history.

I’m not sure why I was so drawn to that tower, but it became like a beacon, guiding me to it night after night. It stood high above Yonge, a relic of a previous time, but also evidence that an important space had existed — one of communal trauma and joy, a shared lineage that went back well before me. And in a strange way, seated on those dusty floorboards, I felt a part of those experiences, decades after they had ended.

I would look out the tiny windows of the tower at the street below, imagining those performers summoning up the courage to stand before the hostile crowds. I would try to conjure up the generations of citizens who had passed through some version of this building each day, Toronto transforming around them. I was now one of them.

I had gained permission from property management to document the space as part of a film project. Much of the building was slated for demolition, to be replaced by a massive condominium not unlike the others that had sprung up along the strip. The clock tower at 484-488 Yonge, with its heritage designation, would be absorbed by the complex and refurbished with art, but renderings still had it dwarfed by the large, antiseptic tower.

But to me, the magic of the space was so much more than just the wooden clock tower itself. It was also the alleyways, stairwells, basement and four walls that had been witness to so much history — and not always the type of history that we like to remember.

The tower has survived almost 150 years by hiding in plain sight. Built in 1872, it spent the first third of its life as part of Fire Hall Number Three, although the most interesting details about the address spring from the mid-1920s on, after much of it had been transformed into retail space.

There were bicycle shops and a few car dealerships, speaking to the growing transit needs of the city, as well as an art gallery on the second floor that was damaged by fire during the Second World War. The St. Charles opened in 1950, serving Chinese-Canadian fare, with the fire hall’s surviving brass rail and tower a central component of its marketing campaign: “Meet me under the clock!”

In the present, I find the old dumbwaiters from this version of the tavern in the basement, now filled with cement and sealed shut, the diamond-shaped windows shattered. Grooves in the floor reveal the placement of old food preparation tables. I run my fingers along them and try to snap as many photos as I can.

During the 1960s, the shifting demographics of Yonge forced the business to evolve once again. Provincial regulations of the time restricted unaccompanied women in establishments serving alcohol, creating single-gender environments that attracted discreet gay male clientele. A queer bar in everything but name, the St. Charles began to lend its second floor to an ever-changing lineup of dance clubs, while the main level would hold weekly performances by “exotic dancers and female impersonators”— many of the same performers who would later be targeted during those infamous Halloween gatherings in the 1970s.

Deep in an abandoned keg room, I find an old Brewer’s Retail sign screwed to the wall, gesturing to this period when the St. Charles was one of the city’s top sellers of draught beer. Graffiti is carved into the wooden door, the names of old staff members.

The St. Charles would gradually evolve into less of a draw for the queer community. Compared to the friendlier, gay-owned establishments popping up a few blocks over, the bar became somewhat notorious for petty crimes, drug deals and the sex trade. The tavern’s notoriety hit its peak after the disappearance and murders of a few patrons — brutal attacks that remain unsolved and from which the bar never fully recovered. It closed in 1987.

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The final decades of 484-488 Yonge were unceremonious. Various retail shops filled the ground floor, with dance clubs like Empire and Circus occupying the upper level until the late ’90s. The space would eventually be converted to rental apartments, with the building emptied in late 2018 when demolition began in earnest.

During one of my final visits to the building, I muster up the courage to climb up an old service ladder into the highest chamber of the old tower, above the tiny room where I usually sit.

There, I find the old clockwork, rusted, the time locked at half-past three. Manually, I turn the mechanism forward, but the clock remains inactive, no sound save for my camera and the birds that have long made the tower their home. Soon it will move again.

But perhaps there will still be those drawn to it for reasons beyond merely telling time.

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