It was a chance sighting while stuck in lousy traffic — and now a piece of Toronto’s music history has joined a growing collection of glowing gems chronicling the city’s neon past.

In January, music historian Nicholas Jennings was driving east along Queen Street West near Roncesvalles Avenue when the glow from a storefront window suddenly caught his eye. He immediately pulled over and made an urgent call to an old friend.

In the window of Classic Vintage Audio & Props, plugged in and illuminated, was the sign for the old Record Nook, a vinyl record store that operated during the 1960s and 1970s and served as a gathering place for the Jamaican community and fans of reggae, jazz, soul and calypso.

Jennings, who has written extensively about music, thought it would fit well into the collection of neon signs being assembled by the Downtown Yonge Business Improvement Area (BIA). Executive director Mark Garner agreed wholeheartedly.

“The Record Nook sign was a monumental find. (It’s) a huge win for cultural heritage in the city,” Garner said, noting the sign was stored for decades in the basement of the convenience store that succeeded the record store before it was sold to Classic Vintage Audio.

For years, the sign adorned the Record Nook at 1400 Bathurst Street, which opened in 1968 and closed sometime in the 1970s. It was owned and operated by Jamaican-born reggae legends Jackie Mittoo and Lord Tanamo and featured the works of artists like Clement ‘Sir Coxsone’ Dodd, Leroy Sibbles, Stranger Cole, Ernie Smith and Carlene Davis at a time when Toronto had the biggest reggae music scene outside of Kingston, Jamaica.

The sign joins a collection of almost 30 others, gathered over the past five years, and now stored in various locations around the city, including the BIA’s Dundas Street West offices, and as far away as Orillia, as it awaits a final destination — a permanent neon museum to showcase Toronto’s illuminated past.

“You find these neon signs and it’s like, ‘Oh my God, I remember this place,’” said Garner

Some recent acquisitions include the sign for the Canary Restaurant on Cherry Street on the edge of the West Don Lands, which closed in 2007, and one for the now defunct Crescent Grill, which hung next door to the iconic El Mocambo on Spadina Avenue for decades.

More recently, the group has snagged the Fred’s Not Here sign for the King Street West eatery from owner Fred Luk after the restaurant closed last year.

The Sea Hi Famous Chinese Restaurant at Bathurst and Wilson — once located on Dundas Street West in the city’s oldest Chinatown district — will offer its neon marquee for free to the collection after it closes its doors later this month, after 59 years in business.

“A lot of the signs come our way because people want to tell the story of the family or the venue in some capacity,” Garner said.

Next up? Wrangling the sign for Filmores Hotel, a rather notorious strip club/hotel on Dundas Street East, which opened in 1980. The business will soon move to a new location after the building was sold to Menkes Development.

“We’re after the Filmore sign. A lot of people may not like it, but it’s an iconic sign to Torontonians,” Garner said.

The BIA has also acquired two large signs from the Hard Rock Cafe at Yonge-Dundas Square, which opened in 1978 and closed in 2017.

“The Hard Rock guitar sign weighs more than a tonne. To move that around and to put it on display is monumental. One thing I’ve learned, if I’ve learned one thing in the last five years, is that neon is not cheap,” Garner said, noting many of the signs in the collection require careful and pricey restoration.

Neon lighting, using glass tubing filled with neon or other inert gases, made its debut in 1910 in Paris. Neon signs, initially used in outdoor advertising, soon began to sprout up in places like New York’s Times Square, and had their heyday in cities around the world from the 1920s to 1960s.

As their collection grows, Garner believes he’s found the ideal location for a permanent home for what is tentatively called Neon Museum Toronto. It’s Old City Hall, which reverts to the city when its main tenant, the provincial courts, vacate the building at the end of 2021.

Tentative plans approved by city council for the 121-year-old landmark include a museum of Toronto’s history as part of its redevelopment.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“It’s the spot. It’s got to be the spot,” Garner enthused in a recent interview.

“As Old City Hall repurposes, give us 10,000 square feet and we’ll program the heck out of it, put signs in there and tell all those stories. It’s an iconic building with great heritage,” Garner said.

“We’re looking for a bricks and mortar location, trying to find a spot in our patch which is the Yonge-Dundas neighbourhood since Yonge Street was the most iconic place for neon,” he added.

A pop-up museum last year in the Junction community, in concert with Slate.com, drew more than 4,000 visitors over three days, suggesting there’s a strong public interest, Garner said, adding negotiations are underway with several developers who’ve expressed interest in playing host to future pop-ups.

“We just keep putting more signage into storage until we can ultimately get that bricks and mortar (location). Otherwise, we’re going at it with pop-ups,” Garner said.

But one sign that almost certainly won’t likely be part of the collection: the one for the Gasworks, a legendary rock ‘n’ roll bar on the east side of Yonge Street, north of Wellesley, that closed in 1993.

“We know where the Gasworks sign is but the current owner wants a significant amount of money for it,” Garner said.