Editor’s note: This story has been updated from a previously published version.

Sitting at a table on a makeshift stage for a news conference on Wednesday afternoon, Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins — “The Hawk,” as his black baseball cap introduced him — was reminded that when he arrived from Arkansas on the Yonge Street strip in Toronto, he called it “the promised land.”

“It was the promised land!” he shouted.

As rock and roll history records, he moved up here, with his band, and set up shop in Le Coq d’Or nightclub, building legends, including his own, and making the strip ever more the promised land for music fans.

Yonge is still Toronto’s main drag, of course, but a Ryerson student happening by the parkette at Granby St. might have been surprised to think of it as a “music mecca,” as one of the speakers called it. I mean, today, you’ve got the excitement of the Nordstroms opening at the Eaton Centre, and the Saks Fifth Avenue signs going up on what has long been The Bay, and the glittering billboards of Yonge-Dundas Square. It’s a fascinating and exciting place, but a rockin’ promised land?

Well once upon a time, there wasn’t a place more synonymous with music excitement in Canada. In the 1950s and 1960s, you could pop in an see The Hawk and his band — Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson and the boys who would become The Band — and Bob Dylan might be there, or Bo Diddley, or Kris Kristofferson, or Conway Twitty. Some of the gang that replaced The Band went on to be Janis Joplin’s backup band.

And as Gordon Lightfoot said, also there at the press conference, after a set at Le Coq d’Or you might follow Hawkins and his gang up to the folk club the Steeles Tavern, where he’d be working on his material onstage or launching a single with Ian and Sylvia Tyson or Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the audience.

Or you could wander down to the Colonial Tavern to catch Muddy Waters, or the Town Tavern to see Oscar Peterson or other jazz legends work right there in front of you. It was right around the corner at Massey Hall where Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gilespie, Bud Powell and Max Roach recorded a live album together — the only time those five recorded together.

Up and down the strip you had every style of edgy music. You had blues and calypso and reggae at the Calypso Club, open all night after the other bars closed. You had Glenn Gould, the swaying, ecstatic classical music virtuoso holding the stage at age 14 at the Eaton Auditorium. You even had The Beatles just off the strip at Maple Leaf Gardens.

This was a city famous for its buttoned-up Protestantism, but the Yonge Street strip was a bacchanal — crowded with neon lights and go-go dancers and boozy juke joints and drag shows and strip clubs and grindhouse triple-bill theatres. And the best live music, in every genre, anywhere.

The street’s music history, music journalist Nicholas Jennings said at the press conference, “is worth remembering, especially as the buildings that housed that music disappear.” In the place where the Colonial Tavern once stood, there was a park with a historical plaque, which today has been removed to make way for the construction of a glass-and-steel tower. Where the Steeles Tavern and Sam the Record Man were, today Ryerson has built an angular blue student building to face the street.

But up at a park at Granby St., those places and the people who played in them will be remembered. Hawkins and Lightfoot and Jennings were on hand to launch the painting of a mural, which will eventually be 22 storeys high, on the side of a community housing building, bearing the faces and facades of music legends gone by.

Already, on the wall area closest to the ground, artist Adrian Hayles has painted Oscar Peterson grinning, his hands on a piano; B.B. King, eyes closed in the rapture of a guitar solo, Lightfoot crooning into a mic. Other legends will be added in a totemic tower, tinted in bright blues and rich browns and deep black — Shirley Matthews, Muddy Waters, Jackie Shane, Diane Brooks, Glenn Gould, and at the top, The Hawk. The logos of bars and record shops gone by will be beside them.

Eventually, we’re told, the mural will be interactive, with a smartphone app that will bring the music and history of those depicted to life.

Theirs was a Yonge Street — as much an attitude as a place — that was familiar to those in Toronto not just at the time, but later, in the 1970s and 1980s, when teenagers and tourists would make pilgrimages to Sam the Record Man, or to the head shops for t-shirts and bongs, or to the Rock Pile to see Led Zepplin or to the New Yorker to see The Ramones or to The Edge, just off the strip, to see The Police. It seemed a bit seedy, and maybe slightly dangerous, but it was exciting, pulsing with energy, with the spirit of music — jazz, blues, calypso, rock, punk. Yonge Street was a place where it felt like the world opened up, and a different, more exciting life was possible.

Does Yonge Street still feel like that to teenagers arriving on its strip for the first time today? It’s hard for me to say, I’ve known the place my entire life — went to university on the strip, ran a restaurant on Yonge, work in an office on the street today. I’ve seen it shift, and change, and grow.

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If these walls could talk… we often say. Thanks to Hayles’ art, this wall will, and the story it tells is of a place, for rockers and dreamers alike, that felt a lot like the promised land.