After 36 years serving thirsty Torontonians on Queen Street West, Squirly’s Bar & Grill will pour its last drink on November 16.
For staff and regulars, the closing of Squirly’s means the end of an era. Not just the end of a steadfast fixture of the neighbourhood, but also the final nail in the coffin for Queen Street West’s grungier past.
When Squirly’s first opened in 1988, Queen Street was a low-rent haven full of mom-and-pop shops, bars, restaurants and a healthy number of nightclubs and punk venues. But even in the late ‘80s, things were starting to change as Toronto’s downtown core expanded and developer money arrived in the area to drive up real estate prices.
Queen Street West has since become a neighbourhood used to change and turnover. But through the years, Squirly’s persisted.
“Squirly’s is definitely the last or one of the last bastions of a former Queen West, and that's expressed in the way that it has really been in stasis, for better or for worse, for 36 years,” said long-time Squirly’s bartender Hannah Lecours.
With that long history comes a dedicated community of regulars who have been coming to Squirly’s for decades, comforted by the nostalgia it brings. On any given night, up to 80 per cent of the bar could be regulars, Lecours estimated.
“Everyone's always treated this place like a living room, to a problematic degree,” she joked. “I’ve had to tell customers, like, ‘Can you not change your baby’s diaper on the couch?”
Former bartender Mike Schram, who used to work at Squirly’s from 2014 to 2018, said he calls the bar his “Cheers,” referring to the NBC sitcom.
“Really, half the people in here know everyone’s names,” Schram said, noting conversations are always flowing at the bar between friends and strangers alike.
“It's the kind of place where you can meet your best friend and your worst enemy and it can be the same person and you can meet him within five minutes of sitting down,” he said.
Lecours, who has worked at Squirly’s for the past nine years, put it frankly: “We're not selling any kind of highly-refined commodity that you can't get elsewhere. The only thing that we've ever been very good at selling is community.”
Contributing to that easy-going attitude is the fact the Squirly’s bartenders pretty much have the run of the place with minimal oversight from the owners, Lecours and Schram said.
The owners of Squirly’s did not respond to TorontoToday’s request to be interviewed.
Before Schram worked at Squirly’s he was drinking at the bar one day when he witnessed a long-standing tradition between the staff of Squirly’s and its sister bar, the Done Right Inn, just down the road.
“The two bartenders looked at me sitting at the bar and said, ‘The bar is yours for five minutes. Watch the bar.’ And they would run down to the Done Right Inn yelling ‘Home and home! Home and home!’”
When the Squirly’s staff arrived at the Done Right, both sets of bartenders would do shots, then have to race back to Squirly’s for another set of shots.
“And so each bar was not looked after for like 10 minutes on a Saturday afternoon,” Schram said.
Lecours remembers doing something similar, except she met the Done Right staff in the middle of the street for shots.
“One of the beautiful things about Squirly’s is that it's an environment that's so ripe for the conjuring of urban lore,” Lecours said. “Things get lost in broken telephone.”
Schram and Lecours both told TorontoToday the bar is called Squirly’s because the owner used to have a pet squirrel with that moniker when he was a child. Without speaking to the owner, TorontoToday can’t verify this information.
Both bartenders also said Sarah Blackwood, the lead singer of Walk Off The Earth, used to work at the bar. TorontoToday reached out to Blackwood but did not hear back by publication time.
Staff and regulars have their fair share of notorious tales that would be difficult to verify, but perhaps that’s the point of a bar that functions as much as a community gathering spot as it does a place to sell food and drinks.
John McDonald, a photographer who has been coming to Squirly’s since the 1990s, said he doesn’t know where he’s going to go for an after-work pint once the bar is gone.
Another regular named Gerald, who asked that TorontoToday only include his first name, said he’s been coming to Squirly’s for 15 years, and he’s sad to see the makeup of Queen Street West change so much over the years.
“This part of Queen Street is changing into something else. There’s not much here for the locals anymore and this is just one more of the local places that’s going to disappear,” he said.
In place of the bars and music venues, Queen Street is full of eyeglass stores, Gerald decried.
“It's now an optical shop competing with the other optical shop and the other optical shop,” he joked.
Lecours and Schram said the Squirly’s proprietors own the building they operate in, so they aren’t being forced out due to rising rents, which is a familiar story in this city. Instead, Lecours said the owners are simply tired and ready to move on.
In the corner of Squirly’s window reads a message thanking the “incredible staff and customers who made Squirly's a beloved neighbourhood gathering place for so long” and encouraging patrons to “drink the bar dry” before Nov. 16.
For Lecours, there isn’t much use in mourning the loss of Squirly’s or the changing landscape of Queen Street.
“It’s like mourning the presence of my grey hairs,” she said. “It seems futile to devote too much energy to mourning the loss of it because that’s just the nature of time and change and the lifespan of communities in the city.”
Still, she’s sad to see Squirly’s go and noted that at one point in time, the bar was a steadier home than any apartment she had in the city.
For a city that doesn’t have “much reverence for history or the passage of time,” Torontonians still want to feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves, Lecours said. She maintained that Squirly’s provided just that for its community.
“People really yearn for that kind of opportunity to belong to a story that extends across history,” she said. “Squirly’s is special because there's so few places that foster that sort of community and that kind of energy.”
Schram, who said he’s made some of his best friends through the bar, said Squirly’s closing is akin to “someone really close to me dying or moving away.”
Even when the bar goes, the ripples it made in Toronto's cultural history will remain — a fitting end for a bar that means so much to the people who call it home.
