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During the first half of the last century, Toronto could boast that it was home to some of the most popular dance halls in the entire country. Places such as the Silver Slipper north of Lakeshore Road on the east bank of the Humber River, the Club Esquire and Club Top Hat (located in the same building, although at different times, at Sunnyside Amusement Park on Humber Bay), the nearby and recently restored Palais Royale, the Masonic Temple at Yonge and Davenport, the Club 12 at 12 Adelaide Street East, and the Embassy at the northeast corner of Bloor and Bellair. This latter club was unique in that it had a specially designed dance floor that would sway with the dancers. It also opened as a very exclusive private club modelled after several others with the same name located in New York and London. Unfortunately, our Embassy Club went bankrupt after only a few years, but it did stick around as a regular dance venue until the 1960s.

While most of Toronto’s dance halls eventually went out of business due to changing trends, the one that was arguably the best known and at the time still doing a brisk business, was destroyed at the hands of an arsonist.

Proposed in the mid-1920s by a group of English businessmen, the building started out as just one component of a mammoth pleasure pier complex that would jut out into Lake Ontario from the Etobicoke side of the Humber River. The dance hall part of the project would accommodate three thousand couples in a ballroom that covered thirty thousand square feet and could be converted to a skating rink in the winter. Other buildings on the pier would include a 1,400-seat theatre and a large bandstand, as well as restaurants and souvenir stores. The complex would be known as the Palace Pier, a name it took from the extremely popular Palace Pier located in Brighton, England.

For a variety of reasons, the vast majority of which were brought on by the Great Depression and the resulting failure to sell a sufficient number of ten-dollar shares to the cash-strapped public to cover the million-dollar cost of the total project, the only thing Torontonians got in the end was the ballroom.

Looking east along the Queen Elizabeth Highway toward downtown Toronto from above the Christie Brown factory on Lake Shore Boulevard West, circa 1954. The biscuit company’s water tank, which is still there, is at the bottom of the photo. Near the top of the photo and jutting out into Lake Ontario at the mouth of the Humber River is the Palace Pier, which went up in flames on January 7, 1963.

Though initially built as a place where couples could dance to the sounds of the big bands (Canada’s Trump Davidson and Ellis McClintock were favourites), the Palace Pier was also used as a roller skating rink, a public auditorium, and as a venue for wrestling and boxing matches.

But it all came to an end early on the morning of January 7, 1963, when flames swept rapidly through the old building. Toronto lost one of its great landmarks that day.

At the top right of the accompanying photo, you can see the Palace Pier jutting out into the lake. In the foreground is the Lion Monument that was erected at the junction of Toronto’s Lake Shore Boulevard and the Queen Elizabeth Highway (QEW) coincident with the dedication of the “Queen E” by the Queen Mother in 1939. When the highway was widened in the mid-1970s, the monument was moved to a safer location on the east bank of the Humber River, south of what was previously known as the QEW, but since 1997 has been part of the Gardiner Expressway.

January 3, 2010