As part of new liquor laws introduced in 1934 the Province of Ontario introduced what became a cultural touchstone here, the hotel beverage room.
The sale of liquor in government stores, and beer in brewery-owned warehouses (now The Beer Store system), has been lawful since 1927 but only from 1934 were licensed taverns allowed to sell full-strength beer.
For a long time as well a tavern had to be part of a hotel with a lobby and separate dining room. Special licensing applied for clubs, soldiers’ messes, trains and Great Lakes steamships.
Only beer and wine were served in these taverns. Stand-alone cocktail bars were not allowed until the end of the 1940s. The best remembered is the Silver Rail on Yonge Street. I visited a number of times until it closed about 15 years ago. By the time I got there the tired decor testified to a decline, but a ghost of the former glitter and glamour lingered.
In retrospect I should have gone more often, for the history. It was all mirrored walls and shiny banquettes, anchored by a sinuous curved bar.
In contrast, as mandated by Premier Mitch Hepburn in 1934, hotel beverage rooms bore a clinical mien. Basic round tables and chairs handled the traffic, and frosted glass or other stratagems hid the interior from street view.
Separate men’s, ladies’, and “with escorts” sections were mandated to preserve an orderly atmosphere.
There was no standing in the tavern: patrons had to drink beer seated. Changes in 1946 meant only one beer could be ordered at a time, in small measures. English or even American pints were far in the future.
In the 1930s and ’40s Toronto journalists regularly investigated these statutory haunts. Maclean’s magazine ran major features in 1934 and 1945.
You can read, here, Morley Murray’s crisp reportage of December 1, 1945, notable for its period, “just the facts, ma’am” style and comprehensive scope.
In August 1946 Lex Schrag wrote a three-part series for the Toronto Globe and Mail, termed “the Customer”, “the Hotelman”, and most appropriately, “the Law”.
Sadly, he omitted “the Beer”, but at the time Ontario tavern patrons and the Fourth Estate expressed little interest in the beer palate. There may have have been commentary of an “intramural” nature, if so a record is lacking, by my ken.
Schrag did state that with wartime rationing still in force beer often was not sufficiently aged. Short of that he offered no discussion on matters of colour, style, temperature, taste.
Murray did not discuss beer at all, its intrinsic merits that is. His piece gains value for the social and economic insights offered. For example, temperance as a public issue was far from a spent force and Murray made sure to address the issue.
Schrag, for his part, contrasted the beverage room with the British public house, typing the latter as a largely peaceful, organic part of its community. He hoped the Ontario beverage room would morph into this. History has shown this largely did take place, as modern bars are really as much eateries, for the main part well-appointed. The raucous edges of the old-time saloon have been rubbed away.
Schrag pictured 1946 Ontario as wracked by guilt about alcohol, evidently a legacy of earlier temperance campaigns and legislative experiments to ban booze. This resulted in mechanical and furtive drinking and – not without irony – drunken scenes, as he well depicted.
The temporary English pub at the 1949 Canadian International Trade Fair in Toronto, which I discussed earlier, is all the more striking in this light. The same for a similar pub in late- 1960s Toronto,and the for British Week in Canada.
This was the start here of showing there was another way to organise popular public drinking.
While “Toronto the Good”, as Toronto was once derisively called, gave these early British pubs a warm reception, that style of drinking really only took root in the 1970s, ditto the idea that a tavern could stand alone, sans hotel.
All this noted, there are still drinking places in Ontario, even Toronto, that evoke the old beverage room. And a hotel might still be there, perched alongside or on the higher floors, disused.
The advertisement above is from the November 1957 Maclean’s magazine. As the beverage room still retained its1934 design in the Fifties, ads might portray beer being consumed at home in comfortable, sometimes unrealistic settings, but an aspirational purpose was at work.
Finally the tavern caught up with this ideal, from the 1970s as noted. Liquor stores, which increasingly sold beer (vs. only the Beer Store system) caught up too, shedding their earlier bare-bones, functional look for warmish, inviting places of consumer disport.
Note re images: The first image above was drawn from Maclean magazine’s archives, here. The second was drawn from the website sootoday.com. All intellectual property therein belongs solely to the lawful owners, as applicable. Images used for educational and historical purposes. All feedback welcomed.