Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:04:00

The Freemasons built it, Led Zeppelin baptised it, and a Rolling Stones rehearsal kept the legend warm. The Concert Hall occupies the Masonic Temple at 888 Yonge Street, the six-storey landmark on the corner of Yonge and Davenport whose cornerstone was laid in November 1917 and whose first lodge meeting convened on New Year's Day 1918. At its peak the Temple housed 38 Masonic bodies, but the public hall was always a rental space to defray costs - lectures, ballroom dancing and community concerts at first, then, as the sixties arrived, rock and roll. As The Rock Pile in the late 1960s the room became Toronto counterculture's living room: Led Zeppelin played their first Toronto show here on February 2, 1969, while virtually unknown, and returned that August as chart-toppers - the second visit's extortionate fee famously helping bankrupt the promoters - with The Who, the Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa, Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry all on the same era's ledger. The Concert Hall decades kept the flow going - Iggy Pop, the Ramones, Iron Maiden, The Cure, Dead Kennedys, King Crimson and Depeche Mode through the 70s and 80s - before heritage designation in 1997 saved the building from developers who coveted the lucky 888 address. The broadcast years followed: CTV bought the Temple in 1998 as a news bureau and the home of Open Mike with Mike Bullard, the Rolling Stones rented it as a rehearsal hall, and MTV Canada broadcast from the building from 2006, even staging a U2 performance in 2009. Info-Tech Research Group bought and thoroughly restored the building in 2013, and since 2017 the hall has operated again as The Concert Hall - a 1,200-capacity events and concert space with a standing main floor, mezzanine and private boxes, its century of ghosts intact under the Masonic carvings.