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

Some of the earliest basketball games ever played happened in this building, and Feist played here a century later. The Great Hall at 1087 Queen Street West in Toronto was built for the West End YMCA - cornerstone laid November 13, 1889, dedicated October 9, 1890 - a High Victorian red-brick landmark by Gordon and Helliwell at the corner of Queen and Dovercourt. The original program was pure YMCA: a gymnasium with a bowling alley, a suspended running track - used by Boston Marathon winner Tom Longboat in training - a library, and the great assembly hall upstairs that gives the building its modern name. When the Y moved on in 1912 the building passed through a series of institutional lives: headquarters of the Royal Templars of Temperance, then the Independent Order of Foresters, then the Polish National Union, which published a newspaper here and housed Polish refugees after the Second World War. By the 1990s and 2000s it had drifted into service as a bohemian arts centre and performance space - Feist, Metric and Daniel Lanois all played its rooms - while the fabric of the building quietly deteriorated around the shows. Developer Steve Metlitski's Triangle Development bought the building and spent two years and roughly four million dollars on a top-to-bottom restoration completed in August 2016: facade, slate roof, turret, original windows, coffered ceilings and wood floors, plus an elevator, modern HVAC and new washrooms. The restored complex reopened in September 2016 as a multi-room events venue - the 460-capacity Main Hall with its horseshoe balcony, the Longboat Hall performance space in the old gymnasium, and smaller parlour rooms - hosting concerts, weddings, corporate events and Toronto Fashion Week. The project earned an honourable mention at the Heritage Toronto Awards and stands as the city's reference case for venue preservation: a building that spent 125 years serving whoever needed it, now maintained by the very shows it hosts.