Paige Turner wore a new stage costume for the final night of Filmores Hotel and Gentlemen’s Club.
In front of a packed audience of regulars old and new, she danced in an aquamarine robe, corset and bikini she had adorned with rhinestones and snake appliqués.
It was a symbol of the club’s closure as a shedding of her skin, a part of her, as she and other staff members described, that she was sad to leave behind, but grateful to have experienced.
Turner, who worked at Filmores off and on for 20 years, performed her final stage set to “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” “Goodnight Moon,” “Ghost Town” and “The Killing Moon,” and danced with a large white balloon filled with LED lights, her moon.
Jan. 31 was the final night for Filmores, a strip club in business for the past 45 years. The building near Dundas Street East and Jarvis was sold in 2020 to developer Menkes for $31.5 million, and rental apartments are planned.
While some people may think of strip clubs as sleazy, inside the walls of Filmores, there was nothing but love and fond memories on the final night of its showing, as Toronto lost a colourful piece of its history.
Strip clubs are a vanishing breed. Thirty years ago, there were 2,515 dancers licensed to work in 41 strip bars across Metro Toronto. Now, only 482 dancers are licensed for seven remaining Toronto clubs. The city has a limited number of operator licences available for strip clubs, and bylaws regulate where they can be. So when one closes, opening another is difficult.
Filmores was known by a few different names — “Fils,” the club, the facility or the theatre. Many of the club’s walls are painted Pepto-Bismol pink, specifically the change room and break room, which is a hotel room staff call “the smoking room.”
Back in 1994, when lap dances were first legalized in Ontario by Judge Gordon Hachborn, Filmores celebrated by naming one of its lap-dance areas “The Hachborn Room” and put his name on their marquee, notorious for its fun phrases: FILMORES PRESENTS JUDGE HACHBORN STYLE LAP AND COUCH DANCING NO COVER CHARGE.
Before starting her shift at 9 p.m. on the last night the club was open, bartender Devon Simpson stood on the bed in the smoking room and wrote a poem on the wall in thick, black permanent marker:
“This was never just a club. It was a home, a shelter stitched together by lashes and laughter, by late nights, shared smokes, deep talks in the back and a love that felt like family.”
When a club closes, its community scatters. Co-workers split, some never to be seen again. That’s how it’s always been in the adult entertainment industry. This is no different, and the people who love this place are deeply affected by its closure. But staff said there was magic in there that they’ll carry with them.
The Filmores Family
The most common refrain Filmores president Howard Adams said he heard from his staff since he decided to sell back in 2020 was: “I don’t want to work anywhere else in the city.”
“I always felt protected and cared for and like I was a part of something,” said Paige Turner. “We really did create such a beautiful little community.”
Lili, a former dancer at the club, said she could always work shifts at Filmores if she needed to: “I knew for over 20 years that I could show up at Filmores, either at my best, or my worst. Even if it had been years, and I would be given a room, a job, a drink and a meal.”
Bartender Devon Simpson said no matter where you work, you can make friends, but it’s different at a strip club.
“There’s a certain aspect of vulnerability that goes along with that, and openness,” she said. “You kind of bear more than you normally would at any other workplace.”
Many staff, including company president Adams, said they grew up at the club and learned how they wanted to live their lives under its neon glow. Dancers said Filmores gave them independence. As independent contractors, they typically decided their own hours; the club also granted them financial freedom.
“I’ve saved my life many times at Filmores,” Turner said.
Recalling her first day, in March 2008, Turner remembered walking up the stairs to the stage for the very first time: “I was in control,” she said. “One of the things that this job and being in this world has taught me is that my time is valuable, I’m worthy of my own efforts and attention, being able to sustain me and help me build the life that I want to live,” she said. “I’m so glad I’m this kind of girl.”
Filmores was accepting of a more diverse range of staff and was less discriminatory than other clubs in Toronto, said Tuulia Law, associate professor at York University and organizing team member of Work Safe Twerk Safe, a Toronto-based, stripper-led resources organization. Clubs like Filmores accepted body types outside of conventional, Eurocentric feminine beauty norms, which Law said is important because they provide work opportunities for women who are unlikely to be accepted or allowed to work consistently at clubs that brand themselves as “upper class.” In practice, she said, that often means lighter skin tones, slimmer figures and younger-looking dancers.
“It’s a loss,” she said. “A permanent closure will destroy those networks and communities.”
Law said the disappearance of a club like Filmores means strippers who don’t fit into these beauty standards may lose a revenue stream and explore other kinds of sex work, like erotic massage parlours and escorting — which can involve services with which they may be less comfortable. They may switch to a lower paying non-sex-industry job, she added.
How Filmores came to be
Before there was a building on the site of 212 Dundas St. E., it was part of 100 acres owned by Toronto mayor (and later Speaker of the Senate) George Allan, namesake of Allan Gardens. According to City of Toronto archives, Allan’s son split those acres into lots. Lot Four, the largest and first sold in 1872, would become Filmores. But first, it became a rooming house, then apartments, then a hotel.
In 1980, the property was purchased by Stage 212 Inc., the company of business partners Phil Stein and Morris Adams.
Howard Adams said originally, his father Morris had planned to knock the hotel down and build an office building. But the economy weakened, and Phil and Morris decided to open a venue in the existing space. First, they tried a rock-and-roll-themed bar, then country-western, jazz, and a lesbian bar called Fly By Night. Nothing stuck.
“They finally threw their hands up in the air, said, ‘OK, this neighbourhood and this address is known for adult entertainment, so let’s provide them good adult entertainment,’” Adams said.
They renovated and started booking acts, and it started to do better. The name, Filmores, is a combination of the co-founders Phil and Morris.
Club regular Bob, who asked that only his first name be published, said he first snuck into Filmores when he was 17 because he’d heard a dancer named Cheri Champagne was doing her legendary giant champagne glass show.
“The bouncer was skeptical, but Champagne, who happened to be seated at the bar near the door with a less-than-desirable customer who wanted her to moo like a cow, said something like, ‘Oh come on; let him in,’” said Bob.
He was hooked.
By the mid-‘80s, strippers would dance on mini-stage boxes at tables for $5 a song.
“There were actually real lineups outside the club in daylight hours when you could actually see people’s faces and inside it was at capacity,” he recalled.
Adams, like many employees, grew up at the club, he said. When he came of age, he started picking up shifts for pocket money while he studied at the University of Toronto. He started as a busboy, and over the next 10 years, “I probably worked every job in here,” he said: bartender, doorman, manager, front desk clerk, DJ.
Adams would go out on his own, moving to the United States. In 1993, his father Morris died. Phil Stein continued to run the club until 2000, when he called Adams and told him he wanted to sell. Howard didn’t think the offers made to Stein were good enough, so he returned and bought Filmores himself.
He’d planned to stay a couple of years. But he said the business needed rehabilitation, and that took time. He also met his wife; they’ve been married 26 years.
“Turning it around for me, it was easy, yeah, because I knew the business,” he said during an interview in his office, surrounded by boxes and packing tubes filled with promotional materials like posters and keychains that spanned the club’s history. “I recognized what needed to change.”
When the club got its second wind, Filmores had the luxury of bringing in all kinds of different talent and retaining it, said general manager Derek Simpson.
What comes next for Filmores?
Adams said he is intent on finding a new location and reopening, but it’s been difficult. There’s a preconceived notion among landlords that strip club tenants make a lot of money, he said, so even though he’s seen viable places, he has been asked to pay twice as much to rent, or up to 60 per cent above market price to buy. But he said he is not giving up.
Adams also told Toronto Today that city zoning laws are making the search difficult. Current bylaws prevent strip clubs from existing within 100 metres of a residential area, 500 metres of a school or place of worship, or within 500 metres of another adult entertainment business.
York professor Law said the bylaws are discriminatory.
“There’s very much a direct connection between assumptions about what goes on at strip clubs,” and disproportionately high rates charged to operators and people working there.
“I think that the process of finding a new location is one where patience will be rewarded,” Adams said. “I’m not chasing a bad deal.”
The local city councillor, Chris Moise (Ward 13—Toronto Centre), said the $31.5 million the building sold for “is a reflection of how attractive land in that location now is to developers,” and noted the parking lot beside the club sold for $20 million.
Moise said the stretch of Dundas East between Jarvis and Sherbourne streets is well known for being one of the least safe downtown blocks. Moise noted the redevelopment of the area has brought more small and local businesses, that he has prioritized building affordable housing and financial support for tenants displaced by redevelopment projects.
“The redevelopment of Filmores is another big step forward in the revitalization of that area.”
It’s hard to know what residents think of the end of the club. The area used to be primarily known for having a large population of homeless Torontonians due to several nearby shelters and offering affordable rent for students. But condos, whose doors have signs that read “RESIDENTS ONLY” in large letters, have closed in from the west, starting at Church and Dundas, making their way east across the block, adding in a Starbucks, a Papa John’s Pizza and pushing lower-income residents out.
At least a couple of neighbouring businesses are sorry to see the club go.
An employee of Vape X, across the street from Filmores, said the club brought them good business on weekends and he estimated the closure will result in their store losing out on $400 to $500 a week.
Mahfaz Rahmar, owner of MJ Curry Kitchen, also across the street from Filmores, said although about one person a week would come into the restaurant and be rowdy, the club’s closure means they will lose a lot of business.
‘The stripperiest stripper of all time’
Many Filmores staff interviewed for this story asked that their real and even stage names not be published. Some of their families don’t know what they do. Some don’t want the attention or judgment often attached to stripping. As online platforms like Instagram censor Toronto strippers despite them not seeming to break any rules, some said they fear increased stigmatization of their work. Simplistically characterizing that strip clubs can sometimes be places of exploitation and abuse maintains the misperception that sex work is violence, which it is not, Law added.
“The problem is that the people who know the least about it think they know the most about it,” said the dancer known as the Queen of Filmores.
The Queen asked that her name not be used in this story, as her family isn’t aware she is a dancer.
Her first time at a strip club was when she went to interview for a job as a waitress. For the first year, she was in the background, “taking everything in.” She learned to dance by watching other dancers, and some helped her while working the less-busy day shift, but ultimately, when you get on stage for the first time, “you figure it out,” she said.
“I feel like it’s a destiny,” she said, about becoming a stripper. “Everyone may not get that, but I do feel like I was chosen.”
The dancer Lili described the Queen is “the stripperiest stripper of all time.”
“I love what I do and I know that’s a blessing,” the Queen said. “I was given this beautiful life.”
The Queen tried out working at a new club earlier last month. “I felt like it was my first day again, on stage,” she said. “I was horrible.”
She compared her first stage set in a new environment to getting a new desk chair at an office job. Though she found it uncomfortable, she’s getting used to it, she said.
“You learn again to just own your own presence up there, whatever it may be.”
