Last Call

The Imperial Pub was a beloved local haunt for more than 80 years. I spent my entire life behind the bar

- BY FRED NEWMAN

MY DAD BOUGHT the Imperial Pub in 1944, the year before I was born. I’ve never known life without it. It was my grandfather who had heard the place was for sale—he and my dad later worked there together. My dad used to say that he walked through the doors on Dundas Street and saw his future. The space wasn’t a pub back then—it was a “beverage room” in a hotel. The law stipulated that we had to have at least nine rooms for rent, which we had upstairs. In the 1940s, the liquor laws in Ontario were such that, if you ran a public house, you were allowed to sell draft or bottled beer but no wine or liquor. Lounges could sell bottled beer and wine but no draft beer. We had to close at 6:30 p.m. and reopen at 8 p.m. so customers would leave and go home for dinner.

Everything was separated by gender: one entrance was for men, and another was for women and women with male escorts. The bar itself was two separate rooms. My dad replaced part of the wall between them with a custom aquarium. He wanted the space to be divided by something beautiful that customers could see from both sides of the bar. As a kid, I would spend hours watching the angelfish. All the waiters were nice to me because I was the boss's son. When I was seven or eight years old, my friends all wanted to be firefighters or astronauts. I wanted to be a publican.