By Dan Brown

I wish I could go back in time to step into the Library Pub for the first time again.

As a twentysomething journalism student at Ryerson University, what was I thinking as I stepped through the door on Toronto’s Dundas Street and walked up the stairs to the venerable pub?

Did I know then how the Library Pub would become an unofficial headquarters for our class, how I would spend so much time there in the following two years, how it would loom so large in my memories?

I ask these questions because the Library Pub, which was the dive of choice for many a generation of Rye High journalism students, will soon be no more.

As of Nov. 15, the family that has owned the Imperial Pub (which is the downstairs part) is closing the whole business. The building is to be razed to make room for more housing for Toronto Metropolitan University students – the same school I went to in the 1990s, only with a different name.

Located maybe three blocks from the j-school, the Library was where our class walked briskly on Oct. 3, 1995 when we heard the O.J. Simpson verdict was about to come down. We grabbed some glasses of draft, snuggled into the wide and worn leather couches, then asked the bar staff to switch the wide-screen TV to CNN. 

It was not the verdict I had expected.

It was also where we went for a pitcher or two of Rickard’s Red after every occasion, like our final TV broadcast class. The old-school jukebox had maybe a hundred jazz songs on it and every one of them was Frank Sinatra’s Summer Wind.

I bought many glasses of beer for my classmates, one of whom I am friends with to this day. In fact, she was the best “man” at my wedding. Journalism school was a shared experience, and that bar room is also where we bonded, complaining about our instructors and dreaming of how we would fix journalism while we played pool.

We also watched episodes of The Simpsons, which was then in its glory days. In one episode it was revealed that Sideshow Bob’s real name is Robert Onderdonk Terwilliger, which was strange because we had a Rob Onderdonk in our class, too.

And yes, I was told by my classmates that this conversation did take place on more than one occasion when I was missing from class:

– Where’s Dan?
– He’s at the Library.
– Wow, he’s always at the Library, he studies so much.
Along with many of my peers, I went on to a long career in journalism. My classmates became sports columnists and movie-magazine editors and freelance reporters.

I spent almost a decade in Toronto all told before following my passion for journalism back to Southwestern Ontario. Now I mentor students who are roughly the same age I was in my prime drinking days.

I haven’t been to the Library Pub in years, perhaps even decades, so I would be the first to admit: What I’m writing is really a tribute to the Library as it was back then, to the Library Pub of my mind – although I’m told it never changed much.

I will also admit that some bars never get immortalized like this. 

In fact, this column belongs to the subgenre of articles about watering holes that get written for no better reason than  they matter to journalists, like McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon (the New Yorker), the Wheat Sheaf Tavern (the Globe and Mail) and the Bucket of Blood/Victoria Tavern (the London Free Press). 

You can call me guilty of the same journalistic crime.

Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.