At the York

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright and librettist and author of the
children’s books Magic and What’s in a Name?

In the 1950s, the York Hotel in London, Ontario, allowed no singing by
its patrons and only one beer to a customer. In the 1960s, entertainment
was allowed in and the place was transformed into a lively drinking hole
for artists, writers, and jazz musicians.

In 1984 Wayne Johnston interviewed five men who were part of the scene
at the York in the 1960s. Eddie Assaf, an ex-musician who managed the
hotel until it was sold in 1980, talks lovingly of the music he brought
to his pub. Artist Greg Curnoe was one of the founders of the Nihilist
Spasm Band, which pulled in a lot of people, Eric Stach was a jazz
musician who played there, James Reaney a dramatist who drank there, and
Robert McKaskell an art historian who didn’t go there very much and
remembers the place as low-class and very noisy.

Recalling the York 20 years after its heyday, these men talk with some
incoherence of the culture of another time, when London was alive with
artists of all disciplines. Johnston has recorded their comments in a
rhapsodic oral history that doesn’t go anywhere in particular, but
perhaps that’s what the story is all about. By some mysterious process
a drinking place becomes home to a group of creative people, and then
it’s over. But no one who was there ever forgets it.