One of the very last no-nonsense, non-hipster Toronto watering holes, a two-storey fixture for 81 years in the proper thick of downtown, is shutting down on Nov. 15. It’s reasonable to be impressed that it lasted so long — longer than almost any comparable institution in the city. But the Imperial Pub and Tavern, owned for its entire history by the Newman family, has somehow never seemed more essential. First the Jays lose, now this?

The Yonge and Dundas area the Imperial inhabits has transformed many times over the Imperial’s run. Even in my lifetime, it has been several different kinds of seedy — peep shows and porn shops; video arcades with too many strange men in them — and now it’s every kind of grim. Toronto’s grasping, tragically misbegotten attempt to replicate Times Square was a

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