Leaving Eden: Montreal’s Venue Problem - Part One
part one: The Past
It’s September 2022, and I’m standing at the back of the Diving Bell Social Club, leaning up against the bar. The house lights have been dimmed, and the coloured stage lights flash with precise coordination, making for an ambiance that is at once intimate and exciting.
The band I’m in, Favourite Daughter, has a set tonight, and I’m killing time waiting for our set to start by watching the opening act, Dolly Blonde. The crowd is hyped, most audience members standing at the center of the old, orangey-brown dance floor and swaying to the electronic pulses of the music and Dolly’s melodious voice. The now-famous large brass diving bell helmet sits proudly atop the bar behind me, and I pretend to share a knowing nod with it after watching the set in front of me.
I smile, and wonder at the wonder of being here. How lucky I am to be here, right here, right now, in this place I’ve come to call a home. How I could do this forever, and never get tired of it.
Photo provided by The Diving Bell Social Club
It’s February 2024, and I’m sitting in my tiny home office as the sun sets on another cold winter day. The arm of my recording mic is angled downwards precariously, the mic itself edged as close as humanly possible to the output speakers of my phone. It’s a little too DIY for my liking, but this was the only opportunity I had to speak to Austin Wrinch before he leaves town for a while. We’re set to talk about a venue near and dear to both of us; one that became an integral weave in the fabric of Montreal’s arts and culture scene seemingly overnight, and which was torn from it almost as quickly.
Austin was the co-owner and manager of the Diving Bell Social Club, or club social le Scaphandre, a bar and performance space tucked away on the third floor of a building on St. Laurent just below Duluth. It hosted its final show on December 16th, 2023, after having been open since August 2018. At the time, Diving Bell’s opening felt auspicious - other Plateau mainstays like Divan Orange, Les Bobards and Psychic City had all closed down in recent months, and Diving Bell’s emergence felt like a passing of the torch, a new hope for the continuation of the area’s famed venue scene.
I think at this point, I don’t need to wax poetic about what happened to the Diving Bell. Anyone interested in the arts in this city at this point knows the story- it was covered by Forget The Box, all over the news, in all of our timelines and stories - and the legacy it has left in the hearts of those who loved it is palpable. Even Austin admits it: “By closing, we kind of have become a symbol of things that are going on regarding issues facing spaces in Montreal. It’s important to talk about it as much as possible.” And that’s what I’m here to do.
Those who grieved the loss of Diving Bell have had their share of pain, and I’m not in the business of reopening old wounds. What is important here is history and memory, and the power of recounting those things in an authentic way. For his part, Austin is patient with me, going through the different parts of the story - the whole story, not just the ones taken and passed around like a grudge we could all hold onto and break into little pieces - with admittedly a little tiredness, but also an authenticity that I find refreshing (after what I’m sure is the umpteenth time telling the story).
“Diving Bell was the home of Contact Theatre’s five year anniversary party which will forever be a core memory. A celebration of independent musical theatre in Montreal with so many incredible people in a warm inviting space that felt like home!”
To call Diving Bell a bar isn’t really giving it a fair shake. It had a bar, certainly- but it was a concert venue, a home for local comedy, a drag show theatre, an open mic spot, you name it. They hosted their own programming, from themed karaoke nights to the incredibly popular Teen Angst Cover Night, but also rented the space for third party events, like local theatre fundraisers and many others.
Unsurprisingly, this had been the goal of Wrinch and his partner Evan Johnston from the very beginning. The Diving Bell came about as the natural next step of what Austin, Evan, and Sarah Armiento from Hot Tramp were doing at ‘the Bog,’ a DIY space that actually still exists down in St-Henri. “The Bog was a really great space for live bands, but not ideal as like, a comedy space or a drag space,” says Austin. “It was working really really well, but because of its small size and the location there were definitely limitations… After a while, it felt like it would be cool to do this in a bigger room- the space was holding us back.” He goes on to describe it as being “in this crazy old building up a bunch of stairs and down a bunch of other stairs” - sound familiar?
It was only natural then to look for a better space that could do more. Enter the Diving Bell building, which already housed both Champs (a sports bar Mecca in the 80’s but a dive bar by then) and Blizzarts (now Barbosa), and was owned by an eccentric old man- an unusual and uncommon setup for Montreal spaces by 2018 standards. “The Diving Bell was an excuse to do what we did at the Bog at a higher level and also now be able to do different kinds of things,” says Austin. “It opened up new opportunities to do different kinds of things which we knew were going on in the city and that we had always wanted to do but couldn’t.”
Photo provided by The Diving Bell Social Club
With Evan being manager of Blizzarts at the time, the duo found out that the third floor was available, and after clearing out the floor over the course of a very long summer, they had a space. “It was an unusual start, kinda DIY in a sense,” says Austin, reminiscing. “We had all the permits and were paying taxes, on the grid, but with that DIY energy of doing it all ourselves and trying to make it a venue space first and a bar second.”
Some of you may not know this, but there was also a ‘secret’ fourth floor ABOVE the Diving Bell - one that was also essentially sitting empty and rotting at the time - which Austin and Evan knew would have to be dealt with. “We kind of realized that if this is going to work at all, any noise that we make is going to be very much heard on the fourth floor above,” Austin pointed out. “We knew that if we wanted to not have that be a problem, it would be better if it's us in control of it versus like, if it's going to be turned into some apartment or going to the sketchy landlord who is going to let it become super sketchy again.” Little did they know that even this would not halt the inevitable.
To their credit, Austin and Evan did something pretty spectacular with that space, converting the floor’s many rooms into studios and spaces that people could rent and work in as artists- some of whom were even employees of the Diving Bell at various times. “It was just a great way to kind of create a nice creative space, right above, like a secret kind of creative force up above the Diving Bell,” says Austin. “We just had these two little floors, hidden away in this building, and it was working in unison, both to protect from sound complaints as much as possible, but also just to kind of keep a nice, positive, creative energy. And it worked, you know, it was like a trickle down effect.”
“The first time I went to Diving Bell was for a queer open mic night where I performed an original song for the first time ever with my friend. I was so nervous but the crowd was lovely and I wish I could do it again! Then another time I went and saw Piss For Pumpkin, a local punk band that is unfortunately now broken up 😭 the show was soooo epic though and the venue was perfect for a close and connected crowd.”
The main thing you might remember if you were following the story of the closing of the Diving Bell is probably the noise. Even today, if you search ‘Diving Bell Montreal’ in your search engine of choice, you’ll see more than a few articles from other publications about how ‘noise issues’ and ‘increasing noise complaints’ were to blame for the venue’s out of the blue closure announcement on July 28, 2023. The way memory works is important here: because while noise complaints were definitely a factor in the Diving Bell’s demise, it was hardly the only one- but it was the one that latched the longest and tightest onto the public psyche.
“The issues with the neighbors, that was the thing that obviously people really paid the most attention to,” Austin admits. “And to be honest, it was so inconsistent. Like it'll be a situation where we don't hear from anyone for like 6 months straight and then all of a sudden it's like, four nights in a row the cops are showing up and you're just like, what changed?”
In retrospect, I think it’s easy to point a finger at the noise complaints; at shitty people who move into a very obviously mixed-use neighbourhood and decide to ruin the very thing that made it cool in the first place. It is baffling and stupid and cruel, and the feeling of righteous anger at that happening as a ‘person who lives here and likes it being cool’ is one that I think a lot of Montrealers have felt- as I expressed this very same thought to Austin when talking about this. And while I expected to be preaching to the choir on this, the truth is, as always, a little more complicated.
Let’s start with setting the record straight. Diving Bell wasn’t ‘shut down’- they chose to end things on their own terms. “Our lease expired,” says Austin. “We could have signed on for another five years, we were given the option to do that- but we made the decision to ultimately not re-sign, which is why we left at the end of the year.”
If that sounds wild to you, it was wild to me too. Diving Bell had an amazing thing going for it- but there’s something to be said about acknowledging that what you’ve got isn’t perfect, and striking out to do something better. Austin continues: “There were a bunch of reasons why it didn't make sense to hold on. All these persisting issues like, you know, the neighbors, the noise complaints… [but] also, accessibility was an issue; we were on the third floor, we had low ceilings which therefore means a low stage. Certain physical attributes of the building were just always going to be issues, and we had been there for about 5 years and we thought- we could always do better, and we're never going to be able to overcome those things in that space.”
So instead of fighting and going down with the ship, the Diving Bell team made the conscious choice to go out on top. And while their summertime announcement of a December closure was painful to those who loved the Diving Bell, it played out like a triumphant chord that ends a killer set. “It was so amazing how much people cared, and it felt like a nice way to leave things, honestly,” says Austin. “Because we did so many different kinds of events, we kind of had different finales for different things- there was the final comedy show, the final drag show, the final music show… Then the last event, we just kinda wanted it to be not even a show- we kinda wanted to have everyone be there, hanging out, partying and enjoying the space. (...) It was an opportunity for everyone to live in the moment.” If you were at that final rager, aptly named ‘The Last Dance,’ I hope you feel like you lived that moment. And if you weren’t, I think we can safely say it was exactly how you picture it.
“The Diving Bell holds a special place in my heart because it was where I first fell in love with the art of burlesque. I watched a performer do a lemonade stand act (I believe it was Elle Diabloe? Or Jolie Lolita? TBC) and thought to myself: “Wow. I want to do that.” After a quick little standup gig, I won a pair of pasties and a certificate for an Arabesque Burlesque class. Life was never the same since 💃🔥 All thanks to the Diving Bell 🥰 ”
So what about these ‘persisting issues’? What about the infamous noise complaints? The truth is, as far as noise complaints go, the Diving Bell got lucky. “The cops responded [to noise complaints] lots of different times, but we actually never got tickets because I guess what we were doing was reasonable,” Austin says.
It could have been much worse - in Montreal, whether or not a performance venue gets a fine for a noise complaint is up the discretion of the police officers who arrive on the scene; there’s no structured, codified system. And while the Diving Bell managed to avoid the harm of this incredibly flawed system, other places may not be so lucky: “that's just how the system is set up, and eventually the bars and the nightclubs, they don't have the money to pay those silly fines.” Austin laments what I think many venue owners in the city feel, saying, “It just seems unfair that, you know, ultimately one person has the ability to prevent something like the Diving Bell from being able to continue.”
And it’s not like Diving Bell didn’t do what it could to make peace with its misophonic neighbours. “We put a lot of money into soundproofing, and we always tried to adjust our hours so that we're not having full-on bands playing live music going on super late,” Austin recalls. “We always tried to cut the shows around midnight and just kind of try to coexist and whatnot, but it was just one of those things where ultimately, like, we have no control over this situation.”
So how did things get so bad between Diving Bell and its neighbours? Was there bad blood there from the beginning, or did things escalate? Here we come to what may be the central issue facing performance spaces in Montreal- zoning, housing, and by extension, gentrification. The building the Diving Bell was housed in had a long history of being a ‘nightlife’ space- Austin tells me it had active alcohol permits in all four of its spaces since at least the 1970s. The issues came mostly from the building next door, which used to be an office space but was rezoned in 2013, and is now all residential save for the hair salon on the 1st level. “It's just gentrification in action,” he says with exasperation. “It’s a story old as time, you know - there’s a bar with a bunch of people, things happening, but then people move in next door. They're not required to do a certain level of soundproofing or anything, they can just call the cops.”
Cue the mob of angry Montrealers calling for people to know what they’re getting into and to stop ruining our city. Don’t get me wrong- I’m sharpening my pitchforks too - but it’s not that simple. In a city where the cost of living is increasingly pricing people out of neighbourhoods like the Plateau, it’s hard to blame people for just living next door. “Housing is obviously like a huge issue,” Austin relates. “And like, I'm sympathetic- as a business. I don't want to be disruptive to people. But I do think that there needs to be some sort of fix.”
And reasonably, it wasn’t just the residents of the next door building that the Diving Bell had to contend with. “We were trying to work with the landlord of the building next door for a long time,” says Austin. “I've been to the apartment to listen to what it sounds like. Now obviously I'm biased, but let me tell you, the sound of music from the Diving Bell coming through the wall was being drowned out by the sound of the traffic going by on Saint-Laurent. And you’re not allowed to make a noise complaint about traffic.”
Photo by Dan Crowder
As with a lot of things wrong with the state of the world today, the pandemic is partially to blame for this change in how residents in mixed-use neighbourhoods like the Plateau react to noise. “There's like people moving in during the lockdown periods when everything was forced to be closed,” Austin tells me, “and a lot of people got really used to everything being nice and quiet. Then when we reopen, they’re all like, ‘whoa, I didn't know there were four nightclubs next door.’”
While that might seem like moving in next to La Ronde in the winter time and then in the summer being like, ‘I didn't know I would hear roller coasters!’, it points to an increasingly noticeable pattern in neighbourhoods where residential, commercial and entertainment buildings commingle: how the interests of wealthier people moving into an area disrupts the area as a whole. Austin believes you can see this firsthand on Boulevard St. Laurent, which is to this day called ‘the Main’ for its historical and cultural significance, but which has since lost a lot of the small businesses that made it that way. “I think if you look around at the neighborhood that the Diving Bell is in right now specifically, it is kind of a weird, changing neighbourhood.” he says. “That building where the Diving Bell is like this one little island in a sea of furniture stores and shuttered buildings.”
I think anyone who’s walked up St. Laurent from de Maisonneuve to Rosemont can agree with this statement. With all its shuttered storefronts and boarded up windows, countless ‘for rent’ signs and crumbling facades, St. Laurent doesn’t feel like ‘the Main’ anymore- it feels like a ghost town. The places that are actually open are either ones that close at 6pm, or are the bars and nightclubs that the boulevard is now practically synonymous with, and that has not only an impact on the neighbourhood but the city at large. “What happens to a city when all of a sudden everything is just a hair salon or a dumpling shop or a cupcake decorating store, where everything closes at 6:00 PM?” Austin asks me rhetorically. “You have these weird sleepy cities like Vancouver or something, where we sold out for like the easy quiet things and slowly but surely pushed out the kind of [places that made it unique and fun].” I don’t know about you, but that’s not the kind of Montreal I want to be in.
“[My partner] and I went to a queer comedy night at the Diving Bell for JFL a few years back and Wanda Sykes showed up for a surprise set after her place des arts gala, in like a track suit and no makeup 😅”
It’s at this point that I have to acknowledge one last factor in the closure of Diving Bell, something I haven’t mentioned yet: their landlord. For most people, having trouble with your landlord isn’t anything new; it’s almost a rite of passage if you’ve lived here long enough. But maybe ‘trouble’ isn’t the right word for what the Diving Bell experienced with their landlord.
In 2019, a new landlord bought the building the Diving Bell was in, and for all intents and purposes, Austin and Evan had a good relationship with him. Then they found out, in 2023, that he was trying to sell the building. “He wanted us to sign a lease that would have expired at the end of 2029,” Austin recalls. “And we understood, from talking to the other tenants in that building (Barbosa, Blue Dog, and Champs), that all of our leases were set to expire on that same day at the end of 2029.”
If that sounds fishy, it’s because it kind of was. Austin says it best: “The reality was that if we were to sign this lease and agree to pay steadily increasing rent between now and the end of 2029, and this guy's trying to sell the building, we've all lined up our leases so that now some new developer person could buy the building and that's just going to be the date we’re forced to leave.” Gentrification in action.
It’s something you’ve maybe seen in action in your own neighbourhoods. A local food joint that was open for years before you moved in suddenly closing its doors months later, only to be replaced by a chain restaurant. An old building complex going up in flames one day, only to be bought and sold and redeveloped into condos, the ashes still smoldering. “It kind of felt like the developers were just waiting us out,” says Austin. “I feel like a lot of times these residential landlord people - specifically when it's like, companies and their lawyers and stuff - they're probably anticipating that the future tenants of their places will shut down the dive bars, or call the cops enough until they close down. Not to sound conspiratorial, but it is just kind of part of the grand scheme [of commercial real estate] and it works.”
I don’t blame Austin for feeling this way. If you’re a landlord or a developer, your interests are in turning a profit, not keeping older institutions alive. So if you’ve got wealthier people moving into a building you own that maybe wouldn’t care too much for a rowdy bar next door, maybe you don’t tell them about it. Maybe you just wring your hands and nod sympathetically when your tenants complain to you about it. Maybe you don’t really do anything when they call the cops multiple times and the bar tries to offer a solution. Let nature take its course. It’s tough to keep a good thing going when the world seems to be pushing you to give up, just so it can extract the most amount of wealth it can from the corpse of what once was.
The thought, then, goes to protecting our cherished spaces. Some ideas have been put forth around doing that, mainly related to the kind of zoning I was referring to earlier. You wouldn’t have to deal with noise complaints if you were located in a zone specifically designated for nightlife, right? Austin doesn’t necessarily agree. “For all of our noise complaints, all the cops showed up at like, 9:30 PM on a Friday night,” he says. “So if we were allowed to stay open however late we wanted, that wouldn’t solve the main issue, which is that anybody can call in a noise complaint for anything they want regardless of if it's reasonable or not.”
Having exclusive places for ‘nightlife’ would also exacerbate other related issues- namely in regards to community, rent, and safety. There will always be a demand for places for people to live, and so saying, ‘hey, this area of the city, you can't live here,’ feels like a kick when you’re down. Austin continues my thought, saying, “If you have these neighborhoods where the bars never close, all that's going to really result in is that, one, the landlords in those neighborhoods are going to be able to charge like twice as much, because it's the only part of town now where you can have a nightclub, and two, those nightclub areas are going to just be [hubs for bad shit].”
Historically, there has definitely been a culture of nightlife spaces being not ‘for the family’. But as mentioned earlier, for the Diving Bell, the goal was not to be just a bar, but a place for local arts to flourish, so having it in an ‘all-nightlife area’ would be at odds with that mission. “I wouldn't want [Diving Bell] to be in a 24/7 nightlife district, that's for sure,” says Austin. “It would be weird if we were having to do what we did in a place like that.” This is even doubly true with the fact that Diving Bell had become such a vital place for the queer community. If you were to have a place like Diving Bell exist in an area that’s specifically for nightlife, surrounded by other bars and clubs, you would lose that kind of safety and community- which would defeat the whole purpose. It’s just something that comes with being in an area that is mixed-use, that is both residential and close to places of gathering, where people can walk to the places they enjoy right from their apartments.
So what’s to be done? For Austin, it comes down to smart regulation for noise complaints. The ideal would be a sort of decibel level system established for how much noise is too much noise. “It could vary by region, of course,” he goes on. “Like if there’s an area like Saint-Laurent, maybe there could be some sort of discretion about like, ‘hey, you're going to hear some stuff, it’s a loud street.’ But that way if you want to make a noise complaint, the officer responding would show up with like a decibel reading thing and take a reading, and if it's above a certain threshold, they can say ’you gotta keep it down below this level.’” This would hopefully resolve the major issue between venues and neighbours in mixed-use neighbourhoods: right now, as Austin says, “as businesses, it's so hard to work towards a solution when there's no standard being set.”
“I only went there twice, but it was such a lovely queer space! I went to two queer events there (a Twilight drag and a queer board game night) and the atmosphere at both was just so lovely. Felt really welcome.”
Losing a place like the Diving Bell isn’t anything new- unfortunately, it's just one drop in the bucket of a slew of indie venue closures that have been happening for the better part of a decade. I think it hurts especially to see that happen in Montréal- it feels like the kind of thing that shouldn’t happen in a city so vibrant, one that was once considered Canada’s cultural capital. Austin agrees: “Montreal specifically prides itself on being a city where artists and creative people come to do their stuff. It's like a launching pad for so many different things.” And the historical precedent for that is unmatched. I would lose count trying to name all the Indie artists who made a name for themselves here - Leonard Cohen, Rufus Wainwright, Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade, Coeur de Pirate, Patrick Watson, tUnE-yArDs, Grimes, Half Moon Run, Charlotte Cardin, Milk & Bone, Kaytranada - the list goes on.
And it’s not your MTELUS’s or your Bell Centres that make this kind of thing happen. “There's a lot of [places and] people that I feel like are contributing something very valuable to the ecosystem of the city,” says Austin, and Diving Bell was one of them. It’s places like Diving Bell, like Turbo Haüs, Bar le Ritz, and so many others that make up the fabric of this scene and are the lifeblood of up and coming artists; hell, Arcade Fire released their self-titled EP with a show at Casa del Popolo in the winter of 2003. These places matter.
Of course, what made Diving Bell so special, and so successful, was how varied its programming was. “Ultimately everything that we were doing at the Diving Bell was working really well,” he tells me. “Clearly there's a need in the city for a space in which different kinds of amateur and professional art can be displayed in public and communities can form around them.”
The importance of spaces like that cannot be understated. The impact of keeping around a place like Diving Bell, where artistic expression, community building, and entertainment are at the forefront of what’s happening, is hard to see in real-time, but it sets up a future where we are more connected; where art is prioritized; where the marginalized and the weirdos and the people on the fringes of the scene can feel safe; it's an investment for posterity’s sake. “The more spaces there are for people to put on showcases of whatever it is, whether it's music, comedy, drag, whatever, even just talks in ‘third places’ as they call them, [the better] - there's always a need for that kind of stuff,” Austin expresses. “Having those third places where people kind of go and feel comfortable, and having a space that is set up consciously for putting on events at the highest quality possible - that's really the importance of the space like the Diving Bell.”
Photo provided by The Diving Bell Social Club
Thankfully, what happened in 2023 is not the end of what we knew as the Diving Bell. As their website and socials say, Austin and Evan are planning to relocate to a new location in the near future. “The plan is to continue on with everything about the Diving Bell; the community aspect, the shows and all that,” says Austin, “and use that energy, the knowledge and the experience that we've gained to build a space that's more accessible. And that has slightly taller ceilings.”
It’s crazy to think that a place that left such a mark on the community also left a mark on the people who ran it, but it’s true. “We've learned so much in the last five years about what works, what doesn't work, what is important physically,” Austin shares, after I ask him what kind of lessons he’s taken away from this. “Now it’s just about trying to set ourselves up in a way where it's sustainable so that we can keep doing it and it doesn't have to be this precarious thing.” Clearly, running a performance space isn’t all fun and parties. “Taking it seriously in a small intimate space or a performance space is thoroughly exhausting,” Austin admits, “and it’s not very profitable or rewarding other than just feeling good about it- but it’s a thing that everybody really seems to understand, or at least everyone in the community, who really appreciate the value and really kind of feel it when another one of those spaces disappears.”
The impact of a space disappearing also cannot be understated. People want to make art, people want to put on shows- at Diving Bell, they were killing themselves just trying to do as many events as possible. “One of my main jobs at the Diving bell was organizing the calendar and scheduling stuff,” Austin recounts, “and pretty much at all times there were more people reaching out than there was available time for in the calendar.” Those people don’t just disappear. The desire to create and host and perform doesn’t go away. What does happen is, you maybe don’t see as many theme nights, or fundraisers, or local bands playing shows. I think Austin put it best: "Where else are these kinds of things supposed to happen if [the places that host them] are just constantly being shut down?”
The pressure falls to other spaces to be able to cater to an ever-burgeoning scene.“I can only imagine how much more pressure there is now on other spaces,” Austin says. He jokes that there may be “a DIY revolution” down the line, “with all these vacant lots everywhere.” I, for one, welcome the revolution, but I also don’t want to leave our existing venues in the dust. And if there are any lessons we can learn from the history of the Diving Bell, it’s that showing up and supporting the venues you care about matters. “There's just no substitute for going in person to these places, for people showing up with their bodies,” Austin continues. “I know things are tough, money's tight everywhere, and a lot of the time it feels weird with all the shit going on in the world to be like, ‘but what about my little local venue space?’ But even if it's just like you're showing up, you’re giving support to artists and local community.” And you’re supporting the memories that will be made there.
“We had our engagement party there, where we had friends come and perform: it was so lovely to have a space that held space for great art and community ❤️”
So was the closure of Diving Bell the beginning of the end of Montreal's celebrated culture scene? I don’t know. Looking at the past can be a weird way to look at the future, but it provides some insights. If we cannot learn from our history, we are doomed to repeat it, right? So maybe if we take everything that’s happened and learn from it, one day, things will be different.
Maybe one day, the places that bring our communities together and let our culture scene flourish will stay open. “Surely in a city like Montreal, there has to be some sort of acknowledgement that, ‘hey, we live in a bustling city,” Austin jokes, “And part of the reason why we all want to live here is for these kinds of things.’
I like the hopefulness, in the face of what has happened. Because while the past is bleak, it’s also full of the incredible memories we made in the places that become pillars of our community. Memory is a powerful force- it can help us hold on to the past, reckon with the present, and change the future. History shows that the rights of landlords and capital always seem to trump these community spaces, but just maybe we can change the present. Quite frankly, I don’t think we have an alternative.
Photo provided by The Diving Bell Social Club
Part Two of Leaving Eden: Montreal’s Venue Problem is HERE.