Yonge Street has a vibrant history for massage parlours and other adult businesses

Yonge Street is a wild a crazy place with a long history of massage parlours.

The latest addition to Yonge Street is Oriental Health Centre in midtown Toronto.
Over the winter Pure Bliss Spa opened at Yonge and Lawrence featuring younger Asian girls.
In the spring of 2012 Yang Yang Spa near Yonge and Finch opened which are quite far north.
In the heart of downtown, I Spa, Yonge Spa and Luna Spa, capture the spirit of those crazy times.

In 1977 the following adult businesses were on Yonge street between Queen St and Bloor St:
Gameland arcade 718 yonge
Lady Strawberry (massage parlour) 718 Yonge
A Chez Plaizir (massage parlour) 650 Yonge
Pin ball arcade 633 Yonge
Oasis Health Club (massage parlour) 592 Yonge
Nude Entettainer (massage parlour) 575 Yonge
Lady Godiva (massage parlour) 570 Yonge
Pleasureland (massage parlour) 569 Yonge
ABC Bookstore (massage parlour) 544 Yonge
Taste of Honey (massage parlour) 544 Yonge
Funland arcade 518 Yonge
Skin Deep (massage parlour) 518 Yonge
Lady Blue (massage parlour) 368 Yonge
Venus Nude Bodyrub (massage parlour) 364 Yonge
Her Place (massage parlour) 362 Yonge
Zanzibar sc 359 Yonge
Delilahs Den (massage parlour) 356 Yonge
Funland arcade 356 Yonge
Lady Luck (massage parlour) 355 Yonge
Lady Jane (massage parlour) 354 Yonge
Blue Angel (massage parlour) 348 Yonge
Relaxation Plus (massage parlour) 346 Yonge
Pinball Spot arcade 335 Yonge
Starvin Marvins sc 331 Yonge
Neptune Health Spa (massage parlour) 331 Yonge
Funland (massage parlour) 315 Yonge
Minsky's Burlesque sc 315 Yonge
Paradise (massage parlour) 311 Yonge
Caesar's Spa (massage parlour) 279 Yonge

The Grid wrote about Yonge Street in Dec 2011 On January 31, 1977, the City of Toronto struck a special committee to suss out all "places of amusement" along Yonge Street, south of Bloor. "The goal of the report," says Steve Kupferman, who wrote this week's feature story about the waning stripping industry in Toronto, "was to find and recommend ways of dealing with the proliferation of seedy businesses in the core, and its findings seem to have influenced a lot of future regulations."
So, just how seedy was Yonge Street in 1977? Very: some 44 businesses were cited by the report, from strip clubs to body rubs to x-rated entertainment stores to pinball arcades, with names like Peep A Rama, The Body Shop (no, not that one) and The Yonge Strip. (Why pinball arcades? "Pinball arcades are in there because they were also a concern at the time," says Kupferman. "Council was worried that they sheltered delinquent youth and provided criminals with an easy way to launder money.")

The Grid also wrote about the decline of strip clubs in Dec 2011
Three decades ago, downtown Yonge Street was a mecca of XXX-rated entertainment. Today, only 17 strip clubs remain in the entire city. Inside the slow death of a scrappy, embattled industry.

Downtown "Yonge Street in the mid-'70s was a much different scene than the gradually gentrifying shopping and restaurant strip we know today. It was a place where no self-respecting storefront went without a giant neon sign-flashing words like "nude," "girls" and "XXX"-and where seediness was a simple fact of life. (See map on right for proof.)

At the time, Yonge was home to countless so-called body-rub parlours, where the discerning gentleman could duck behind the street's glittering facade for a quick massage, complete with happy ending. For do-it-yourselfers, the strip's erotic movie houses screened the finest pornography the decade had to offer.

Interspersed were other businesses that offered comparatively simple pleasures. Places like Starvin Marvin's (313 Yonge), Le Strip (237A Yonge) and Zanzibar (359 Yonge) featured nude or semi-nude stage shows. These clubs helped form the nucleus of an X-rated scene to rival anything in New York at the time. Even before the city had attained its current skyscrapery grandeur, Toronto's sleaze was world class.

Almost 35 years later, Yonge Street has changed dramatically. Most of the seediest businesses are gone and the remaining strip clubs seem like stragglers living on borrowed time.

Zanzibar is the street's last holdover from that '70s golden age of strip joints. Walk through the door beneath the club's bright marquee, lit with neon and hundreds of incandescent bulbs, and you'll find yourself in a surprisingly narrow space, about the size of a coffee shop, where a crowd of men, mostly 30 and older, is arrayed in small groups, in black-lit semi-darkness.

On a recent Saturday night, there were no wild bachelor party antics, only little knots of tough guys with shaved heads, middle-aged men in sweaters and the occasional shamefaced student, nursing an $8 bottle of beer.

A guy in a windbreaker took a seat at the bar and started having a one-sided conversation with a stripper about his ex-wife. Nearby, a mostly nude woman performed on stage against a backdrop of silver party-store streamers—a homespun touch that made the place feel like exactly what it is: a neighbourhood business trying to make a go of it.

At another aging club, For Your Eyes Only (located on the rapidly evolving stretch of King Street West between Bathurst and Spadina), I met James, a 32-year-old real-estate agent who, in the company of his two brothers, was visiting a strip club for the first time. "It's lame as hell," he said. "I feel like I'm in the '80s."

His assessment of the scene was blunt, but also pretty accurate. From a peak of 63 licensed strip clubs in 1982, the city's supply has dwindled to just 17. There are currently only 1,537 licensed dancers in Toronto, down from 3,755 in 1998, the earliest year for which reliable numbers are available. Those dancers are as nude as they ever were, and the beer is still cold. So what killed Toronto's strip-club industry?

Half of these closed down after the death of the Shoeshine Boy, Emanual Jaques. There is still much hurt from that event. See email below about Facebook Group: Please on behalf of my family, delete this group. You all need to respect our privacy. This whole thing about making a book on my uncle? Ugh you people don't know half of what my family has been through and will never experience the pain we have gone through and are still going through.. Please stop adding our family members & messaging them just leave us alone


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