'Downtrodden, old-fashioned, quiet': The Glue Pot Pub is closing
Bruce Deachman
Postmedia
March 10, 2019
340 Queen St., home to the Glue Pot Pub, Barbarella’s VIP Cabaret and Dana’s Indian Cuisine, is to be torn down to make way for three highrise buildings.
David Raynor sat at the copper-topped bar of the Glue Pot Pub on a recent afternoon, reading a book and nursing a beer, one of the last he’ll have there. A retired university professor, Raynor only rediscovered the bar a few months ago, after a long absence, and he now comes six days a week, making the half-hour bus ride from his home in Blackburn Hamlet.
“It’s not upscale,” he says. “A lot of people don’t like upscale. People like this … I don’t know what you call this: downtrodden, old-fashioned, quiet. You meet really interesting people, from construction workers to retirees to politicians. People come here to relax, and the prices are great.
“This is a good place.”
Two stools down sits Don, a LeBreton Flats resident who also rediscovered the bar, in his case about a year ago. He had his first beer here close to 25 years ago, when he was 18, (not quite) the legal drinking age.
“It’s a nice dive,” he says. “A nice, easy place to come to where you can have a drink and watch the game.”
But the Glue Pot’s 31-year reign at the corner of Queen and Lyon streets is coming to an end. At the end of March, it and two other businesses in the building — Barbarella’s VIP Cabaret and Dana’s Indian Cuisine — will close to make way for the building’s demolition and construction of a subsequent three-tower Claridge development that will include 389 condominiums, a 200-room hotel and a 23,000-square-foot supermarket.
“It’s going to be a loss for the neighbourhood when it goes,” Don says.
A laminated world map on one wall of the Glue Pot is covered with red dots, indicating how far its customers have come for drinks: the Aleutian Islands, Fiji, Siberia, China, Zimbabwe. General manager Doug Letcher estimates “hundreds of thousands” of people have passed through its doors since it opened in 1988.
Initially, though, most Glue Pot customer’s came from four blocks away. The bar’s original owner, Hugh Ireton and a couple of partners decided to open the Glue Pot in a disused second-floor space above the Dill Pickle restaurant, after Ireton’s favourite daytime bar, the Windsor Tavern at the corner of Metcalfe and Queen, announced it was closing, leaving the downtown core without a traditional brasserie.
“There’s got to be someplace you can go to sit down over a quart of beer without having to hack your way through a plate of radicchio,” Ireton said at the time.
He got a great deal on rent — “It was just bats and rats and storage and junk. There was nothing there. It had been derelict for some time” he recalls of the two-storey former Coca Cola bottling plant and onetime government printing warehouse — and began installing fixtures, some scavenged from the neighbourhood. The actual bar, beer fridges and wood paneling came from the Skyline Hotel across the street (now the Delta), when it closed its Rough Rider Lounge. The copper for the bar top came about when workers installing new copper on the Supreme Court roof came in for a beer one Saturday.
“They liked to drink beer and I’d always wanted a copper-topped bar,” Ireton recalls of that quid pro quo deal, “so one thing led to another.”
Doug Letcher, general manager of the Glue Pot Pub and Barbarella’s VIP Cabaret, has been associated with the businesses for 21 years.
Ireton hired Lou Roussy and Lorne Armstrong, longtime and beloved waiters from the Windsor Tavern, and many of their customers followed, including numerous government workers and NDP staffers who were habitués. The government employees still make up the lion’s share of the Glue Pot’s largely daytime clientele, Letcher says, but the NDPers have been supplanted by Tories.
In 1991, Ireton sold the Glue Pot to current owner Pierre Groulx, who also owns Barbarella’s strip club downstairs. Over the years, the Glue Pot hosted scores of live music acts of all types, as well as trivia nights, burlesque performances, and pool and darts leagues. The building also experienced some unsavoury drama. Groulx points to the spot in Barbarella’s where, in January 2012, arsonists attempted to burn it down. “Someone wanted me to do something I didn’t want to do,” is his cryptic explanation. Eight days later, someone fired shots into the front door.
In June 2015, two Barbarella’s employees were charged with aggravated assault following an attack on an Uber driver, and in January 2017, a male employee was stabbed outside the club, following an altercation that began inside.
The stories they’d prefer to remember, Letcher says, are of their customers. “People have packed this bar to watch Canada win gold medals. I remember the morning the towers went down in the States. The government workers here were let out, and the place was packed all afternoon, watching it.
“We’ve had people who’ve met here get married. Staff have gotten married.”
Rumours of the building’s demise, Groulx says, have circulated for a half dozen years or more. A year ago, the end seemed inevitable, and at the beginning of February Claridge finally told him he had until the end of March.
He looked around with the idea of opening elsewhere, but ultimately decided against moving the Glue Pot or Barbarella’s.
“I’d have to spend about five- or six-hundred thousand to open another place,” the 66-year-old says. “I feel bad for the employees, but, for me, I’ve had enough.”
Besides, he adds, he has other properties to manage, including a fishing camp near Maniwaki.
(Dana’s Indian Cuisine owner Mohammad Hossain says he’s looking to relocate his business, but hasn’t yet found a suitable spot.)
So, rather than move, Groulx is selling off everything: fixtures, TVs, signs, even the original tin ceiling. But, before it all goes, they’re planning a couple of farewell parties for March 21 and 22.
Meanwhile, letters of recommendation have been written for the bar and kitchen staff — about 25 people in total — while most of the 30 or so dancers will move to the Bare Fax in the ByWard Market.
“It’s disappointing,” says one, Annabelle, who commutes to work each day from Smiths Falls. “I’ll miss it here. It’s like family.”
Then and now: From 1912 to 1946, Coca Cola’s first bottling plant in Ottawa was located at 430 Queen St. Today the building is home to the Glue Pot Pub, Barbarella’s VIP Cabaret and Dana’s Indian Cuisine.
But it’s time, Groulx says. Business at the strip club has dropped about 60 per cent in the past four years following a general malaise in the industry. Recent construction of the LRT, with blasting and road closures and gas and water outages, have also hurt business.
“It seems a shame that it has to go,” Ireton says, “but its time has passed. It was far more than just a place to go and have a beer; it was a social phenomenon that has really changed, and young folks really wouldn’t understand. It’s the passing of an era, for better or ill.”
For Groulx, there’s really only one thing left to do. “I’ve been here since February 1991. Now I just want to finish it off. I’ve asked them to call me when they’re going to bring the building down, so I can watch.”
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