We’re back at the Riverside Pavilion for this week’s Timmins history feature on dance halls.
Museum director-curator Karen Bachmann has discussed how “The Pav” was the dance spot in the 1930s and 40s. She says it attracted performers who, if they weren’t big at the time, were on their way to fame.
“There was a young gentleman who played the Pav by the name of Sammy Davis Jr., and he came to play when he was about 13,” she recounts. “Oscar Peterson, when he first started his career, played at the Palace Theatre, and then ended up playing a lot of different jazz things later on in the evening, out at the Pav.”
Peterson was, of course, a jazz pianist.
Bachmann says The Pav was a dance hall until the early 1970s, when it became a furniture store, and maintained the spring floor.
“When its days were done as a dance hall, it became Bad Boy’s. Then it did become Fabricland and was Fabricland when it burned.”
The fire was quite spectacular, fuelled by the wood the Pav was built of, and all the textiles from Fabricland.
Next week: Other dance halls in the mining camp.
