Albion Hotel is a beloved icon

The first time I went to the Albion, I’m pretty sure I broke the law.

I was 18 years old and therefore a few months shy of the legal drinking age. I was tagging along with my older university friends who were going to see the band Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet in the bar’s upstairs space. The woman at the door knew them and they knew me and that was good enough. It was an epic night.

The first of many, as it turned out. Located at the corner of Norfolk and Macdonell Streets in downtown Guelph, the Albion Hotel is an institution steeped in history and folklore: my experiences are just a few notes jotted in the margins, massive as they may be to me.

It was the go-to spot of my 20s. In those days, the bar was divided into three distinct areas: the “old man room” with the tiny bar, the washroom and all the day drinkers. Then there was the “jukebox room” with the, uh, eclectic jukebox with Stompin’ Tom, CCR and an array of other favourites. Finally, there was the kitchen room where you sat if all the other rooms were full but which pumped out an amazing array of house-made dishes like burgers and antojitos.

Then there was the upstairs. Closed during the day, it was an intimate spot to watch amazing Canadian indie bands that cycled through regularly. Working at the University of Guelph student paper, we would have semi-annual staff parties that were simply unbridled debauchery run fully amok. There is not a finer way to spend a summer afternoon than to sit on the Albion patio with good friends, watching the kookiness of downtown Guelph go by in all its glory.

In my later years, the Albion continued to play a role. It was physically connected to my old place of work, the Guelph Mercury building, and so a Friday afternoon mood-setter was almost required. When my good friend Matt, a former Albion bartender, was taken by cancer at an obscenely young age, we held his wake upstairs and it felt more right than any postlife celebration I’ve attended before or since.

And that’s just my connection to the place. It’s a been a tavern since 1856 and the Albion since 1867, the second establishment in Ontario to get a liquor licence. If you know someone from Guelph, odds are they have an Albion story. There are tales of bootlegging, Al Capone, tunnels to the giant Catholic Church across the street and a ghost — the jilted mistress of a mobster, or so the story goes — that haunts the place.

She’s had it all to herself lately. The Albion has been closed for most of the last two years and there’s currently a “For Lease” sitting in one of the dusty, papered-over windows. Its last incarnation, after a renovation and kitchen revamp that tilted it more upscale, scraped off some of the lovable grime but kept the bones more or less intact.

Running a bar and restaurant isn’t easy and nostalgia is not a business model. I don’t really care who owns it, I just want them to treat it with the love and respect it deserves.

It’s an institution, an icon, a piece of the social fabric that remains dear. I hope it rises from the ashes to something of its former glory.