The Office Named as the Future Home of Crocks in March 2010

The address at the top of the release was 16 Cumberland Street South, Thunder Bay, and the words under it were “The Future Home Of Crocks.” The Office was the name on the building. Crocks was the name that had been attached to independent music in the city for years. The release, dated 22 March 2010, joined the two.

Its headline said that Loffredo & Associates had developed a promotions deal with The Office. The body was brief. It described the Office as the future home of Crocks and called Crocks the original home of independent music in Thunder Bay. It was tagged as a press release and carried the usual line marking it for immediate release.

The Office and Cumberland Street

Cumberland Street runs through the north side of downtown Thunder Bay, the part of the city that was Port Arthur before it amalgamated with Fort William on 1 January 1970. Red River Road crosses it. The streets around it, Court and St. Paul among them, hold the restaurants and bars that people now group as the Waterfront District.

Nothing in the release describes the building or its earlier life as The Office, and no opening date is given. The one thing it fixes is the postal address. That address turned out to be the one that mattered, because the club kept it for the better part of a decade.

Crocks and the two brothers behind it

Northern Ontario Travel describes Crocks as started by two brothers, one as owner and promoter and the other as the business partner who founded it with him. The same profile says the original building was also on Cumberland Street in downtown Port Arthur, and that the room began as a family restaurant by day. A Thunder Bay reader needed none of that explained.

Crocks reached a national audience through print and film. The travel profile credits the room, and Thunder Bay, as an inspiration for Bruce McDonald’s Highway 61 from 1991 and his 1996 film Hard Core Logo. It also lists Dave Bidini’s book On a Cold Road and Michael Turner’s Hard Core Logo among the places the name turns up.

What the address became

Loffredo & Associates went on to present shows at 16 Cumberland Street South. One example is the Swollen Members night on Sunday 4 May 2014. Madchild and Prevail headlined, Animal Nation gave tour support, and Deepcave and Rogue played locally. Advance tickets were $25 and doors were at 8 p.m.

Other nights from the room are gathered on the shows page. Read together they show what the deal led to: a run of touring bands in one small room on Cumberland Street, from hip-hop to rock and pop, such as the Nashville Pussy night of 20 April 2012.

CBC News reported in 2018 that Crocks had spent about nine years at 16 Cumberland when it moved, that October, into the NV Nightclub building at 228 Red River Road. Shows from that final stretch appear on this site under the name Crocks at NV, and the rooms index lists both.

A line worth reading twice

Press releases of this length are easy to skim past, and this one rewards a second look for a single phrase. “The original home of independent music in Thunder Bay” is a claim about priority, made by the promoter about its own room. It cannot be checked against a list of rival venues, and it does not need to be.

It reads as a statement of how the room saw itself when it changed address. A club that had already appeared in books and films could afford to say so plainly, and the release says it in nine words, with no adjectives to lean on.

What can be stood behind is narrower. A promotions deal was announced in March 2010, and one named building was to become the home of a named club. The address on that release, 16 Cumberland Street South, is the same one printed on the poster for Swollen Members in May 2014, four years later.