Resident DJs live at Crocks in Thunder Bay, 1 July 2015

Wednesday is an awkward day for a national holiday, and Crocks treated 1 July 2015 as a late-night affair. Doors opened at ten, and the billing tied the night to the fireworks at the marina. What it promised was plain: resident DJs and party favours, following the show over the water.

Admission was $5. It was a 19+ event, photo ID required. Loffredo & Associates presented it with H.I.T Management, and the billing called it the annual Canada Day party in #DowntownPA. Crocks stood at 16 Cumberland Street South.

What the hashtag points at

The hashtag was the promoter’s own shorthand for the north-end downtown, and it appeared on the billing as a rallying tag more than an address.

PA is Port Arthur. It was a separate city until 1 January 1970, when it merged with Fort William and two townships to form Thunder Bay. The railway had renamed the place Port Arthur in 1883, after an earlier life as Prince Arthur’s Landing. Cumberland Street South sits in that old downtown, in the north end near the water.

The water in question is Lake Superior, and the shoreline park beside the old downtown is Marina Park, still known by the older name Prince Arthur’s Landing. The city’s Canada Day celebrations were held there in 2015. That is the marina the billing meant, and Crocks was close to it.

The waterfront the party followed

Marina Park had been rebuilt in the years before. A waterfront redevelopment, started in 2006, added a hotel, condominiums, an art gallery, trails and a pavilion, and turned the old Canadian National railway station into shops and restaurants. By 2015 the park was the obvious place for a city-wide crowd to gather on a holiday evening.

A club near that shoreline could count on some of the same crowd passing afterwards. That is a reading of the map. The billing gave no explanation for the timing, only the order: fireworks first, then the party.

A city on a long bay

The 2011 census counted 108,359 people in Thunder Bay. The bay itself runs about 22.5 kilometres from the Port Arthur downtown out to Thunder Cape, so a holiday crowd on the waterfront is looking down a long stretch of Lake Superior.

The city calls itself Canada’s Gateway to the West, a nod to its place at the end of Great Lakes navigation on the Canadian side.

The fireworks were the fixed point of the evening. A party that starts after them borrows a crowd that is already in the north end, and the billing built its schedule on that.

The 148th birthday

The day marked 148 years since Confederation on 1 July 1867, when four provinces joined: Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The holiday has been called Canada Day since 1982 and Dominion Day before that.

Nothing about the Crocks night touched on the anniversary. The DJs were the programme, and 19+ was the rule. In Ontario nineteen is the drinking age, which is what the photo ID line enforced, and it kept the party an adult one even on a family holiday.

Five dollars

Across 2015 the room’s billed prices ran from $5 to $95, and this night sat at the bottom of that range. Only the admission was listed. The DJ Qbert after party in May cost the same, and Joel Fletcher in April charged $15 for a guest DJ over resident support.

A holiday party with no guest was priced like an after party, which is to say the late hours on their own. Ten dollars is what a visiting name added in April, and on 1 July there was no name.

Two days later

The room did not rest. On Friday 3 July Five Alarm Funk, a Vancouver party-funk band, played Crocks with a $15 advance ticket and doors at nine. The first weekend of July went from a DJ floor on Wednesday to a touring band on Friday.

More of the summer’s dates are on the shows page. What the marina crowd did in the hours between the last rocket and ten o’clock is not something anyone recorded.