Before the record bins and the espresso machine, our address kept very different hours.
Rectangle Triangle has two doors — 1288 and 1290 Atateken — in a building that spent roughly two decades as one of Montréal's most dependable places to lose track of time. Three clubs ran here — Playground, Groove Society, and Parking — and between them they covered nearly everything this city's nightlife did between the first warehouse raves and the end of the mega-club era. If you're standing in the shop flipping through house 12"s, you're standing on top of that story. Sometimes literally: a lot of it happened in the basement, and the after-hours downstairs answered to the same street number that's beside our door today.
One building, three eras. Danced here? We're collecting photos and flyers — details at the end.
Playground: the after-hours, mid-1990s
When Montréal's early-'90s rave scene came in from the warehouses, this is one of the places it landed. Playground was among the first wave of the city's after-hours clubs — the string of rooms that would later include Sona, Stereo and Aria — and in spirit it barely bothered to be a club at all. As promoter Christian Pronovost put it in Red Bull Music Academy's oral history of the Montréal scene: "Cox and Playground, big-scale clubs, began doing after-hours parties, but it was a rave."
The bars let out at 3 a.m.; the basement at 1288 was just warming up — no alcohol, no polish, no need for either. Mark Anthony — a fixture of the warehouse era and one of the DJs who built this city's after-hours culture — played here regularly, and decades later still lists Playground alongside the warehouse days and Black & Blue among his favourite Montréal memories. The camcorder footage above is what this address looked like at sunrise in 1995.
The name changed — for a stretch the room answered to Storm — and then the basement got a second life.
Groove Society: the plush years, 1996–2003
In 1996, the same basement reopened as Groove Society, and it was everything Playground wasn't on purpose. Where Playground was raw, Groove Society was plush: deep-blue padded walls, winding corridors like a cartoon labyrinth, intimate lounges tucked into the turns, and — the detail everyone who went still talks about — a curtain of falling water behind the dancefloor.
The music matched the décor: warm, groovy, discovery-oriented house, held down by a murderers' row of Montréal residents — Alain Vinet, Bruno Brown, Eddie Jasmin, Pat Boogie. The guest list wasn't bad either. DJ Shadow passed through in 1997. Paul Oakenfold played here with Dave Ralph in September 1998 — billed as his first Montréal appearance, fifteen dollars at the door — back when he was arguably the biggest DJ on earth. And the club kept famously odd hours, running weekend daytime sessions that blurred the line between after-hours and Sunday afternoon. It held on until 2003 — a seven-year run, with its peak somewhere around the turn of the millennium, when a basement on this street was one of the best places in North America to hear house music.
Parking: the Village's big room, 2000–2011
At the building's 1296 entrance, a former auto-repair garage became Parking — a name that winked at the space's previous life. Through the 2000s it grew into one of the biggest gay clubs in Montréal, a multi-room machine: house in the main room upstairs, harder and hip-hop sounds down in Le Garage, special nights in the back room they called the Bunker, plus a leather room with a strictly enforced dress code.
Parking mattered for more than its size. Thursday nights, with DJ Mini behind the decks, were one of the few reliable nights in the city built by and for queer women — a night, as one regular told the Archives gaies du Québec's oral history project, when "on savait qu'on allait rencontrer plus de lesbiennes, d'avoir des DJettes lesbiennes." And in true Montréal fashion, the terrace ran through winter, with heaters going and blankets handed out at the door. It closed in 2011, and with it went the last of the building's club era.
The street changed its name, too
One more piece of history: when all three clubs operated, this was rue Amherst, named for a British general best remembered for endorsing germ warfare against Indigenous nations. In 2019, Montréal renamed the street Atateken — a Kanien'kéha word close in meaning to "brothers and sisters."
The clubs were gone by then. But anyone who ever hit 6 a.m. on one of these dancefloors — gay, straight, anglo, franco, and every permutation the Village welcomed — knows the new name describes what this building was already doing.
Same rooms, different tempo
The rooms are quieter now. We sell the records instead of playing them at peak volume — house, techno, disco and everything around them — along with the turntables, mixers and gear to play them on, and coffee that keeps more reasonable hours than Playground ever did.
We didn't have to go far for a relic, either: the original Parking sign is here in the store. Come stand under the name one more time.
If you danced here — Playground, Groove Society, Parking, any era — come tell us about it. We're collecting stories, flyers and photos from the building's club years: bring originals by the shop and we'll scan them on the spot, or send us your pictures and we'll add them to the archive with credit. The listening station is yours. And if a record you first heard in that basement ends up back in your hands upstairs, that's exactly the kind of loop we opened this shop for.
Sources and further reading: Red Bull Music Academy, "Montréal Rave: An Oral History"; Montréal Concert Poster Archive on Groove Society; Archives gaies du Québec, "Walls Have Ears"; event listings preserved on Rave.ca; CBC News on the renaming of rue Amherst.
