ONCE UPON A TIME · 04
Playground's basement ran until sunrise because a licence to do exactly that already existed in this city — and it was invented, in 1973, three floors above a gay bar on rue Stanley.
Go back far enough in our own building's story and you hit an unexplained fact: after-hours culture in Montréal didn't evolve gradually out of ordinary bar hours. It has a start date, a founder, and a specific piece of paper. The paper was a liquor permit that ran three hours past normal closing. The club was Lime Light, at 1254 rue Stanley. Everything Playground, Groove Society and Parking later did with a basement and a sunrise owes something to what a 30-year-old named Yvon Lafrance built here first.
The room
Lafrance opened Lime Light on 7 September 1973, named after Chaplin's 1952 film, after a trip to New York the year before showed him what a nightclub could be. His technical partner was Claude Chalifoux. Three storeys, each its own club: the ground floor, Le Jardin, a gay bar seating roughly 800 (now Chez Parée); the second floor, known as the “Super Lime Light” or simply the Sky, holding about 1,200; a third floor built around Ouimet's room.
The door was tiered on purpose. Newcomers were held downstairs first, as a kind of test, before they were allowed up. Cover was $3 on weekends, $1 on weekdays — or you bought a $25 “Friendship Card” and got in free, Monday to Wednesday, for a year.
The DJs
The first regular DJ was George Cucuzzella. He didn't last — by his own account he “couldn't stand the afterhours scene” — but he went on to co-found the Canadian Record Pool in 1976 and the label Unidisc. That's a direct line from this booth to Canadian record distribution, which is a thread we care about more than most.
His replacement, Robert Ouimet, became the club's defining DJ, principal through the club's first run. He worked from a fully glassed-in booth — soundproofed to the point that he couldn't hear the room and never mixed with headphones, cueing the next record off a left monitor while reading the crowd off a right one. Like every Montréal DJ of the era, he wasn't using a DJ mixer at all: it was a Yamaha 16-track recording console, riding both channels by hand. After Ouimet came Michel Simard, Fernand Gagné and Gil Riberdy.
The lighting rig matched the ambition. Ouimet and lighting technician Richard Joly ran every light in the room from a custom matrix of 16×16 pinball buttons, played like an instrument. Joly, on the approach:
The dance floor is a theater… I would spend a whole evening using only red lights for six hours.
The wooden dance floor once collapsed under the weight of line-dancing and shut the club for a month. That's the level of physical commitment we're talking about.
Breaking records
Lime Light didn't just play imported records — it paid to go get them. The club covered Ouimet's weekly flights to New York, plus a buying budget, specifically so he could bring back music not yet released in Canada. He's credited with breaking Donna Summer's “I Feel Love” in North America before most of the continent had heard it.
A trio working under the name PAJ Disco Mix — Pierre Gagnon, Allen Vallieres, Jean Barbeau — cut tape edits for the club on an Akai 4000 reel-to-reel, extending and reworking tracks for the floor before anyone called that remixing. Their edit of “Music” by Montreal Sound sold half a million copies and reached number 7 on the Billboard disco chart. A record shop's version of this story: the DJ booth here was functioning as an A&R department.
The permit that started it
Lime Light held a liquor permit to 6 a.m. — three hours past the standard close. The bar physically closed for thirty minutes at 3 a.m., then reopened dry, alcohol-free, for the after-hours stretch. That single piece of paper is the direct ancestor of the after-hours culture that Playground and, later, the whole Stereo/Sona/Aria lineage grew out of — including Bal en Blanc, still running today, which staged its first edition in 1995 a few blocks away, in Playground's basement, with Robert Ouimet himself on the decks.
Founder Yvon Lafrance, on the room's peak and its new-wave-era decline: “We used to run 3,500 per night. Friday night. Saturday night. Then we went down to 415.”
Who was there
Gloria Gaynor, The Trammps, Donna Summer, The Ritchie Family, Vince Montana, Van McCoy, the Salsoul Orchestra and France Joli all played. James Brown played five nights running in May 1977, two shows a night. Grace Jones was a regular before she was famous. On the floor rather than the stage: Bowie, Iggy Pop, Rick James, Alice Cooper, Freddie Mercury, Elton John. Kraftwerk came by after their 1981 show at Théâtre St-Denis.
Ouimet was widely regarded, in his time, as one of the country's most influential DJs — the specific title and the outlet that awarded it vary between the sources we found, so we're not printing a citation we can't stand behind. What isn't in dispute: the club flew him to New York every week to keep the room ahead of the rest of the continent.
How it ended, and what came after
Lime Light closed permanently on 17 June 1990, alongside the Thunderdome next door at 1252 Stanley, following a public inquiry into the death of Presley Leslie, killed at the Thunderdome on 9 April 1990. It reopened on 24 April 1997, ran until 2001, then became Club La Boom, which closed in 2017.
There's a current echo worth knowing about if you want to hear some of this rather than just read it: Disco Fever Experience — Tribute to Limelight runs at Espace St-Denis, 13–14 February and 13–14 March 2026, with afterparties featuring DJ Fernand Gagné — one of the club's own resident DJs, still playing.
Why we care, from a shop full of turntables
Every after-hours club in this series — including the basement under our own floor — is downstream of a liquor permit and a DJ willing to spend the club's money flying to New York every week to stay ahead of the room. That's the same instinct that runs a good record shop: go get the thing before everyone else has it, and let the floor decide if you were right.
A note on what we didn't print: several sources attribute a specific “Best DJ” award to Robert Ouimet from either Rolling Stone or Billboard, with the year, publication and even the country of the award disagreeing between them. We could not find the original citation for any version, so we've described his standing without asserting a specific title. If you have the original source, we'd like to see it.
Photographs of the club exist — Norman A. Craan's crowd shots and Micka Silvestre's photos of Ouimet in the booth, both held by Red Bull Music Academy's archive — but they're rights-reserved and we don't have permission to reproduce them here, so we're linking to the video interview instead rather than hosting the images ourselves. Montréal's La Presse archive at BAnQ also holds a dated Ouimet photo (fonds P833, 22 March 1980) we haven't yet requested.
Sources: Red Bull Music Academy, “Montréal Rave: An Oral History,” 2016, including its Robert Ouimet interview at his home in Laval; RBMA Daily's Lime Light feature; Exclaim! obituary coverage of Robert Ouimet's DJ career; Xtra Magazine, “Montreal's Bal en Blanc party turns 20,” 2014; Wikipedia, Bal en Blanc.
Part of Once Upon a Time, our series on Montréal nightlife. Next: Business, the club at 3500 Saint-Laurent that brought Chicago house to this city. Danced at Lime Light, or worked the booth? Tell us about it.
