ONCE UPON A TIME · 01
The building we sell records out of now spent roughly two decades as one of Montréal's most dependable places to lose track of time.
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 did the heavy lifting — 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.
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 — Fugues, looking back at three decades of Village nightlife, calls it flatly le premier afterhour de Montréal — the start of a string of rooms that would later include Sona, Stereo and Aria. In spirit it barely bothered to be a club at all.
The bars let out at 3 a.m.; the basement 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. Angel Moraes played here too, with Mark Anthony as his Montréal contact — the connection that would eventually produce Stereo. The camcorder footage above is what this address looked like at sunrise in 1995.
That same year, on Easter Sunday 1995, this basement hosted the first-ever Bal en Blanc — a benefit for Divers/Cité with DJs Nikola T and Robert Ouimet, the same Ouimet who'd defined Lime Light's booth two decades earlier. Eight hundred people showed up. It's now one of the biggest annual indoor parties in North America, and it started in this basement, not somewhere grander.
The name changed — for a stretch the room answered to Storm. Fred Everything, who was behind the decks for the handover, puts it in one line: "I played at Playground when it became Storm." After that the trail goes cold for a few years: Fugues mentions a Résurrection and a Tunnel passing through the address without lasting. Then the building got loud again.
Groove Society: the plush years, 1996–2003
In 1996, a basement at 1288 opened 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 and Pat Boogie. The guest list wasn't bad either. Kid Koala played here twice in the winter of 1997, alongside DJ Food and DJ Vadim in February and again in March. DJ Shadow passed through that April with Jeru the Damaja. Paul Oakenfold played with Dave Ralph in September 1998 — billed on the night 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: a surviving 2003 listing advertises a Saturday running 10 a.m. till closing, which tells you most of what you need to know. It held on until 2003, closing out with, of all things, the Village People that October — a seven-year run whose peak sat 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.
It didn't quite stay shut, either. Six years after the last night, the crowd got itself back together for a Groove Society reunion in June 2009 — different room, same people, same records.
Parking: the Village's big room, 2000–2011
In October 2000, at the building's 1296 entrance, a former auto-repair garage opened as Parking — a name that winked at the space's previous life. It did not start out as a temple of anything. Its own website in 2001 describes a bar gay Dance/Cruising/Cuir with four residents — Claude Laviolette, Ron, Wheels and Lou K — and a music policy listed, in plain words, as Dance Top 40.
Then it grew, and kept rearranging itself. By 2007 the club described itself as two sections; by 2011, three — the Nightclub, the Urban Room and the terrace — with a room called the Tunnel appearing on the 2010 calendar alongside them. Visitors in between describe a harder room downstairs called Le Garage, Friday nights in a back room called the Bunker, and a leather room with a strictly enforced dress code. The same operators ran Taverne Normandie across the street at 1295.
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." Mini held that residency for seven years, and her Overdose parties turned the room into something the rest of the city didn't quite expect from a Village club.
Because here's the thing about a club that opened playing Top 40. Scroll the surviving event archive and the 2004–2007 stretch alone turns up Laurent Garnier, Ellen Allien, Tiga, Marco Carola, Adam Beyer and Paco Osuna, Zombie Nation, Ladytron, David Morales, Misstress Barbara. In four years this became a room on the international techno circuit that happened to be in the Village, rather than a Village club that occasionally booked techno. And in true Montréal fashion, the terrace ran through winter, with heaters going and blankets handed out at the door.
The flyers
A few nights, as the street saw them:
Most of these were scanned and preserved by the members of the community archive at Rave.ca, where more than a thousand Parking listings survive; the last two come from the club's own website, saved by the Internet Archive. Click any flyer for its source. The artwork belongs to the promoters and designers who made it — if a piece here is yours and you'd like it credited differently, or taken down, email us and we'll sort it out the same day.
The end came with the building: it was converted into condos and the club was pushed out. Fugues dates the closing to 2010, but the club's own website was still posting new flyers in June and July 2011 and still describing three working rooms that August, and the event archive carries listings at Parking into October 2011. Whenever exactly the lights went off, the last of the building's club era went with them.
The street changed its name, too
When all three clubs were running, this was rue Amherst. In 2019 it became rue Atateken, a Kanien'kéha word for brothers and sisters — episode 02 is the whole story, general included.
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 — out of the same building.
The continuity isn’t only sentimental. There are around twelve thousand records on the floor at any given time, most of them 12″ singles running from the early eighties to now, and the deepest sections are house, disco, garage house, deep house and boogie. That is, near enough, the Groove Society record box. The music that filled this address at four in the morning is the music on the shelves at two in the afternoon.
The tempo is the part that changed. The basement ran until sunrise. We close at five on a Sunday. There is a listening station and it is there to be used — bring a record to it and find out before you buy, which is a much smaller version of the test this building used to put records through at 4 a.m.
Shop details are here — hours, what we carry, and the fact that we buy collections. And the original Parking sign is on the wall if you want to come stand under the name one more time.
The series
This is one address out of hundreds. Keep reading the series — next, the street outside, then Stereo's sound system and the six a.m. permit that started it all.
If you danced here — Playground, Storm, 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.
A note on the addresses: the archives don't fully agree on which door belonged to which club. The Montréal Concert Poster Archive places Groove Society in a basement at 1288 sharing space with Playground; Fugues traces the Playground → Résurrection → Tunnel → Parking lineage at 1296 — though Parking's own calendar later used Tunnel as the name of one of its rooms, so that one may be a room rather than a predecessor. If you know the answer — or better, have the flyer that proves it — we'd love to hear from you.
Sources and further reading: Red Bull Music Academy, "Montréal Rave: An Oral History"; Montréal Concert Poster Archive on Groove Society; Steven Ross, "Survol nostalgique du nightlife dans le Village : 1984-2014," Fugues, 2024; Parking's own website, 2001 and 2011, via the Internet Archive; Archives gaies du Québec, "Walls Have Ears"; event listings and flyers preserved on Rave.ca; Émilie Côté, "Vie de nuit, vie de DJ," La Presse, 2011; David Madden, "DJ Mini and Montreal's Vulgar Dance Music," Dancecult, 2016; Radio-Canada Archives, "Un rave en 1993"; CBC News on the renaming of rue Amherst; Xtra Magazine, "Montreal's Bal en Blanc party turns 20," 2014.
Part of Once Upon a Time, our series on Montréal nightlife. Next: the street outside, and how rue Amherst became rue Atateken.
