This was the first event I've had a chance to shoot at 560 Club, and I have to say, I was unimpressed. The dance floor is cavernous with no nearby seating or anywhere to put your drink down, except for a tiny smattering of seats in the far corner. It's unclear where anything is. The connecting hallway to get to the washrooms or the upstairs lounge is dark and cramped (so much so that one of the bouncers, well, bounced off me and the unfortunate result was the lens of my camera snapping in half.) The bathroom basement space was perhaps the most interesting part of the club, but I'm not keen on putting a drink down on a wet counter next to a bathroom sink, and given what will inevitably go on in the individually closed stalls I was having visions of old health cartoons from elementary school where valiant white blood cells did battle against legions of evil germs. Perhaps if either the upstairs lounge or the side lounge were actually open and not rented out to separate parties I might not have found the dance floor so uncomfortable. What is exactly is the point of having a multi-floor, multi-room club if you can't move from room to room? And the drink prices were just as outrageous as they every were at Richard's. The stage is nothing but a barren slab at one end of the dance-floor that the burlesque performers were dwarfed by, it's only redeeming feature being the live projectors mirroring the action on the stage against the back wall. Even on a night that was obstensively by and for an alternative crowd, the douchebag and woo-girl contingent was overly well represented and only added to the uncomfortable feeling in the space. Multi-room New York style club? I'll take the Albion's layout over this place any day. And even better, I'll take small clubs like 23 West, the old Twilight Zone/Rodaos, or spaces like Toronto's Bovine Sex Club and Velvet Underground over 560 Club. Mark my words, this place is never going to get the traction with the arty and alternative scenes that the owners are hoping for without some radical change. And without it, it is doomed to become an extension of Granville Street in order to draw sufficient crowds to survive, if it survives.
