Contains adult themes: this story covers an adult (p*rn) performer and a strip club. Nothing explicit is described.
In brief: On Nov. 2, Nikki Benz reacted on X to a fan’s reminder that Toronto’s Brass Rail strip club has about two months left. “I can’t believe this iconic club is closing!” she wrote, asking what will replace it. Heritage Toronto says the club, at 701 Yonge St., is slated to close by the end of the year.
Every city landmark gets a eulogy eventually. For the Brass Rail, one of Toronto’s best-known strip clubs, part of it came from Nikki Benz.
On Nov. 2 a Toronto fan posted that there were “Roughly 2 months left before this Toronto institution – Brass Rail – closes,” adding that Benz “will no longer be immortalized on Yonge St.” Benz quoted the post the same evening: “I can’t believe this iconic club is closing! Anyone know what will go up there instead?”
View this post on X
It is a very practical question for a farewell. Most people mourning a landmark stop at the mourning. Benz went straight to the zoning.
A building with a long résumé
The Brass Rail did not start out as a strip club. According to Heritage Toronto, it was founded in the late 1940s as a family-friendly restaurant, the Brass Rail Tavern, and became a destination for topless dancing and live music by the late 1960s, when part of Yonge Street became known as the “Sin Strip.” Toronto musicians Jackie Shane and Paul Shaffer performed there.
Before that, the property held grocers, liquor stores, a billiards hall and, during the Second World War, an art gallery. It is now a designated heritage building, and its facade turned up in Drake’s music video “Little Birdie,” Heritage Toronto notes.
In 1981, when the city began requiring licenses for clubs with strippers, the Brass Rail was one of 63 clubs to get one. It runs three spaces, Lower Brass, Upper Brass and the Mezzanine, and Heritage Toronto says upwards of 70 to 100 dancers work there on weekend nights.
The end of a strip
Heritage Toronto says the club is slated to close by the end of this year. Along with Filmores and the fire-damaged Zanzibar, that could leave downtown Toronto with no strip clubs at all if Zanzibar does not reopen. The organization calls it potentially “a brutal blow to hundreds of stripper livelihoods.”
So Benz’s question is a fair one. What replaces a building that has been a tavern, a gallery, a billiards hall and a heritage-listed strip club? Nobody in the thread had announced an answer, and Benz did not offer a guess.
For a performer whose X bio lists AVN Hall of Fame and Penthouse Pet of the Year, it is a small, very human moment: a star finding out that a club fans tie to her name has a closing date, and then asking, reasonably, what is next.
Sources: Nikki Benz on X, Nov. 2, 2026; Heritage Toronto, The Brass Rail.