Clements Bar

Clements Bar is a locksmith’s shop that becomes a bar, and the joke is entirely deliberate. By day the premises at 2626 Cherokee Street are Clements Lock & Security, the neighbourhood locksmith for Gravois Park and the surrounding streets. On Thursday evenings the counter opens for beer, wine and spirits instead.

The lock shop has been at this address since 1973, opened by Joe Clements. After his death the business was bought by Jason Deem, a developer long associated with Cherokee Street’s revival, and it was under him that the Thursday bar began.

The room needed almost no decorating, because the shop already had everything. The wall of key blanks – hundreds of them, hung in rows – turns out to be one of the better pieces of wall art in the city once there is a drink in your hand. Around it sit old key-cutting machines, plywood, salvaged fittings from the shop’s own past, and the counter and bookshelves rescued from Globe Drug. Nothing was staged; it is simply what was there.

The drinks list is deliberately plain – beer, wine, spirits, no elaborate cocktails – which suits a room where the point is the room and the company. It is one of the small, odd institutions that make Cherokee Street what it is, and one that no amount of planning would produce.

The shop stands at the eastern end of the street, several blocks past the antique dealers.