Capacity: 289 Former Booker: Brian Salmi come october of this year (2007) the mighty niagara will have been dead for a decade. alternately known as the bender on pender and the no agro, the niagara was the epicentre of a short-lived explosionof live music venues in vancouver. prior to the niagara local bands were lucky to get a tueday night slot at the town pump (now sonar), for which they might get $25 and a case of beer. those same bands would regularly pack the niagara on weekends and walk away with a decent amount of cash and a hundred new fans. when other empty bars noticed what was going on at the bender on pender, they jumped on the band wagon and within a year there were at least a half dozen new live music venues in the downtown core. while the mighty niagara was indisputably the best place to check out the local talent (as well as scores of touring acts), the bar was best known for social alchemy. on wednesday nights (gin and sin) you could see scuzzy 20-something punks decked out in styly smoking jackets and cocktail dresses sipping martinis with 48 year old corporate lawyers as the sounds of frank sintra filled the cigar-smoke thick air. the smooth and refined elegance of gin and sin was contrasted by the semi-regular circus known as metal de frommage (mdf). mdf made headlines in vancouver's mainstrem media for bizarre stunts like hit-a-hippie (patrons could smack a real, live, dirty commercial drive hippie with a wiffle bat for a buck. however, mdf made headlines coast to coast for hosting the BIGGEST COCK IN VANCOUVER contest. no shit. the contest came about after the bar's female regulars (well, in truth, there wasn't much regular about them, or they would have been drinking at some shithole like the roxy, but anyway) demanded the male equivalent to mdf's outrageous wet t-shirt contests. nothing was sacred at the mighty niagara, a fact attested to when jesus fuckin' christ himself showed up for a good friday mdf show to personally soak down the girls for the wet t-shirt contest (how many girls can claim that jesus soaked them down in a wet t0-shirt contest? more importantly, how many would like to? send me an email and i'll hook you up, you dirty little harlots!) okay. that's enough. i'll get around to writing the official history of the best bar in the history of vancouver another day later, kids s8n