Raise your lighters, Toronto, it’s Massey Hall Day.

The most fabled of Toronto’s many fabled performance venues celebrates its 124th birthday Thursday with an evening of music provided by such CanCon leading lights as Jim Cuddy, Sarah Harmer, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Sam Roberts and Whitehorse, and Mayor John Tory has officially proclaimed June 14 Massey Hall Day in its honour.

The evening’s star-studded shindig will be a somewhat bittersweet occasion, however, as the venue will go dark early next month until the fall of 2020, while its interior and exterior get a thorough makeover and its overall footprint is expanded to take in a brand-new, seven-storey tower — to the immediate south of its longtime perch on Shuter St. — that will include a new, 500-capacity secondary live venue on its fourth floor. After a run of three shows by living local legend Gordon Lightfoot on June 29, June 30 and July 1 and a final staff party on July 3, that’s it. No Massey Hall for two years. The mind boggles.

“Honestly, I’m trying to avoid thinking about it too much since we still have so much work to do in this last stretch,” says Jesse Kumagai, director of programming, marketing and business development for the Massey Hall/Roy Thomson Hall corporation. “Despite that, you inevitably end up talking about it and I’d be lying if I said a few tears haven’t already been shed around the office. But we all know this renovation needs to happen, that this work is going to mean Massey Hall will be here for future generations and that it’s so very well deserved after 124 years as the hardest-working concert hall in Canada.”

The scale of the $142-million Massey “revitalization,” as its overseers have been calling it, is daunting. But if all goes as planned, the results promise to be genuinely breathtaking.

For starters, a building that’s come to be regarded as holy ground in Canadian-music circles is going to look an awful lot more like a church when the work is finished. One of the major features of the restoration will be uncovering 100 stained-glass windows ringing the auditorium that have been covered up for the better part of a century.

Standing on the empty stage where so many musical giants have performed over the years — Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Miles Davis, Lou Reed, Loretta Lynn, Pete Seeger, B.B. King, P.J. Harvey, Nick Cave, Sinead O’Connor, the National, Blue Rodeo, Cowboy Junkies, Wilco, and Kraftwerk, just to name a few — and gazing up at the blank indentations in the walls where those windows will soon be returned to the cathedral-like splendour churchgoing founder Hart Massey originally intended, it’s hard to imagine the room becoming any more impressive than it already is. But it looks like it’s going that way.

“Last August, there was one day they had three of them out and we all rushed over and honestly, Ben, we all had a lump in our throat, just knowing that those particular windows were almost 90 years covered and to see all the light come in,” says Deane Cameron, the former EMI Music Canada president who came out of retirement three years ago to assume the CEO position at the Massey/Roy Thomson corporation just as the renovation plans were becoming concrete. “There’s probably nobody alive who’s seen them all uncovered and in their former glory. Most of them have been covered over for probably 85 or 90 years. We’ve seen some of the initial work going into the windows, and they’re spectacular. It’s gonna be beautiful. If you’re an artist performing into these, it’s gonna be incredible.”

In addition to restoring the windows, which will each have retractable acoustic blinds to keep the light out and the noise in as performances warrant, the Massey Hall revitalization will also involve a complete redo of the auditorium’s vaulted ceiling. The chicken wire that went into the ceiling and below the galleries during a previous refurbishment in 1948 will be pulled and the plaster and lath will be painstakingly hand-trowelled into its original form and repainted.

Inside, the 70-year-old cinema seats on the floor will be pulled and replaced with removable seating that will provide a standing, general-admission space for appropriate shows and boost the hall’s 2,700-person capacity. A small parterre will also be installed at the back of the GA area, with a few rows of newly tiered seating going in under the balcony, while downstairs the Centuries lounge will be expanded to include a stage and to add yet another (250-capacity) performance space to the venue.

The new tower replaces an old adjacent Victorian home known as the Albert House and expands Massey Hall into some land graciously deeded by a condo development going up nearby on Yonge St. This will finally give the hall an actual loading dock for the stage, some much-needed office space, expanded dressing rooms for visiting artists, more room for bars and concessions and the aforementioned live venue on the fourth floor, plus a fifth-floor mezzanine wired to record audio-visual content from that venue as well as the main hall and Centuries.

“It was something we started discussing about ten years ago, around the same time we started presenting concerts in smaller venues,” says Kumagai of the new room. “It was so clear that there were brilliant artists out there that weren’t yet ready to play Massey Hall, but with the right path ahead of them it wouldn’t take long. We wanted to work with them throughout that journey. Expanding the venue portfolio was the obvious next step, made possible when we acquired the land to the south of Massey Hall. At a time when small venues in Toronto are more likely to close than they are to open, you jump at the opportunity to build a great new room that you know will be there many years down the road.”

Roy Thomson Hall will pick up some of the concert traffic that would normally pass through Massey Hall over the next two years, while Kumagai says the organization will increase the number of shows it presents in smaller venues about town. “And, of course, artists are already asking about playing the reopening. So our dreams of a quiet couple years with extra long weekends have already vanished.”

The main concern, says Cameron, is that “we get everything 100 per cent right” so that neither the public nor the musicians who play the hall — built all those years ago by Hart Massey as a home for the Mendelssohn Choir and a tribute to his son, Charles Albert, a musician who died prematurely of typhoid fever, and enshrined as a National Historic Site of Canada in 1981 — think the old vibe has been irretrievably ruined.

“One concern I’ve had is people just believing that we can make this beautiful again and still keep the charm. We’ve actually talked about whether the public will overreact and say ‘That’s not the Massey Hall I know’ with all these stained-glass windows, but from 1894 to about 1910 that’s the way it was,” he says. “It’s just carefully restoring everything to its natural state. And a lot of hand-plaster work. A lot.”

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And what of our mayor and his Massey Hall Day proclamation? Might he have some personal connections to the room?

Ben Rayner reminisces about the first show he reviewed at Massey Hall after getting an inside look at the place before it closes for extensive renovations.

Turns out, like most Torontonians, he does.

“My first visit to Massey Hall was probably when I was about 8 or 9 and I was actually on stage as part of Captain Kangaroo’s visit to Toronto. He was a big U.S. TV star and we just had to walk across the stage and no more, but it was a very big deal,” he says. “Next up, probably when I was 11, was my first Toronto symphony concert. My grandmother took me as she thought all children should appreciate classical music and off we went for the first of many times. I also had a great-uncle who played in the Toronto Symphony so that was a bonus. And finally, my first ever concert I attended with friends was about five years after that to see James Taylor with opening act Carole King, then an unknown.”

It’s gonna be a long two years.