The late, great crime novelist Elmore Leonard’s novel Killshot opens like this: “The Blackbird told himself he was drinking too much because he lived in this hotel and the Silver Dollar was close by, right downstairs. Try to walk out the door past it. Try to come along Spadina Avenue, hundreds of light bulbs in your face, and not be drawn in there.”

When the news came this week that the Silver Dollar might be closing — possibly temporarily, it turns out — my friend Lynda Spark shared a story of going to see Leonard read when Killshot was still a work in progress. “Later in the reading he mentioned the clientele of old drunks; people down on their luck. But the bar was under new management then, just starting to book bands,” Lynda says. “When I went to get a book signed, I decided to mention this to Mr. Leonard. ‘Well I just drove by, and it looked pretty disreputable to me,’ he said, testily.”

But when the book was published, sure enough there was a change in that section: “Also, there were more punks coming in there, crazy ones who coloured their hair pink and green; he didn’t like the way they called him Blackbird, the way they said it.” Leonard died in 2013, so there’s no way to check with him if Lynda inspired a revision of his hardboiled Toronto, or not. But Lynda is both trustworthy and perpetually cool, and when she was my copy editor for years, she made a million helpful tweaks, so I will choose to believe she was also involved in this one.

But I like this story for another reason, as we lament that the Silver Dollar is closing while construction and redevelopment takes place around it, and suspect that it will be a changed place if and when it reopens, even if the sign and bar and stage and terrazzo tiles of it are protected by city law. Killshot reminds us that the place we knew and loved was the impostor version in someone else’s mind — since opening in 1958, the Silver Dollar has been an upscale hotel bar, then a seedy dive, then a jazz hot spot, then a seedy dive again, then a blues landmark, then an indie rock institution. Maybe there have been more lives lived there than that, ones that live on in the memories of former regulars. But you gotta figure at every stage, there was a group of people who shook their heads at what the place they knew was turning into, who didn’t like the new crowd, didn’t like their haircuts or the way they said things.

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Is Toronto facing a live-music crisis?

In a city growing and changing and developing as fast as Toronto, we get occasions for nostalgia almost daily as another familiar signpost of the city gets boarded up or torn down — Dangerous Dan’s burger joint is now closing, across the street from where the hot pink neon lights of Jilly’s peeler bar turned off for good a few years ago; last year saw the death of the Brunswick House and Honest Ed’s and Come as You Are; the Victory Pub has just recently poured its last pint, the HMV record store chain is in its final weeks.

I like marking the passings, both those I wish weren’t happening and those I think are probably for the best. In either case, a place that has provided memories is good to memorialize, worth marking on the personal civic historical record, an entry in book of stories that add up to what Toronto is to us.

But I also think it’s worthwhile to realize, and remember, that where the stories start and end, what the key conflicts and who the main characters are and what it all means — these are different for each of us, and ever changing. For everyone who wanders down Princes’ Boulevard and feels the phantom cold of steel bleachers under their butt from the years they cheered Damaso Garcia at Exhibition Stadium, there is a Toronto FC fan following a drumbeat to BMO Field to see the Atomic Ant make Canadian soccer history. Both may feel their own version of Toronto sports history in that spot is the real story and represents the authentic experience of the city. Neither is wrong.

A significant feature of the Queen St. W. in my mind is sipping cocktails at the Cameron House on Sunday nights while Kevin Quain and the Mad Bastards perform gravel-voiced cabaret — and even while I was there seeing it happen in person more than a decade ago, there was someone beside me recalling Big Rude Jake smoking cigars on the bartop, and Quain himself was singing about memories of the dear departed Squeeze Club. The sign over the bar said “This is Paradise,” and for each of us, in a different way, it was. For those who go there now every Sunday to see New Grease Revival, it probably still is. The sign over the bar is still there.

Whatever you used to do, and love doing, people are probably still doing it, or something like it, somewhere. Wherever you used to do it, people are probably still doing something there, or will. And probably those things and places are as meaningful to them as the old ones were to you. There’s room in this city for all those competing and overlapping versions of How Things Should Be. And if we’re lucky, some of the buildings and signs and physical markers of our personal definitive version remain in place, forming an impression on the shroud outlining the sacred things that have passed.

Another Spadina Ave. live music institution, we learned recently, will soon be reopening. The El Mocambo — which was the setting for live albums by the Rolling Stones, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Elvis Costello, April Wine and others, and was at one time programmed by Dan Burke, who is now leaving the Silver Dollar — closed in 2014, but will reopen this summer. It will feature a new recording studio alongside the famous stage. No doubt it will be different than it was, again — just as when it was reborn under new management in 1989, 2001, and 2012. But it will still have the neon palm-tree sign, and the name, and the stories. And now there will be new songs to go with the old ones still stuck in our heads.

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That’s the way things go, all over the city: things ain’t what they used to be, it’s true. But then again, they never were.