The outside of the Big Bop has remained mostly untouched since its doors were officially closed just over a year ago amidst a rather celebratory slew of last hurrahs for the punk, metal, and rave crowds that dominated its multiple floors since the early '90s.

When it was announced in December 2009 that the legendary all-ages concert hall—home to the Kathedral on the ground floor, the Reverb on the second, and the tiny Holy Joe's on the third—would be closed, almost immediately, the "Leased" signs were thrown up and some of the distinct, ghastly paint was scraped away from the lower half. But aside from marquees being removed and frequent fresh batches of posters and graffiti, the purple monster has loomed quietly at the corner of Queen and Bathurst since.

Inside, however, renovations started as soon as the place was closed, and the slow-moving clean-out has put it in stark contrast to the familiar exterior.

The Big Bop is bare now: no stages, no bars, no soundboards or lighting rigs. Walls have been knocked down, columns have been restructured or moved, and patches of floor and ceiling have been replaced, some with planks of wood for now. (A gallery of photos from inside is above.)

Daniel Rumack is the owner and landlord of the building, and he tells OpenFile that the four-million-dollar renovations have taken a bit longer than initially expected. He visits the site three to four times a week, and says that the new tenant, CB2—a modernized, condo-targeting offshoot of American housewares store Crate and Barrel—is still on target to open in the summer. It’ll be their first Canadian location.

“That’s what happens when you can’t open the building up,” Rumack says on a stroll through the dusty first floor, pointing out a massive four-level-tall support column that had to be moved into the building and installed without the help of a crane. The building is located in the Heritage Conservation District of Queen Street West (which spans University to Bathurst), so Rumack and the new tenants have been working with the area’s coordinators from the City’s Heritage Preservation Services to preserve and restore the building’s architectural details, such as the windows, long obscured by the trademark paint job.

Rumack tells us that they’ll be refurbishing as much of the existing wood (some of it lovely and ornamental, a detail hidden in the dim of a rock show) and brick as they can, and harvesting more of the brick, currently sitting in piles on the floor inside, for use on the outside, too.

They’re currently awaiting final approval on the exterior designs. By March, staging should start to go up around the outside of the building to begin its facelift.

It’ll be a remarkable visual change to the neighbourhood, one that for years has been subject to the big g-word and simultaneously—thanks, in part, to the Big Bop—been called ungentrifiable. Rumack, who has owned the building for four years—he bought it after selling the parking lot at Queen and Portland, where more chain retail stores will be coming to the area this year—says he’d been working on finding a new tenant for years; Abercrombie & Fitch and Apple, he says, were each one-time interested parties, but he suspects the area was ultimately “a bit too edgy" for them.

I ask Rumack if he’d paid mind to the music community’s mourning over the loss of the Big Bop as an important all-ages venue. “Well, I didn’t get any of the hate mail,” he says. For a while, Rumack helped the Big Bop look for a new location; it ended up being recreated outside of the downtown core as The Rockpile on Dundas Street West, near Kipling Station, in Etobicoke. Ex–Big Bop/current Rockpile manager Dominic Tassielli couldn't be reached for comment, but Steve Hoeg, talent booker at the Rockpile, tells us in a brief chat that the Queen and Bathurst location isn’t missed, and that the new place is doing well.

Rumack makes brief mention of his own time spent as a patron of the Big Bop, standing just feet away from some “R.I.P. Bop” graffiti on a wall in the room that was once Holy Joe’s. Another wall is gone completely, overlooking the alley where CB2’s loading dock will be; the walls that remain are littered with neon bristol-board cut-outs of tattered stars and other shapes.

On one last walk through the former Reverb, Rumack continues to point out details, more excited about salvaging the ceiling moulds than nostalgic for his own memories. It’s a bit difficult to even place where the stage once was, but in the dull, dingy window light, there's something else to see there now.