Meet me at Monica's.A Little Jamaica saying
Monica Lewis (c. 1940 – June 5, 2026) was a Jamaican-Canadian entrepreneur and community leader known as the Queen of Little Jamaica. For over sixty years she operated Monica's Records, a reggae record label and store, and Monica's Cosmetic Supplies Ltd. at 1553 Eglinton Avenue West in Toronto. She died June 5, 2026, at 86.
Before Eglinton West became a wound, it was a world. You knew it by the music that found the sidewalk before you could find the door, reggae pressing through the glass on a Saturday, turning the whole block into something that felt, for a moment, like the island. At the centre of all of it, sixty years without interruption: Monica Lewis.
She came to Toronto from England in the late 1960s, born in Jamaica, arriving with her husband George and the particular ambition of people who have already crossed one ocean and are not afraid to cross another.[1] They planted themselves at 1553 Eglinton Avenue West and did not move. George became what the community came to call The Record Man, pressing 45s, handling distribution, running the sounds.[2] Monica ran the label. She ran the shop. She held the whole of it in her hands without appearing to hold anything at all.
The label was Monica's Records, a proper imprint, catalogued on Discogs, releasing roots cuts and Canadian pressings of Jamaican originals when this city was hungry for the music and couldn't always get the import.[3] The basement had twin 16-inch bass bins and a wood-paneled back room with shag carpet, a sofa, a gathering space.[4] You didn't just go to buy a record. You went to hear what was happening. To find out who was in town. To be somewhere that felt like somewhere.
Monica's Records · RG 07 · “Dance In Canada” by Johnny Clarke
Prod. George M. Bunny Lee · 1553 Eglinton Ave. W., Toronto
My father would come home from work every Friday and go buy 45s at Monica's. I would mimic those energies in Grade 7 and 8, hanging out at the record store with my friends.Dalton Higgins, cultural critic[5]
What artists recorded on Monica's Records?
The label's catalog, fully documented on Discogs under label ID 65891, reads like a who's who of roots reggae. King Tubby, who defined the art of dub mixing, pressed an LP there. Dennis Brown, John Holt, Horace Andy, Max Romeo, Cornell Campbell, Delroy Wilson, Augustus Pablo, and I-Roy all appear in the catalog. Tommy McCook, a founding member of the Skatalites, the band that invented ska, released on the label. A 1976 Prince Jazzbo single was produced by Lee "Scratch" Perry.[6] The dominant producer across the catalog was Bunny "Striker" Lee, one of reggae's most prolific figures.
Monica's Production, a parallel imprint run from the same address and catalogued separately on Discogs, pressed Canadian releases for American R&B alongside the reggae catalog, including Teena Marie and Philadelphia soul group Rhyze. Monica's served the full spectrum of what Black Toronto was listening to, not a narrow slice of it.
The internationally known reggae artists who passed through Toronto in those years, Jackie Mittoo (Skatalites keyboardist, who recorded in studios on Eglinton West after moving to Toronto in 1969[7]) and Leroy Sibbles (lead voice of The Heptones, who lived in Toronto for twenty years and won a Juno Award here[8]), were part of the same world the label operated in. Monica's Records was where that world was documented and pressed onto vinyl at 1553 Eglinton Avenue West.
What was Little Jamaica, and why did Monica Lewis define it?
Little Jamaica is the stretch of Eglinton Avenue West between Dufferin Street and Keele Street in Toronto, the commercial and cultural heart of the city's Jamaican community, built by Jamaican Torontonians since the 1970s. You don't name the city when you're from here. You name the corridor. That stretch is where they built something real: a culture, in public, on their own terms. Monica Lewis was its fixed point for sixty of those years.
"Meet me at Monica's." That phrase spread not because anyone decided it should, but because it named something true. Her store was a coordinate, the place you directed people toward when you needed them to find something they couldn't name yet. A third space before the language existed for it.
Monica was always a hub. It was basically the culture.Community member[9]
She greeted every person through the door as though she had been waiting specifically for them. Not as performance, as conviction. You felt it land.
As soon as you open these doors, she'll give you this big smile and say, "Hey, beautiful. I love what you're wearing. I like what you're doing. I love this." And she'll compliment you no matter what you do. Once you come into that store, she'd greet you like a friend. Her arms are wide open.Community member[9]
Through the years the city tried to forget them
When Metrolinx broke ground on the Eglinton Crosstown LRT, a decade of blocked sidewalks, severed foot traffic, and construction dust settled into the accounts of businesses that had no reserve to weather it. Hundreds closed. The street went quiet.
Monica Lewis did not close.
She documented it without self-pity, in her own words, to the Toronto Star in 2018:
We're not making any business at all. We just come out here and sit. I haven't sold one dollar. And this is how the days are.Monica Lewis · Toronto Star, 2018[11]
And then she said what she was going to do about it:
I am not going to let anyone push me out. I'll go when I'm good and ready.Monica Lewis · Toronto Star, 2018[11]
She stayed. The doors stayed open. The smile, everyone who knew her comes back to the smile, did not dim once.
How did Monica Lewis become the Queen of Little Jamaica?
Nobody held a ceremony. Community titles don't work that way. They accumulate over decades, in the space between what someone does and what everyone notices: every young entrepreneur she talked through their fear, every business owner she kept in the fight through the lean years, every person who walked in feeling invisible and walked out feeling seen. It took sixty years. It required a certain quality of character that cannot be taught, only chosen, every morning, until choosing it becomes indistinguishable from who you are.
Miss Monica. The Queen of Little Jamaica.
She put herself at a level that she wanted everybody else to follow. She was a role model for us.Community member
She basically grew us.Community member[9]
That word. Not mentored. Not supported. Not helped. Grew. As though she understood what you were made of before you did, and held that knowledge patiently, for years, if that was what it took.
What she's done as a business woman, to come from Jamaica, to come to Canada, and to kick down barriers. I could imagine back in those days a lot of women weren't really given that opportunity to go into business. Miss Monica thrived in business.Community member[9]
She should be read about in books.Jason McDonald, Chair, Little Jamaica BIA[10]
What happens at 1553 Eglinton West now
Monica Lewis died on June 5, 2026. She was 86. Her son Jr. has the building at 1553 Eglinton West, and he is doing with it exactly what you would expect of a man who was raised inside that kind of generosity, opening it as a pop-up space, giving new businesses on the same block their first foothold, continuing the work without making a ceremony of it.
Helping them in any way I can. If they can get a start, that's good. As long as they can open a business along Eglinton and make it Eglinton the way it was before, I'd be way happy.Jr., Monica's son[9]
That's exactly what your mom would do for others.
Exactly. Exactly.
Monica leaves behind a large family: those who share her blood, and the many more who became family through the kindness of her soul.Little Jamaica BIA[10]
The phrase “Meet me at Monica’s” lives on.