Revisiting the Summer of Love
Yorkville flashes back to the hippie days of 1967 as part of Luminato festival
Jun 03, 2007 04:30 AM
Chris Sorensen
Staff Reporter
David DePoe’s Yorkville was a place that blared Janis Joplin, smelled of marijuana smoke and buzzed with talk of political and social change – basically the exact opposite of what the upscale neighbourhood is today.
Dressed in a blue T-shirt emblazoned with the word “peace” and a wide-brimmed hat, the 63-year-old elementary school teacher walked down Yorkville Ave. yesterday and pointed at high-end boutiques, pricey restaurants and luxury condominiums that now sit where there used to be all-night cafes, boisterous bars and rooms to rent for as little as $40 a month.
That was back in the summer of 1967, when Yorkville, now a playground for the city’s well-heeled, was the epicentre of the country’s hippie movement, and DePoe was one of its leaders.
“Yorkville today is the antithesis of what we wanted,” said DePoe, who compared 1960s Yorkville to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury or New York’s Greenwich Village. “It’s consumerism and rich people whereas we were trying to live the simple and cheap life.”
Indeed, Yorkville is now a metaphor for the hippie movement, which was characterized by a potent mix of music, drugs and talk of political and social change. It began as a rebellion against society and its values ended up becoming swallowed whole by popular culture.
Nevertheless, DePoe was one of several current and former hippies who returned yesterday for a Summer of Love event, part of this weekend’s Luminato festival.
The sight was slightly surreal as local 1960s- and 1970s-era bands rocked out on a stage in front of a towering Williams-Sonoma sign. Meanwhile, a handful of hippies in their 50s smoked pot next to curious passersby who clutched cellphones, Holt Renfrew shopping bags and specialty coffees.
“It’s a bit of a flashback,” said Jannine Kelly, 53, who recalled running away from the suburbs at 13 into the open arms of Yorkville and its culture of community. Others, like Sebastian Agnello, 54, remember the neighbourhood as a giant, drug-fuelled party. “Lots of us didn’t take the political stuff too seriously. It was just a lot of fun.”
While yesterday was clearly about the music and the fashion (dozens of onlookers stood in line at kiosks to have flowers painted on their faces or placed in their hair), some, like DePoe, are convinced the Toronto hippie movement, short-lived as it was, did bring about social change.
“It was peace and love and all of that, but what we were actually trying to do was establish a community where people treated each other differently and everyone was accepted,” he said.
“I don’t think we would have a Charter of Rights if it wasn’t for the social movements of the 1960s.”
But rebellion also brought resistance from the establishment. DePoe’s summer of love included a clash with police over traffic in Yorkville. On Aug. 20, hundreds of hippies sat on the road and chanted “no more cars, no more cars.” Police then dragged kids, some by the hair, into paddy wagons while others were clubbed and kicked.
DePoe ended up in a jail cell and later recalled being shocked at the use of force. “What woke me up was realizing that these were the people that have all the power.”
The 60s, visiting for a day in Yorkville
June 3rd, 2007 · 1 Comment
When he was young in the 60s, Jerry Miskolczi used to listen to the artists whose album covers he still collects avidly. It wasn’t until the 80s that he started collecting as a hobby.
It was at the Lake Shore Inn in Toronto, a place that no longer exists. Saturday, in the Gallery of Memories section of the Summer of Love attraction in Yorkville, he displayed a full rack of records that might seem obscure to foreign eyes. But bands like Jack London and the Sparrows eventually became Steppenwolf and Buffalo Springfield, and The Staccatos became the Five Man Electrical Band.
“I have slowed down in my collecting,” Miskolczi said with a smile. “I’m not obsessive.”
In the stall next to him, Nicholas Jennings offers his book, “Before the Gold Rush,” on the history of Yorkville in the 1960s.
“It’s every bit the equivalent of the history of Greenich Village or Haight-Ashbury in those days,” he said. “It’s a history that needs to be celebrated.” Indeed: Where there are now sushi restaurants and a Williams-Sonoma, in the 60s there were houses full of hippies and musicians, including Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. A nearby parking lot is the one Mitchell famously refers to in her song “Big Yellow Taxi.”
That Saturday, Yorkville was half thoroughfare, half amphitheater. People got their faces painted as Sylvia Tyson sang about The Night The Chinese Restaurant Burned Down. For one day, it all came back to us.
→ 1 CommentTags: yorkville · celebrations · music
Yorkville ~ Hippiedom
40 years ago, Yorkville belonged to the hippies and Queen’s Park was made for grooving
May 21, 2007 04:30 AM
Philip Marchand
books columnist
DICK DARRELL / TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO
In an event that speaks to the innocence of the time, the summer of ’67 saw the hippies take to Yorkville streets in a traffic protest.The summer of love, the summer of 1967, was a turning point in the late ’60s, the culmination of a utopian vision of music and love and sharing and leisure.It’s now 40 years and a lifetime away.
It all began in January ’67, when activist and political organizer Jerry Rubin announced a Be-In would shortly occur in San Francisco’s Polo Field. The local counter-cultural newspaper, the Berkeley Barb, outlined the significance of this event: “In unity we shall shower the country with waves of ecstasy and purification. Fear will be washed away; ignorance will be exposed to sunlight; profits and empire will lie drying on deserted beaches; violence will be submerged and transmuted in rhythm and dancing.”
That was the hippie agenda in a nutshell.
It had its beginnings with the postwar Beats, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and before them the Surrealists.
Life would become art through poetry, music, colourful and exotic clothing, ecstatic dancing and, of course, the mind-expanding enticements of marijuana and LSD. There would also be a total rejection of politics.
This was the approach of novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, and the group known as the Diggers.
By early 1967, the Pranksters and the Diggers had won numerous youthful converts in the San Francisco area; it was in part due to their influence that Rubin’s Be-In turned out to be a truly cool event. Tens of thousands listened all afternoon to speakers and rock bands, smoked marijuana, dropped acid, smelled the incense, grooved on the colourful banners.
The stage was set for San Francisco’s vaunted summer of love, when hordes of hippies, would-be hippies and exploiters of hippies would flood Haight-Ashbury. In Toronto, a similar phenomenon had its locus in Yorkville and Queen’s Park. That summer, knots of young people from all over Canada, dressed in fantastic garb and long hair like Tolkien’s hobbits, sat around Queen’s Park, just grooving.
An almost giddy and melancholic note suffuses the recollections of Toronto poet Karen Mulhallen. “The summer of ’67 – it was love, love, love. Whatever happened to love? … Where is love? Where did it go?”
For Mulhallen, art was expressed not only in poetry but in the clothes she designed and wore, and all the sensual accoutrements of incense and oils, black light posters, marijuana and hashish. Hippie art was always closely allied to handicrafts. Toronto poet Roo Borson’s older brother made sand candles and beautiful dulcimers. That was typical.
And there was much sleeping around among friends and acquaintances in the communal houses and crash pads.
The media ate it up. Towards the end of the summer they found their perfect drama in the protest of Yorkville hippies against area traffic. Of course, the issue was laughably trivial compared to Vietnam and not even that controversial. As Stuart Henderson, author of a forthcoming history of Yorkville entitled Making the Scene, points out, then-Mayor Phil Givens had proposed closing Yorkville to traffic two years earlier. But the spectacle of hippie spokesman David Depoe squared off against his city hall antagonist, Allan Lamport, plus the photos and TV and film images of cops grabbing hippie protestors by the hair and throwing them in police wagons, captivated the media.
It didn’t hurt that drugs and sex were constantly in the foreground. All three Toronto newspapers – the Toronto Daily Star, the Globe & Mail, the Toronto Telegram – gave daily coverage to the scene, which in turn drew more kids. “If you’re in Moose Jaw and you’re 17 and bored, why not spend your summer vacation going to Yorkville, getting stoned and getting laid?” says Henderson. Of course, there was no place for the visitors to stay, except where they spread their sleeping bags in Queen’s Park.
As the summer wore on, a sense of irrelevancy, of being “a couple months behind the curve,” as Henderson put it, began to haunt Yorkville. In San Francisco, it had already turned ugly, with heroin and amphetamines replacing marijuana and LSD. There were episodes of violence and sexual exploitation on the overcrowded streets. Long before the Death of the Hippie march on Oct. 6, observers of Haight-Ashbury knew something had gone very wrong with the movement.
The summer of love would not be repeated in San Francisco, or Toronto. Rochdale College, opening its doors in 1968, drew many of the same kind of restless youth as Yorkville had the previous year. The hepatitis scare in Yorkville that same year – a fear, unfounded as it turned out, of an epidemic caused by shared needles – came close to destroying Yorkville. Drugs and violence also haunted Rochdale, to the point where desperate residents allowed bikers to police their building. It was the end of a utopian vision.
Political protest on the streets, a common feature of the era, would continue in the years to come and sexual liberation would mutate into something called “lifestyle,” but the system would remain essentially the same. Nothing would be changed by the “waves of ecstasy and purification” so boldly promised by the Berkeley Barb.
May 21, 2007 04:30 AM
Groovy happenings
· Bloor-Yorkville will be transported 40 years back in time for Summer of Love, a celebration tied to the Luminato Festival. Beginning at 1:30 p.m. on June 2, the family-friendly event boasts a “flower power” costume competition, a “go-go dance” and a concert, which includes The Majestics and Sylvia Tyson. For more information, see bloor-yorkville.com
· Rolling Stone magazine, which marks 40 years, is publishing a Summer of Love double issue next month.
· Hippiefest, featuring the Turtles, The Rascals, The Zombies, Mountain and Mitch Ryder among others, takes place at Molson Amphitheatre on July 25.
What remains of ’67 in ’07?
· Protests against an unpopular war; Vietnam then, Iraq and Afghanistan now.
· Ecological/environmental awareness: hippies spread the word in ’67, Al Gore in ’07.
· Mammoth rock music festivals: 1967′s Monterrey Pop Music Festival, the first major rock festival, attracted more than 200,000. The tradition carries on in the form of Lollapalooza, the Virgin Music Festival, Coachella and more.
· Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band: The album was named Most Definitive Rock and Roll Album in 2007; its influence can still be heard in the bands re-recording the album for its 40th anniversary.
· Marijuana
· Neil Young is still making politically charged music: For What It’s Worth with Buffalo Springfield in ’67; Young’s album Living With War was nominated for three Grammys in ’07.
· Jane Fonda is still making movies: Barefoot in the Park in 1967; Georgia Rule in ’07.
· Hints of Trudeaumania: Pierre Trudeau began his inspired campaign for the Liberal leadership in 1967; his son Justin enters Canadian politics in 2007.
· San Francisco is still a popular destination: thousands of young people flocked to the Haight-Ashbury district in 1967; it still remains a hot spot for the young and old. San Francisco sees over 15 million visitors annually.
Compiled by Astrid Lange / Toronto Star Library
Insights from inside the hurly-burly
May 21, 2007 04:30 AM
Five past and present Toronto residents shared memories of the Summer of Love with the Star’s Raju Mudhar. He asked three questions: What is your best personal memory from that summer? What impact did that year have on your life? What do you think the utopian ideals of 1967 mean in 2007?
Marilyn Brooks
Brooks’ store, The Unicorn, opened in 1963, captured the spirit of that heady time and launched a career in fashion design that stretched over 40 years. Now retired, Brooks lives in Rousseau, Ont.
Best personal memory: I was in the Cumberland store and Soupy Sales came in. And when I was a kid in Detroit, Mich., I watched him every night. So he came into the store, and I said `Soupy Sales! Do the Soupy shuffle’ and he did.
Impact of 1967: 1967 was a major year. I hired out the O’Keefe Centre and held my fashion show there. I had (model) Samantha Jones, come in from New York and be the star of the show. And I turned 1,000 people away. That was one of the biggest shows in North America: 3,200 people, so that was pretty wild and crazy.
1967 vs. 2007: Everybody was close to everybody else…. We used to have meetings in our stores to try and figure out how to get people to come to Yorkville … that was the kind of spirit that there was, and that type of camaraderie is something everyone should be lucky enough to share.
B.C. Fiedler
Bernie Fiedler owned the Riverboat, the city’s central junction of hippie culture. He moved on to music management and concert promoting, and runs his own company.
Best personal memory: I owned the Riverboat coffee house and had persuaded Gordon Lightfoot to play my club for the entire month of January. That was big…. People lined up outside until 2 a.m. to see and hear Gordon perform.
Impact of 1967: The year started a friendship between Gordon and I that is still going strong today. 1967 also had a great impact on my career from club owner to concert promoter and later, in the early 1970s, to managing artists.
1967 vs. 2007: The summer of love was flower power, the hippie movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement. We believed we could change the world. We made the environment an issue that couldn’t be avoided.
Bernie Finkelstein
Bernie Finkelstein’s long career in music started managing bands in those heady days in Yorkville. The Juno winner founded True North Records in 1970, which is still going strong.
Best personal memory: It’s a bit of a cliché to say this … if you can remember you probably weren’t participating and I think in my case, somewhat sheepishly, that is true. I lived my life in an outdoor café … I ran whatever I considered to be my business out of a payphone in front of a little restaurant called Upper Crust.
Impact of 1967: I don’t know that that year had any notable impact on my life more than the year before or after, to be honest. A big integral part then was that music and life were inseparable; they are much more separable now for people.
1967 vs. 2007: I think that much of what happened in the ’60s is still prominent today and … in a way it’s tragic to some degree that it hasn’t been replaced for people.
Jane Harboury
Jane Harboury spent four years as head server and eventually manager at the Riverboat. Currently, she operates her own public relations firm.
Best personal memory: One of the better memories I have is of watching people, watching us. On the weekends people would come down from Scarborough or wherever they came from, they’d all be in their car … the doors would all be locked. They were petrified of us.
Impact of 1967: It was a time of personal explorationThere was nothing that was off limits. There was nothing that was impossible. There was nothing that you couldn’t do. You could live on nothing, and we did. It was so cheap and so easy to live, everybody lived for the moment.
1967 vs. 2007: I have mixed feelings … living in such a self-centred, self-absorbed way that we did…. Learning about sexual freedom was great, and we all had a lot of fun, but you didn’t die. (Today) you have one sexual encounter and you can die from it. And I’m sure that has evolved because of the way that we lived. The last thing I wanted to do was cause harm, but I think we did.
Martin Robertson
Martin Robertson covered Yorkville for the Toronto Telegram. That led to a long career around the world in TV production. He is now organizing the Summer of Love festival, which will be part of Luminato.
Best personal memory: Everybody was friendly, even the cops.
Impact of 1967: It persuaded me to keep returning to Toronto and eventually even move here. Toronto in the ’80s still had that atmosphere that people were friendly, that they weren’t segregated, that you could meet almost anybody and that you could walk around the city.
1967 vs. 2007: Today’s parents are the kids from that day. There was a huge change in the boundaries between kids and their parents; it’s much more holistic now. It’s less giving orders and forcing people to do things.
Put this in your hash pipe and smoke it: ’67 overrated
A decade later, we had punk, Iggy, Bowie and more
May 21, 2007 04:30 AM
Vit Wagner
ENTERTAINMENT Reporter
There was, as far as I can recall, no 10th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love. More like the opposite.
If 1967 was all about forever lying in strawberry fields while staring up at Lucy in her groovy sky of diamonds, 1977 held the nihilistic promise that anarchy might erupt in the U.K.
Or at least that prog-rock would finally get kicked squarely in the codpiece.
Where formerly we had psychedelia, now we had “Psycho Killer.” Musically and literally, we went from the Summer of Love on the one hand, to the Summer of Son of Sam on the other.
In a way, 1977 was 1967′s surly, unappreciated younger sibling. It is noteworthy that the people who turned 20 in 1967 and the people who reached that age a decade later were, in strictly demographic terms, both Boomers.
And yet, those of us who constituted the 1977 generation – if it can be called that – were also the first anti-Boomers. The first to say: Enough, already.
Enough of the harping on endlessly about the Summer of Love. Enough of the narcissistic self-regard. Enough of the eternal nostalgia. It was high time for phoney Beatlemania to bite the dust.
Sadly, though, there was never enough. The further we drifted from the halcyon days of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the more hallowed that era appeared when viewed through rose-coloured granny glasses. Every succeeding 10 years – and even, on occasion, the five-year intervals in between – we were treated to another fulsome remembrance of good old 1967. That’s why rather than regarding this as the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, I prefer to think of it as the 20th anniversary of the 20th anniversary.
Maybe there’s a little resentment here in the realization that no one is talking about this as the 30th anniversary of rock’s greatest year.
Nineteen seventy-seven wasn’t just the heyday of the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks. It was the year that Elvis Costello, the Clash and the Talking Heads all released their first albums. It was when a couple of flat-out classics, Television’s Marquee Moon and Wire’s Pink Flag, were born. It was also the year the Stranglers were pretty much bang on in predicting “no more heroes any more.”
Unless, maybe, it was David Bowie’s Heroes. Released in October of 1977, it was the second great Bowie album of that year, following the outstanding Low. Iggy Pop also delivered a double whammy in 1977, with The Idiot and Lust for Life.
Punk was the musical order of the day, but it wasn’t the whole story. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and ELO’s Out of the Blue, if you went in for that sort of thing, both came out in 1977. As did standout offerings from reggae giants Bob Marley (Exodus) and Peter Tosh (Stand Up). Not to mention the many forgotten minor gems that have fallen through the cracks of time, like Garland Jeffreys’ Ghost Writer.
I can already hear some of you protesting that in terms of commercial popularity 1977 was also the year of Saturday Night Fever. But as was patently obvious to every right-thinking person at that time, disco sucked. Still does, as a matter of fact.
While it’s a fact that you haven’t lived until you’ve heard My Aim is True by Elvis Costello, it’s unlikely you’ll ever encounter anyone of my age saying that. We heard enough of “You shoulda been there” growing up.
