A Junkyard Flying Saucer, 1964

We're in a junkyard in Downsview in 1964. It's the Golden Age of science fiction. Flying saucers are all the rage. In fact, just a few years before this photo was taken, AVRO was building and testing their own flying saucer at a facility not that far away, in Malton. The Avrocar was funded first by the Canadian government and then by the U.S. Air Force before the money was finally pulled in 1961. But flying saucers, of course, lived on in pop culture — and in homemade toys like the one this kids are playing with.

Someday, I suppose I should probably write a full post about the Avrocar. For now, I'll leave you with some footage of the saucer hovering around Malton:

The photo comes via York University's Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections here.

A Stamp for Toronto from 1967

1967. A very big year for Canada. The Centennial Year, celebrating a century since Confederation. Expo in Montreal. Toronto's first modernist skyscrapers rising above the city. Yorkville in the Summer of Love. And also, much less famously, the year the post office made a stamp to commemorate the 100th anniversary of our city becoming the capital of Ontario. It's a mix of new and old. A pair of Torontonian Victorians stand by an early streetlamp and look out at the city of the future. Old City Hall. New City Hall. The Royal York Hotel. The Bank of Commerce Building. And towering above them all: one of those brand new sleek black modernist bank towers Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe had just designed for the Toronto-Dominion Centre.

I like this black and white version best, but there's also one in red and green. It was designed by a fellow by the name of Henry Thomas Prosser and engraved by Yves Baril (a Montrealer who spent 40 years as the head engraver at the Canadian Bank Note Company and was apparently involved in making more Canadian stamps — 144 — than any other artist ever).

The Postal History Corner has compiled some of Prossser's drafts, which kinda give you a neat look at his process. (They've got lots more information in their post here.)

 

 

King & John in 1961

Here's the Eclipse Whitewear Building on the corner of King & John in 1961. It was built in 1904 for the underwear company after the Great Fire wiped out a huge chunk of downtown Toronto. And it's one of the listed heritage properties they're planning to demolish to make way for the new David Mirvish/Frank Gehry towers.

Clayton Ruby & Buffy Sainte-Marie In 1967

As I write this post, Clayton Ruby is in court. He's the lawyer trying to get Rob Ford booted from office as Mayor for a conflict of interest. (You can read more about the case on Torontoist over here.) He's been fighting for progressive causes in Toronto since the 1960s. That's when he set up a free legal clinic on the streets of Yorkville, offering free legal advice to people, including hippies who had run into trouble with the police and draft resisters who had come to Canada to avoid fighting in Vietnam. 

Here he is, in this photo from 1967, at the Love-In at Queen's Park. That's Buffy Saint-Marie performing. And that's the young Clayton Ruby in the glasses in the front row.

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I first learned about Ruby in the '60s thanks to Stuart Henderson's excellent book, Making The Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s which I wrote a bit about here. 

Aunt Hetty, The Lovin' Spoonful and The Mamas & The Papas

Zal Yanovsky

Twenty years before she played Aunt Hetty on Road To Avonlea, Jackie Burroughs met Zal Yanovsky while he was living in a dryer in a laundromat at Dupont and St. George. "I met Zelman when I went in to do my laundry one day and he was asleep in one of the dryers," she once explained. "He looked like a deadbeat to me, with long hair, a bad complexion and green teeth."

Yanovksy had been born here, in Toronto, in the 1940s – the son of a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine who did political cartoons for old Communist magazines like The Canadian Tribune. And like a lot of Toronto's young socialist Jewish kids, Yanovsky went to Camp Naivelt in Brampton, famous for its leftist politics and the legendary folk musicians who came by to visit. The RCMP would hang out at the front entrance taking down license plate numbers while people like Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs played guitar around the campfire. Plenty of campers came away inspired, teenagers singing old activist labour songs. That's how The Travellers got together — they're the guys who recorded the Canadian version of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land". And Sharon from Sharon, Lois and Bram went there too. (She has a story about watching Seeger sing a chain-gang song while he chopped wood, swinging the axe as percussion.)

And so, when Yanovsky was late for school at Downsview Collegiate one day and they wouldn't let him in, he just left and never came back. Instead, the sixteen year-old dropped out of school altogether and headed down to Yorkville, where he could make a bit of cash playing folk music in the smoke-filled Beatnik coffee houses that had recently begun to spring up in the neighbourhood's rundown Victorian homes. That's where he'd spend most of the next few years, as those blocks north of Bloor became home to one of the most vibrant artistic scenes of the 1960s.

He did leave town for a while, taking off to work on a kibbutz in Israel, but that didn't last very long. They kicked him out after he accidentally drove a bulldozer through a building. He spent a little time busking in Tel Aviv, and then returned to work as a waiter at the Purple Onion (a famous folk club at the corner of Avenue and Yorkville, where Buffy Saint-Marie would soon write "Universal Soldier") and play guitar at places like the Bohemian Embassy (a couple of blocks south of Bloor, where poets like Margaret Atwood and Gwendolyn Macewen had already gotten their starts and folk musicians like Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot would soon be singing their earliest songs). Yanovsky didn't make much money doing it though, so to help supplement his income, he stole milk bottles off front porches and turned them in for the deposit. Which, uh, didn't really make him all that much money either. And since he couldn't scrape together enough for rent, he ended up spending his nights sleeping in a dryer at a nearby coin laundry.

Jackie Burroughs in 1970

That's where Jackie Burroughs found him. She was in her early twenties back then, having moved here from England with her family when she was 12. They lived on the Island and then in Rosedale, wealthy enough to send their daughter to the super-exclusive-rich-girl-school Branksome Hall. By the time she walked into that fateful laundromat, she was studying literature at the nearby University of Toronto and had started getting into acting, appearing on stage in school productions at Hart House. And as unlikely as it might seem, she fell in love with that unkempt homeless guy she met sleeping in a dryer. She took him home to stay at her place. One day, they'd end up getting married.

But first, they'd end up living on different continents. Zal Yanovsky wasn't the only homeless musician haunting Yorkville in 1961. The scene was still brand new back then, but it was already beginning to attract artists and musicians from all over the country. One of them was Denny Doherty. He'd just moved here from the Maritimes with his folk band, The Halifax Three. And even though they'd signed a record deal, that didn't mean Doherty had a permanent address. "What – get a lease? Get a landlord?" he once scoffed. "No, man. We were gypsies. We were vagabonds. We slept wherever we could sleep." So it makes a weird kind of sense, I guess, that when The Halifax Three were looking for a new guitarist, they ended up asking Zal Yanovsky to join the group.

While Burroughs headed off to England to study acting and dance, honing the skills that would make her a Canadian icon, Yanovksy was back in North America, pursuing his music career with The Halifax Three. And holy shit was that career about to take off.

It happened through a bizarre series of drug-fueled events and chance encounters that began in the fall of 1963:

1. The Halifax Three got a spot on the Hootenanny USA tour and decided to stay on in the States afterward. Yanovsky and Doherty got a gig as the house band at a bar in Washington D.C., but that ended quickly — and badly — when Wavy Gravy came in one night with some pot. They knew the comedian, who would be the Master of Ceremonies at Woodstock a few years later, from their trips to New York, when they played coffee houses in Greenwich Village. But while Yanovsky and Doherty were used to getting high, their young drummer wasn't. He had a bad trip and ran home screaming something about how he was losing his mind, which meant that his large and angry father came looking for the guys who'd gotten him stoned. They decided that was probably a good time to leave town. They moved to New York City.

2. Wavy Gravy wasn't the only person they knew in Greenwich Village. When they got to NYC, they joined a band led by another friend of theirs — a kickass up-and-coming folksinger named Cass Elliot. At first, the group played fairly traditional folk music. But after watching The Beatles perform that legendary gig on The Ed Sullivan show, they renamed themselves The Mugwumps (a Naked Lunch reference) and went electric, mixing a bit folk with garage-rocking R&B. Every once in a while, a harmonica player would sit in with them too. His name was John Sebastian and he just happened to have the best drugs in the Village. They spent most of their time living together in a room at the ramshackle Albert Hotel, jamming and baking illegal brownies.

The Mugwumps

3. The Mugwumps kind of ruled, but they might have been a bit ahead of their time. This was, after all, a year before Bob Dylan went electric and even he got his ass booed by folk purists for doing it. The Mugwumps never really broke through, and sort of just stopped playing. Their bills piled up; soon, it looked like they might get kicked out of the hotel. But on that Hootenanny USA tour, Yanovsky and Doherty had befriended yet another band: The Journeymen. And now that group's guitarist and vocalist, a guy by the name of John Phillips, had just moved from California to the Village with his drop-fucking-dead-gorgeous-ex-model wife, Michelle. (They'd met a couple of years earlier, when he was 25 and married with kids and she was 16.) They were starting a new band, The New Journeymen, and their first gig was just a few days away, opening for Bill Cosby, and they needed another vocalist. When they asked Doherty to it, he had to stay up all weekend downing pharmaceuticals while he frantically learned the songs. But he did it. And the show went well. The Mugwumps had enough money to pay their rent and it looked like The New Journeymen were off to a pretty good start.

4. The night The New Journeymen dropped acid for the first time, there was a knock at the door. Michelle Phillips was the one who answered it — at the very same moment that the drugs started to kick in. She found Doherty's friend Cass Elliot from The Mugwumps standing on the other side of the door. "My life went from black and white to Technicolor," she once said about that moment. "There was Cass: this big, big girl wearing a pink Angora sweater, little white go-go boots and the longest false eyelashes you can imagine." The four of them — Denny Doherty, Cass Elliot, John and Michelle Phillips — all bonded that night during their first LSD trip, and after a blindfolded Michelle threw a dart at a map, they all ended up living together in a tent on a beach in the Virgin Islands.

Oh, sure, it must have been awkward at times: Cass had a crush on Denny Doherty, who was having an affair with Michelle Phillips, while John wrote jealous songs about it and refused to let Cass into the band... or, at least, he refused for a while, until one day she got knocked unconscious by a falling pipe and woke up with a higher vocal range. By the time they ran out of money and the Governor finally kicked them off the island for their drug-addled beach escapades, Cass was in the band and they'd already written some of the most famous songs, well, ever. They were finally The Mamas & The Papas.

5. Meanwhile, back at the Albert Hotel in New York City, Zal Yanovsky had teamed up with that drug-dealing harmonica player John Sebastian, and a couple of other guys, to form their own new band. At first, they practiced in their room, but after guests complained about the racket, they were forced to rehearse their cheerful, upbeat pop tunes in the hotel's dingy basement, surrounded by puddles and cockroaches. That's where they perfected their first single, "Do You Believe In Magic?" They called themselves The Lovin' Spoonful.

The Lovin' Spoonful

Both bands blew up immediately. That summer, "Do You Believe In Magic?" was a top ten Billboard hit. By the end of November, so was "California Dreaming" by The Mamas & The Papas. Then came "Monday, Monday", "Summer In The City", "Dedicated To The One I Love". The AM radio airwaves of 1966 were filled with Doherty's soothing voice and Yanovsky's joyful guitar. A few years earlier, they'd been couch- and dryer-surfing their way through Yorkville. Now, they were HUGE.

By then, Jackie Burroughs was back from England. She'd spent a year there, at a theatre in a small northern town, before returning to the stage in Toronto and Winnipeg and then heading to New York. She studied acting with the Broadway legend Uta Hagen (who also taught Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, and a bunch of other famous people; she was Judy Garland's voice coach). And she studied dance with Martha Graham (who they call "the Picasso of Dance"; she got her own Google doodle last year) and Merce Cunningham (who worked with experimental musicians like John Cage; more recently with Radiohead and Sigur Ros and Sonic Youth). And while Burroughs was studying with all of them, she also re-kindled her relationship with Yanovsky, moving in with him at the Albert Hotel. A year later, they were married and their daughter Zoë was born.

But things kind of didn't really end well for The Lovin' Spoonful. That same year, Yanovsky was busted for pot possession. And since he was Canadian, the cops could threaten to deport him: he'd be banned from the U.S., they said, if he didn't tell them who his dealer was. So he told them. And that was pretty much it for him and the music world. Fans boycotted The Lovin' Spoonful; his fellow musicians ostracized him. Finally, he and Burroughs had to move back to Toronto and he quit playing in bands altogether. Their marriage, which had apparently always been rocky, got worse. Burroughs claims they called it quits in that very same laundromat — between "rinse" and "spin dry". After the divorce, Yanovsky settled down in Kingston with Zoë to run spend the second half of his life running the Chez Piggy restaurant and the Pan Chancho Bakery.

Now it was Jackie Burroughs making her mark on pop culture. She became a fixture in Yorkville at the artist-hangout-y Pilot Tavern, and on the stages of Toronto and the Stratford Festival, performing alongside theatrical giants like Maggie Smith, Peter O'Toole and Jessica Tandy. The Montreal Gazette called her "an actress of thunder and lightning on stage" and wrote thousands of words about her fiery determination and experimental flair. "Give her a law or a limit and she'll smash herself against it," they wrote. "[She] took a hammer to the safe values and social conventions of her Canadian upbringing". When the Star's drama critic didn't bother to see a play she liked, she stormed into his office and berated him for failing to support Canadian productions ("Nothing good will ever come out of Canada!" he screamed back) and then she publicly berated Canadian productions for their mediocrity. She lived off grilled cheese sandwiches and coffee and cigarettes. ("There's nothing like Kraft cheese and Wonder Bread," she claimed during an interview at the Russian Tea Room.) And she played with her fashion choices, too. ("It takes a lot of planning to put together a tacky outfit like this... I've sat down in streetcars and had people move away.") When she played a junkie on TV, she shot sugar water into her veins. And when the Festival Express came to town, she partied with the likes of Janis Joplin and The Band.

Then came Anne of Green Gables. She landed the role of Amelia Evans in the CBC adaptation of Lucy Maude Montgomery's book, which turned out to be one of the highest rated things to have ever been shown on Canadian television. After PBS picked it up, it won a freaking Emmy. And that was nothing compared to the series they followed it up with: Road To Avonlea. The show ran for seven seasons and was broadcast all over the world. It won four Emmys; was nominated for sixteen. And it drew guest appearances from some of the most respected actors around: Faye Dunaway, Michael York, Dianne Wiest, John Neville, Diana Rigg, Christopher Lloyd, Stockard Channing. Playing the eccentric Aunt Hetty to the young Sarah Polley's Sarah Stanley, Burroughs became an icon. She'd be a familiar face on Canadian stages and screens for the rest of her life.

She died here, in Toronto, in 2010. Zal Yanovksy had passed away eight years earlier. Denny Doherty a few years after that. They say even her death was an unconventional experiment. As her stomach cancer slowly killed her, Burroughs made the arrangements for her funeral, said her goodbyes, and surrounded herself with family and friends, facing it all head on. "I never knew it was possible to die so eloquently," Sarah Polley told the Globe and Mail, "breaking down boundaries and rules and storming the gates of experience..."

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I first stumbled across this through the laundromat story, which was in Before The Gold Rush by Nicholas Jennings, which is all about the music scene in Yorkville and on the Yonge Street strip in the '60s. You can buy it here or get it from the library here. Although if you want the Northern District branch copy, you'll have to wait until I'm done with it.

You're probably going to want to read the full Montreal Gazette profile of Jackie Burroughs from 1976, which you can check out here. It's FULL of stuff. (Like: "The other night when I went home in a cab and the taxi driver, who was really beautiful, asked if he could come up. At first I thought, what if he's an axe murderer? Then I thought, well, what the hell, and gave him my phone number.") There are a couple of obituaries with more about her here and here. And a review of a Stratford play she was in with Maggie Smith and Jessica Tandy here.

There's an interview with Michelle Phillips here. And John Phillips here. His post-The Mamas & The Papas legacy has also been rocky — one of his daughters has accused him of having an incestuous relationship with her. There's stuff on Wikipedia about that here. There's more about Denny Doherty here. And Mama Cass here. And Zal Yanovsky here. And the Albert Hotel here. And The Mamas & The Papas here and here.

A couple of years ago, there was an exhibit of work by Zal Yanovksy's Communist father — cartoons and a mural in tribute to Norman Bethune — which you can learn more about here.

I also stumbled over some Road To Avonlea trivia researching this. Like, that Dianne Wiest won an Emmy for a guest appearance on the show. And Faye Dunaway and Michael Yorke and Christopher Lloyd and Christopher Reeve and Stockard Channing all showed up in episodes. So did Ryan Gosling, before he became super-famous, but after he'd been a Mousekeeter and lived at Justin Timberlake's house. You can watch him on the show here.

The Mamas & The Papas wrote a song about how they got together, Creeque Alley. I'm embedding it and then "Do You Believe In Magic?":

You Should Read Making The Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s

Making The Scene

I just finished reading this, easily one of the best books about the '60s I've ever read – in Toronto or anywhere else. It takes a look at the legendary Yorkville scene during that decade, from its early days as a coffee-fueled hangout for Beatniks, through its height as an acid-fueled love-in during the summer of 1967, to its final days and its amphetamine-fueled death. The author, Stuart Henderson, mostly stays away from name-dropping all the famous writers, poets and musicians who emerged from the scene (although I won't: Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, The Band, Gordon Lightfoot, Margaret Atwood, William Gibson, early versions of Steppenwolf and Buffalo Springfield... the list goes on and on...) and instead looks at the deeper currents and trends driving the culture of the neighbourhood and its not-so-rosy relationship with the rest of Toronto. It's an absolutely fascinating look at the young people who flocked to Yorkville  – not just hippies and Beatniks, but greasers and bikers and thousands of "weekenders" too – and the story of how they might have lost the battle for the neighbourhood they called home, but in many ways won the war for Toronto, changing our city forever.

You can buy Making The Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s here or get it from our kickass library system here.

William Gibson & The Summer of Love

The Summer of 1967. The Summer of Love. The whole hippie thing is at its height and Yorkville has become one of the biggest hubs for sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll on the continent. Just ten years ago, the first Beatnik coffee shops opened in what was then a quiet, residential neighbourhood – full of rundown Victorian homes, a few art galleries and upscale boutiques. Now, the coffee houses are everywhere, more opening and closing all the time – patios out front; poetry, folk music, go-go dancers, and rock 'n' roll inside. The Penny Farthing even has a pool on its roof. Streets like Cumberland and Yorkville, Hazelton and Scollard overflow with hippies, greasers, and bikers. And it all just keeps getting bigger and busier.

Shaggy-haired kids from all over Canada are hitchhiking across the country, thumbs pointed squarely at those few blocks north of Bloor, between Bay and Avenue Road – those same few blocks that have already been home to a shitload of super-cool people over the last ten years: folk singers like Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot; poets like Margaret Atwood, Dennis Lee, Milton Acorn and Gwendolyn Macewen; rock stars like Neil Young and The Band, the beginnings of Steppenwolf and Buffalo Springfield and Blood, Sweat and Tears. Hell, even Rick James.

It's not just Canadian kids. Americans have been flocking to Yorkville, too. Some of them come for the scene — for the drugs and music and art and free love — and some for the chance to escape the Draft and the war in Vietnam.

William Gibson came for both reasons. He'd grown up in rural Virginia reading science fiction and the Beats — Ginsberg and Kerouac, but especially William S. Burroughs. One day, they would help influence him to become one of the most celebrated science fiction authors of all-time. But first, they helped influence him to drop out of high school. And with the Draft in full swing, he figured it might be a good idea to convince the authorities that he wasn't really cut out for a stint in the Armed Forces.

"I told them that my one ambition in life was to take every mind-altering substance that existed on the face of the planet," he remembered later. "I just went in and babbled about wanting to be like William Burroughs. And that seemed to do the trick... I went home and bought a bus ticket to Toronto. But I don't like to take too much credit for that having been a political act... It had much more to do with my wanting to be with hippie girls and have lots of hashish than it did with my sympathy for the plight of the North Vietnamese people under U.S. imperialism – much more to do with hippie girls and hashish."

Yorkville, 1967

Yorkville had a lot of both.

Apparently, Gibson plunged right in, smoking pot and hash, dropping acid and doing pretty much everything else he could get his hands on. He knew better than to do heroin – thanks to reading Burroughs – but other than that: "The opiates aside, I tried whatever was going. I sort of prided myself on it."

He wasn't alone. That very summer, just a couple of blocks away at the University of Toronto, Yorkville's hippies organized something of a multimedia conference on the benefits of dropping acid. "Perception '67" they called it. Allen Ginsberg came. (He even had breakfast with Marshall McLuhan.) So did one of the Merry Pranksters. Timothy Leary would have been there too, but the government wouldn't let him into the country. And as amazing as the popularity of LSD was, it was nothing compared to pot. Yorkville was awash in marijuana smoke.

Money, on the other hand, was a bit harder to find. There were thousands of kids in the village that summer, especially on the weekends when "weekenders" flooded in from suburbs like Forest Hill. But there were only so many jobs and places to crash. "For a couple of weeks I was essentially homeless," Gibson later told the BBC, "although it was such a delightful, floating, pleasant period that it now seems strange to me to think that I was in fact homeless."

Luckily for him, at least one young entrepreneur saw the popularity of drugs in Yorkville as a new kind of business opportunity. The world's first head shop had opened in San Francisco the year before, followed by one in New York City a few months later. Now, Toronto had a head shop of our own — with an incredibly nerdy name to go along with it: Gandalf's. The store sold pipes and bongs and rolling papers and all sorts of other drug-related paraphernalia. The CBC called it, "A dope fiend's idea of a dream come true." And it seems that at the same time Gibson was looking for a way to pay rent, Gandalf's was looking for a manager. He got the job. And that's how he bankrolled a summer spent living, as he puts it, "in various wonderful sorts of sin".

Of course, all this drug-use and sex and long hair attracted plenty of media attention. The newspapers and television crews had been fascinated by Yorkville since the early '60s — spending most of their time freaking out over the supposed corruption of youth, but also trying to figure out exactly what in the hell all these kids thought they were doing. And so, in September of 1967, the CBC sent a crew into the neighbourhood to interview some hippies.

By an awesome stroke of historical luck, they happened to find William Gibson.

William Gibson in Yorkville, 1967

The video of their news report is posted online in the CBC archives. (I'll link below.) Gibson — in the slow, lazy voice of someone who seems to be stoned off their ass — rambles on about hippie philosophy, free love and the counterculture while he wanders around the neighbourhood. The CBC's narrator, Knowlton Nash, holds him up as a prime example: "a real hippie".

But in truth, by then, Gibson was sick of the whole scene. And with the summer winding down, he was just looking to get enough cash together to be able to move on. So, he says when the CBC showed up offering $500 for an interview, he was happy to lie through his teeth. "[N]othing I'm saying there, at such painful length, is even remotely genuine," he wrote a few years ago. "I'm thoroughly fed up... and want nothing more than a ticket out."

He got it. For the next few years, he'd move around – even go to Woodstock – before returning to Toronto for a while. It was here that he met and married his wife, but they eventually settled in Vancouver. That's where he went to university, got into punk, and started writing the science fiction that would make him famous. They say that not only did he coin the term "cyberspace", but that it's because of him we talk about stuff like "surfing" and "neural implants" too. His 1984 novel, Neuromancer, is still a mainstay of first year syllabuseses. In 1999, the Guardian called him "probably the most important novelist of the past two decades".

By the time he left Yorkville, the scene had already peaked. As bikers and harder drugs became bigger problems and a few cases of hepatitis sparked a media frenzy, the authorities – who had long been calling the scene a "cancer" and "a festering sore in the middle of the city" – seized their opportunity to drive the kids out of the village. The counterculture spread across downtown Toronto, to Kensington Market and Queen West and just down Bloor Street to Rochdale College (until the government shut that down too). Meanwhile, Yorkville was turned into the super-rich-person shopping district it is today. When Gibson came back for a visit a couple of months ago, the Globe and Mail was there. “It’s as though they tore down St. Mark’s Place and built the Trump Tower,” he told them. “My Bohemia is gone.”

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If you're willing to suffer through the two ads per video our national public broadcaster makes you watch you in order to see anything in their archives, can check out the CBC's footage of William Gibson, complete with a couple of other interviews and footage of a women freaking out on a bad trip here — and there's another whole video about Gandalf's here. 

I first learned the nugget of this story thanks to "Making The Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s" by Stuart Henderson. It's easily one of the best books about the '60s I've ever read. You can buy it here or get it from the library here.

There's a feature-length NFB documentary about Yorkville's young people, which, because the NFB fucking rules, you can watch online for free here. York University has a neat virtual exhibit of Yorkville photos from the '60s here. And there's an archive of Toronto Star photos of the neighbourhood here. There's a nice rundown of Yorkville clubs and coffee houses, here, written by Nicholas Jennings, who wrote THE book about Yorkville's music, Before The Gold Rush.

Read that Globe article about William Gibson here. Listen to the BBC interview here. There's another interview I drew from here. And a book about him on Google books here. There also a biographical documentary about him, No Maps For These Territories.

Finally, Gibson has written about Yorkville himself on his blog. You can check out it here. And I will now proceed to quote a bunch of excepts from it and from the stuff he says in No Maps For These Territories.

ON KEANU REEVES AND THE DEATH OF YORKVILLE:

"When I first met Keanu Reeves, and we found ourselves talking about Toronto, he told me that he had played, as a child, in the excavation for the Four Seasons Hotel, on Yorkville Avenue. I was long gone to Vancouver, by then, but had been shocked, on subsequent visits, by the truly remarkable ferocity with which the ambient zone I remembered had been malled over. In retrospect, this had everything to do with Yorkville "Village" having been, in the first place, a developers' simulacrum of the West Village, briefly invaded, in my day, by a social simulacrum of the East Village.

"As the tide of "weekend hippies" washed back out, many of the more organizationally-inclined habitues were sucked up into the astonishingly Ballardian (as in HIGHRISE, it seemed to me) tower of Rochdale College. 

"The genuine ambients swam down into the twisty, virtually ungentrifiable streets of Kensington Market instead, and away from the Cronenbergian, acid-totalitarian creepiness of Rochdale, and I've regarded Toronto, ever since, as a city somehow uniquely blind to its own psychogeography."

ON THE OTHER DRAFT DODGERS:

"When I got to Toronto I actually – to my chagrin somewhat – I found that I really really couldn't handle hanging out with the American draft dodgers. There was too much clinical depression, there was too much suicide, there was too much hard core substance abuse. They were a traumatized lot, those boys, and I just felt like I – you know, I felt frivolous."

ON THE END OF THE "STRAIGHT WORLD" AND THE ROLE OF DRUGS:

"Most of the people – I suppose really everyone that I counted as a close friend – seemed to harbour the unspoken assumption that everything that had gone before us was ending. It was really a very millennial time – far more millennial than this last year of the century. [What did you think was ending?] The straight world. I think that's what I would have told you at the time. But the straight world didn't end. The straight world and the other world bled into one another and produced the world that we live in today. Drugs were absolutely central to that experience, but they weren't essential. They weren't actually essential to it. I only know that in retrospect. At the time I'm sure I would have said that they were – you know, ingesting the right chemical was absolutely essential to the experience. But in retrospect, no, it's simply a matter of being there and being somewhat open to possibilities... Recreational drugs are essentially a wank. And a wank is okay, but you really should know that it's just a wank. And I think that's what we didn't know – to use the generational "we" – and what some of us still don't know."