Home to high-end retail shops and eateries, Bloor Street is home to flagship stores and expensive lifestyles. Historically, the street carries much different significance. As the last vestiges of its Victorian buildings fell into disrepair, Bloor Street in Yorkville became a center point for 1960's bohemian culture, the famous alternative Rochdale College, and elements of counterculture that all but disappeared during its gentrification.
Mary Armstrong’s diaries are a window into the daily life of a middle-class woman in a new and changing land, and a revealing account of life in early Toronto just before and after confederation. Her journals are one of very few published by Canadian women, especially women outside the upper classes, in the decades surrounding the mid-nineteenth century.
g1BRb-76z8dw--_32-itok-ap8KaEnz.JPG "Making the Scene: Toronto in the 1960s.")
Making the Scene is a history of 1960s Yorkville, Toronto's countercultural mecca. It narrates the hip Village's development from its early coffee house days, when folksingers such as Neil Young and Joni Mitchell flocked to the scene, to its tumultuous, drug-fuelled final months. A flashpoint for hip youth, politicians, parents, and journalists alike, Yorkville was also a battleground over identity, territory, and power.
If a city is its people, and its people are what they eat, then shouldn’t food play a larger role in our dialogue about how and where we live? The food of a metropolis is essential to its character. Native plants, proximity to farmland, the locations of supermarkets, immigration, the role chefs can and should play in society - how a city nourishes itself makes a statement about the kind of city it is.
What is the ‘Toronto look’? Glass skyscrapers rise beside Victorian homes, and Brutalist apartment buildings often mark the edge of leafy ravines, creating a city of contrasts whose architectural look can only be defined by telling the story of how it came together and how it works, today, as an imperfect machine.
Since the election of Mayor David Miller in November 2003, Toronto has experienced a wave of civic pride and enthusiasm not felt in decades. At long last, Torontonians see their city as a place of possibility and potential. Visions of a truly workable, liveable and world-class city are once again dancing in citizens’ heads.
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Yorkville is a high-end neighborhood in Toronto bounded by Bloor Street to the south, Davenport Road to the north, Yonge Street to the east and Avenue Road to the west. Yorkville in the 1960s bears little resemblance to the Yorkville of today.
