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Yorkville: hippie haven

Broadcast Date: Sept. 4, 1967

If Haight-Ashbury is the centre of the American hippie world, then Yorkville is Canada's hippie heartland. Full of coffeehouses, boutiques, long hairs, draft dodgers, and freaks, Yorkville is a tourist attraction – one where the tourists prefer to watch the excitement from the safety of their cars. A 19-year-old draft dodger named William Gibson conducts CBC TV on a tour of the village, where Beatle-haired kids, drugs, and free love are rampant.
More on hippie society

But the Yorkville hippies aren't all love and marijuana. As seen in this CBC-TV clip, they hold a major sit-in protest in 1967 to protect their street from cops, tourists and fume-belching cars. They want to preserve their island of co-operation and love from the violence erupting in cities across the United States. But the Yorkville uprising story doesn't begin with a sit-in; it begins with a chair-in.

On Aug. 17, the hippies visit Toronto City Council to discuss their grievances. They've been invited to speak by their Number one enemy – Controller Alan (Lampy) Lamport. Fifty-eight hippies turn up, led by 23–year-old David Depoe, a member of the controversial, government-sponsored Company of Young Canadians. But city council proves unsympathetic, and the hippies leave disappointed, feeling duped and frustrated.

Aug. 20, the hippies decide to conduct a sit-in on a Yorkville street. Their goal? They want the city to close Yorkville to traffic and turn the area into a pedestrian mall. Two hundred take part in the sit-in; 2,500 stand and watch, creating an even greater traffic disruption. The police decide to break up the protest, and 52 people are arrested when they refuse to budge.

The remaining hippies flee to Queen's Park to discuss their next move. Upon the release of David Depoe and the other jailed hippies the next day, a spontaneous love-in breaks out in the Park. On Aug. 23, more than 150 hippies conduct a sleep-in before City Hall, hoping to greet Mayor William Dennison on his way in to work. A riot squad is held on alert in the basement. In the end, city hall refuses to budge. The street is never closed to vehicular traffic.

Yorkville: hippie haven

• The show's featured hippie, Bill Gibson, is none other than the author of the classic 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, and the man who coined the term "cyberspace."

• The hippies used methods of passive resistance, a philosophy of protest championed by Mahatma Gandhi. Methods included non-violent sit-ins, making human chains, going limp when grabbed by police, and other techniques still used by globalization protesters today.

• The motorcycle club members present at the Yorkville sit-in were the Vagabonds. They had a constant presence in the village, since the hippies distrusted police, and preferred to use the Vagabonds for security and protection against "greasers" – young men looking to pick fights with long hairs. The Vagabonds, in their turn, made money from the hippies by selling them drugs.

• Many claimed that Yorkville hippies were a shoddy version of the American original. Yorkville, they claimed, was full of "weekend hippies" and "summer help" – suburban and college kids who weren't serious about the hippie way of life. They were there for the trendy scene and the sex. They rebelled but lacked idealism. In part, this was because Canadian hippies were removed from the problems – the Vietnam War, racial inequalities – that galvanized American hippies.

• According to the Toronto Daily Star, Lamport asked the hippie delegation to city council: "Why don't you people take baths? How do you go unwashed and have dignity?" He recommended that all hippies be required to serve six months to two years in military service to "build up their bodies and teach them discipline."

• One high school hippie had this to say about Lamport: "He's hundreds of years out of date. You might say he's almost a caveman."

• Albert Hofman developed LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) in 1938 in Switzerland as part of a research program investigating potential therapeutic uses of ergot, a fungal parasite which grows on rye.

• LSD arrived in the United States in 1949.

• In the 1950s, LSD began being tested as an aid to psychotherapy. Much of the early work in Canada was conducted on alcoholics by Dr. Abram Hoffer at the University of Saskatchewan.

• In 1957, Dr. H. Osmond of the Saskatchewan Hospital created the term "psychedelic," meaning "mind-manifesting" to describe LSD.

• In February 1965, the first acid was sold on the streets of San Francisco for the cost of $2 a hit.

• In Canada, LSD possession became illegal in 1969. The U.S. criminalized LSD in 1968 and California did so in 1966.

Yorkville: hippie haven

Medium: Television

Program: CBC Newsmagazine

Broadcast Date: Sept. 4, 1967

Guest(s): William Gibson, Gustav Oki, William Pilkington

Host: Knowlton Nash

Duration: 14:01

Last updated:
Sept. 1, 2009