TORONTO'S HIPPIE DISEASE

It is the belly button of Toronto.

Yorkville, a district consisting of two main arteries sandwiched
between Avenue Rd. to the west, Yonge St. to the east, Bloor St. to
the south and Davenport Rd. to the north, sits in the geographic
centre of the city.

And, for a short period during the 1960s, this half a square kilometre
of boutiques, cafes and art galleries also found itself at the centre
of Toronto's youthful counterculture -- its students, hippies,
artists, greasers, bikers, and others who congregated in and around
the district, enjoyed the live music and theatre in its many coffee
houses, its low-rent housing in overcrowded Victorian walk-ups, and
its perceived saturation with anti-establishmentarian energy.

As early as 1964, city council was actively trying to curtail the
development of this hip community right in the heart of what had been,
since in the late-1950s, a highly successful gentrification project.

In perhaps the most telling example, city council tried to shut down
the intensifying Yorkville music scene by instituting a moratorium on
licenses for coffee houses in the spring of 1965, an act which served
as a rather attractive bit of accidental propaganda for young people
who found this to be incontrovertible evidence that hanging around
coffee houses in Yorkville was, indeed, cool.

Meanwhile, beginning after a small-scale riot the previous spring,
undercover and beat cops were dispatched to fill the streets in
impressive numbers, charged with rooting out the "rowdies" and the
"toughs," along with the drug-takers, the drug dealers and the
prostitutes whom many believed to have set up shop in the area.

But as the early 1960s became the late '60s -- a paradigm shift
frequently characterized (both then and now) as a swing from innocence
to cynicism -- Yorkville moved beyond its role as a mere popular
nuisance in the public imagination.

When Syl Apps, the Chair of the Parliament's Select Committee on Youth
(and former captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs), famously decried
Yorkville as "a festering sore on the face of the city" in the spring
of 1967, a new era was beginning in earnest.

By the end of that year, Yorkville was increasingly linked to
violence, drug abuse, homelessness, and disease.

As 1967 drew to a close, the real question was: Where do Yorkville and
the village scene go now? In San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the hip
old guard had already symbolically killed the Hippie, holding a mock
funeral in early autumn as a statement on the co-optation and
commercialization of the scene and the saturation of the district by
media, municipal and other unwanted attention.

But what of Yorkville? Since winter was never a particularly hopping
season in the village -- cold, rain and snow tended to frustrate the
ascetic and frugal lifestyle of many indigent hippies accustomed to
sleeping where they lay during the balmy summer months -- all eyes
were turned toward the summer of 1968.

In mid-summer 1968, Yorkville became the very "festering sore" that
Apps and other conservatives had claimed it to be. Throughout July,
Dr. Anne Kyle of Toronto's Women's College Hospital (through her role
as supervisor of Trailer, the "hippie clinic" in Yorkville) had
admitted an "unusual number" of patients suffering from hepatitis, and
"most of these individuals, both in-patient and out-patient, were
associated with the Yorkville district."

Kyle and her staff met with the Medical Officer of Health for the City
of Toronto and the Provincial Epidemiologist on July 30, and then
again on Aug. 2, where it was concluded that, although "the number of
cases of infectious hepatitis reported in Toronto in July 1968... was
still less than half the number reported in July 1966," the right move
would be to undertake a survey to try to determine the extent of
hepatitis in Yorkville.

"Subsequently, two unforeseen events took place," stated the final
report of the hastily assembled Hepatitis Co-ordinating Committee in
September 1969, "either of which would have been sufficient to
transform the 'quiet' survey into a front page news story."

On the afternoon of the first survey clinic (Aug. 2), at least two
newspapers received telephone messages advising that the clinic would
begin work that day and suggesting that this would be a good
opportunity for a news story.

The second incident was the wide distribution in Yorkville, on Aug. 5,
of a typewritten single-sheet flier headed, "Danger! Danger! Danger!
Hepatitis." The source was unidentified but the news media were in
possession of copies in time for the daily papers of Aug. 6.

This well-timed invitation was actually the brainchild of Wilfred
(Bill) Clement, chief pharmacologist at Queen Street Mental Health
Centre and well-known Yorkville guru. Following a particularly
unproductive meeting with local health officials, Clement had taken
matters into his own hands.

"I recall being in a meeting [on Yorkville and hepatitis] with the
people from Toronto General and Women's College Hospital," he said.
"The nice ladies from Women's College Hospital were asking the
province to put up the money for needles to score the blood. The
province doesn't want to pay for it. This goes on for half an hour --
they're arguing about the f---ing spikes!"

Clement, infuriated by this apparent lack of interest in helping the
villagers -- Toronto's hospitals were notorious for a paucity of
concern for hip youth and their health issues -- was also dumbfounded
that the province wouldn't pay for the needles necessary to measure
the spread of the illness.

"We're talking about maybe $1,000," he explained recently. "We were
also talking about an epidemic that we were trying to nip in the bud.
That's the whole purpose -- we're going to nip this thing in the bud.
[Hepatitis] is a drag!"

In the end, Women's College Hospital found the money to buy the
needles, but not before Clement, enraged by the apathy he had
witnessed in the meeting, had alerted the local press to the situation.

The Trailer clinic played a central role in the humanitarian effort to
contain the hepatitis outbreak, with The Grab Bag, a local "head shop"
among the first spots in the district to offer free testing for the
disease.

The incendiary leaflet, it must be assumed, was designed to coax
certain otherwise indolent villagers into action. Yet, in constructing
the possibility of a hepatitis epidemic as a kind of foregone
conclusion, the flyer acted as an extraordinarily effective
anti-advertisement to the district.

Clement's alerting of the media to the flyer and to the hepatitis
testing stations also helped to re-establish boundaries around
Yorkville and to reinforce the popular perception that it was a
community in crisis.

The arousal of public alarm had been an unreliable tactic for limiting
Yorkville's appeal. The threats of violence, sexual depravity and
pervasive drug use that had been variously employed by media and
municipal authorities to foster a public outcry and an eventual
cleanup of the district had virtually always achieved the awkward
effect of further attracting curious youth to the district.

And yet at the same time, a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy had seen
the district become increasingly violent, sexually decadent, and
drug-fuelled.

Suddenly, with this possible hepatitis epidemic came the opportunity
to establish Yorkville as a new variety of sick community. Yorkville
was no longer figuratively ill -- it was now literally infected.

Almost immediately following the initial newspaper articles of Aug. 3,
Yorkville's villagers began to evacuate. Although the first report in
the Toronto Star made it plain that the suspected cause of the
outbreak was needle-sharing, it also explicitly claimed (incorrectly)
that intravenous drug use was a typical hippie behaviour.

"Ten doctors from two Toronto hospitals spent last night in Yorkville
looking for cases of a form of hepatitis often found among hippies.
The disease is believed to be transmitted by hippies using
contaminated hypodermic needles."

The Globe and Mail went a step further, referring to an apparent
epidemic of "a little known variety [of the disease] that has come to
be known as hippie hepatitis."

Meanwhile, many of the city's police officers, hugely over represented
in the Yorkville district in their efforts to curb illegal drug
activity, vandalism and underage vagrancy, became concerned that their
beat was hazardous to their health.

Perhaps as a result of hearing that Women's College Hospital had set
up a clinic in anticipation of an epidemic among Yorkville youth, many
cops from the Yorkville beat refused to get their prophylaxes anywhere
but there.

"There was a cop ward at Toronto General," Clement explains, but "the
cops refused to go to the cop ward to get shots. The cops were
terrified! They insisted on going to Women's College because they
didn't trust anyone else."

The following morning, photographs of a throng of uniformed police
lined up to get shots appeared in local papers. "Some asshole ...
seems to have phoned all the newspapers," recalls Clement. "I was
shocked and appalled -- I open the paper, what a lovely picture!"

To the casual observer, little question would have remained: Yorkville
was infected with a dangerous and unpredictable disease. Even the
police were having a collective freakout.

As the Trailer and the Grab Bag established their testing stations,
reporters and observers from various media took up their vantage
points in the village. And, because frenzied reports of a probable
epidemic were floated by doctors and the police even before the
results of blood testing came back, reporters were left with a very
easy front-page headline for the following Tuesday morning: "Hepatitis
among Villagers now an Epidemic, Doctors Fear."

Toronto was about to get a crash course in epidemiology. A combination
of serum hepatitis (now known as hepatitis B) and the more
communicable infectious hepatitis (hepatitis A) was apparently found
in up to 20 villagers on that first weekend.

While the serum form of the liver disease had been expected (as it was
well-known to be communicated through needle-sharing and sexual
contact), the second form was not. The presence of infectious
hepatitis, which could be spread through contaminated food, water,
human contact and a variety of other media, threatened to move the
epidemic beyond the boundaries of hippiedom.

But A.R.J. Boyd, the medical officer of health for the City of
Toronto, was quick to make it clear in press statements that
infectious hepatitis had yet to be conclusively found in Yorkville,
and he emphasized that, until it was found, the word "epidemic" was
being misused.

"And," he cautioned, "the word 'epidemic' is itself sometimes
misleading. All the word means is that a great many more cases of a
certain disease are showing up than is usual. So far, that is not the
case with hepatitis. After all, there have been some years we've had
500 reported cases of the disease."

Rather than heeding his words, reportage of the apparent epidemic
continued unabated -- and Boyd, along with those city councillors who
took up his line, were castigated for dragging their feet.

Even on Aug. 8, when Boyd was forced to admit that two cases of
infectious hepatitis had been conclusively found among the stricken
villagers -- and that one of them was David DePoe's younger sister and
minder of Trailer, Suzanne DePoe -- he still refused to pander to
pressure from the press (and, increasingly, the community at large) to
dub the situation an epidemic.

He also attempted to clarify the muddied results of the initial rounds
of testing in Yorkville, which had come back variously reporting up to
500 possible cases of the disease.

"[These] blood tests are inconclusive," he said. "The same test could
be positive if someone were beaten up and badly bruised. It just shows
tissue damage... The picture is still not at all clear."

In spite of Boyd's statements, the nefarious tourist activity that was
Yorkville was being explicitly reconstructed in media reportage, and
likely in the minds of many frightened Torontonians, as potentially
lethal. Just going to Yorkville could kill you.

The Star, on Aug. 7, underlined this characterization with a dire
front-page pronouncement:

"In theory, any visitor to Yorkville who ate in a cafe, bought any
object or contacted any person, may have been exposed to the disease,
a liver infection which can eventually lead to death."

Newspaper reports in the following days painted a grim portrait of a
community in peril. As the apparent numbers of victims escalated --
almost 150, including as many as six policemen, were reportedly felled
by the disease by Aug. 9 -- the papers published editorials critical
of the city for its slow response to such an obvious
catastrophe.

Before the end of the week, the province had taken over the
investigation, "because people in Yorkville may have spread the
disease outside the city of Toronto."

While Boyd attempted to quell the fears of a frightened public by
blaming the press for overzealous and inflammatory reportage, downtown
hospitals were overrun by spooked kids, "desperate" for a test.

Fear, knowing no boundaries, was in no way confined to Toronto: It was
reported that three days after the initial accounts of the Yorkville
outbreak, a public swimming pool in London, Ont., (some 200 km away) was
being drained as a "precautionary measure."

By the following Monday, the province was formally asking the public
to "stay out of Yorkville," and appealing to them to "satisfy their
curiosity at a later date." Businesses began to suffer. Coffee houses
and rock clubs sat empty. There were reports that, even in 30-degree
heat, cars passing through Yorkville were rolling up their windows.

One villager, using the pseudonym "Luke the Drifter," explained to the
Star that hippies were being treated as pariahs, more than ever before.

"All sorts of guys are swearing at you if you come near them. They all
think you're going to give them hepatitis. One lady screamed at me,
'Don't breathe near me, you ----!'"

On Aug. 12, York Council voted 5 to 4 to ask the province to close off
Yorkville to the general public -- establishing a makeshift quarantine
- -- and to order all of the restaurants and coffee houses in the
district to close down.

Fears of diseased hippies spreading their infection throughout
Metropolitan Toronto, along with an apparent desire to keep
countercultural youth in one place, culminated in the scuppering of a
project to build a badly needed youth shelter at the corner of Queen
and Bathurst Sts., about four kilometres from Yorkville.

Originally in favour of the project, if only grudgingly and
apprehensively, the Queen-Bathurst Merchant Association had now turned
vehement in its attempts to quash the venture. Armed with the
profoundly effective (apparent) evidence that hippies carried an
infectious and lethal disease, the association petitioned Mayor
Dennison and Controller Margaret Campbell to shut down the plan.

"We said we would go along with the shelter," explained George Starr,
president of the Merchant Association, "but that was before the sickness."

Even local celebrities found themselves subject to a new kind of
prejudice. Three members of the band Kensington Market, among the
biggest local draws on the Toronto scene, were asked to leave a coffee
shop on Bloor St. (at Lothian Mews, just adjacent to Yorkville)
because they looked like villagers.

"I don't care too much about who we serve," said Stephen Kefkoto,
manager of the Coffee Mill. "But, you know -- the hepatitis scare.
They were obviously village residents. Usually they don't come in here."

For businesses in the village, it was not so much a question of
turning people away as trying to attract them. On the first Friday
after the outbreak was reported, it was estimated that the crowds on
Yorkville Ave. were but one-tenth their usual size. Coffeehouses and
other hangouts were sparsely populated, and dining spots were
reporting a dip (by up to 80 per cent) in reservations.

Many wondered openly if the village could ever bounce
back.

By Aug. 15, blame for the outbreak was being ascribed to the lax laws
that had allowed Yorkville to become a hotbed for infection. As a
result, city controllers concluded that "stronger laws [were] needed
to put down hippies."

Now afforded the opportunity that many on the Board of Control had
been looking for, the move to clean up the district was underway.

"As strange as it may seem," said Controller Fred Beavis, "this
[hepatitis outbreak] may have done a lot of good for Yorkville."

In a sense, Beavis's assumption was correct: Countercultural Yorkville
was beginning its long goodbye, fading into the murky twilight of the
1960s. The hepatitis outbreak was just another signpost along the way,
but it was the one that clearly marked the beginning of the end.

After almost a month of constant media and municipal announcements
that it was the epicentre of an incurable infection, hip Yorkville
would never recover.

And yet, the truth is that the Yorkville hepatitis epidemic never
really took place.

When, more than a year later, the Final Report by the Co-ordinating
Committee for the Ontario Department of Health was published, it
admitted that the vast majority of the very few cases of the illness
were easily traced back to the unsanitary practices of intravenous
drug users, never more than a small minority in the Yorkville scene --
the basic point that Boyd was making all along.

In fact, the report concluded that, of the total of 32 patients
hospitalized for probable hepatitis during the outbreak, "the 27 who
were classified as probable [serum] hepatitis and the three as
possible hepatitis used drugs intravenously. The remaining two, who
did not use drugs intravenously, [were] classified as probable
infectious hepatitis."

According to one clinical account that was included in the Final
Report, only 25 patients with a diagnosis of hepatitis were admitted
to Women's College Hospital during the period July 3 to Sept. 30 -- a
period three times the length of the epidemic episode.

Of these 25 patients, 20 were male, and the age range spanned 16-27,
with a mean age of 19. Only one of these patients did not use any
drugs, but the remaining 24 all used drugs (amphetamines)
intravenously.

All of the turmoil and confusion, the fear and anxiety, it would seem,
was massively exaggerated. This was no epidemic. Rather, it was, as
the medical officer of health had maintained throughout the three-week
panic, a minor outbreak that was virtually confined to intravenous
drug users and had nothing to do with the water, food, or sanitary
practices of the vast majority of villagers.

In mid-summer 1969, the conservative daily The Toronto Telegram
declared that Yorkville's "hippies are gone."

The article, entitled "Yorkville Re-visited," took a retrospective
view of a bygone era, an era that was said to have reached its zenith
during the highly publicized "Siege of Yorkville" in August 1967, that
two-week period characterized by sit-ins, confrontation, and police
over zealousness.

But, at the Telegram, this zenith had come into focus only with a
little perspective: "Looking back now from the distance of two years,
the famous hippie sit-down in the middle of Yorkville Ave. takes on
another coloration. It seems, if anything at all, rather quaint."

Written on the occasion of the termination of the last of the criminal
trials of participants in the protest -- David DePoe had been recently
acquitted of two counts of causing a disturbance -- the article reads
like a sinister eulogy.

Casually reducing the phenomenon of Yorkville youth culture to a
triumvirate of interrelated (perhaps identical) shorthand, the article
concluded, but certainly did not lament, that since "David DePoe is
gone, the hippies are gone, the Yorkville of 1967 is over, [and] the
trials have ended," Yorkville can now move on.

If, in 1966, one could be said to be a "Yorkville hippie" by donning
the proper garb and smoking drugs in suburban Lawrence Park, by 1969
to do so would simply make one a "hippie."

The idea of a specific hip space was losing relevance, ceasing to
carry any deeper meaning. Performances of hipness -- from the
outlandish clothing to the heretofore underground psychedelic music,
from the spread of dope through public schools and universities to the
liberalization of sexual relations amongst young people -- were no
longer specifically tied to Yorkville in the public imagination.
"Yorkville youth" was no longer shorthand for "hippie"; by the end of
the summer of 1968 it had become synonymous with a certain needy,
distressed and alienated portion of the counterculture: its homeless,
its disturbed, its junk-sick, its infected.

And the truth is that from 1968 to 1970, as developers tightened their
hold on the district, as police managed to arrest ever more villagers
on dope offences, as disease and drug addiction was spread thick as
oil on water over the dwindling numbers of young people who
congregated in Yorkville's all-night restaurants and cafes, the hip
village community fell into a complicated, and often bleak, downward
spiral into irrelevancy.

And so, the hepatitis epidemic that never really was kick-started the
development of the popular view that Yorkville and the hippies were
played out. The "true hippies" were gone, and the new ones were sick,
infected, "damaged."

The petals thus off the flower, the Yorkville activity was associated more
and more with the new villagers, people like "Beatle Bill" and "Murray the
Speed Freak," well-known to many in the scene toward the end as exemplars
of the scourge of speed and indigence in the village. Recalls Suzanne DePoe:

"Beatle Bill was the most famous speed freak in Yorkville. Oh, and
Murray the Speed Freak. There was Murray and Beatle Bill. They're
probably dead. They were characters around the village, so people knew
them. They were social. Well, Beatle Bill wasn't social. He was just
famous because he did so much meth that nobody could figure out how he
was walking around, you know? And his teeth were rotten. It's what
meth does. His general health was terrible. These guys were young,
too!"

The final years in the Yorkville youth scene saw the hurried
development of hotels and other noisy eyesores, further distancing the
village from its quaint early '60s atmosphere. Rents went up, forcing
more students and otherwise underfunded young people farther away from
the little district. Police crackdowns on drug use (and especially
speed) were stepped up; biker violence was more common, and gang rapes
at their hands were being reported with alarming frequency.

When the Health of Yorkville report (begun as an offshoot of the
hepatitis study of 1968-'69) came out in 1970, it left little doubt as
to the sorry state of the majority of the locals it surveyed.

But, it also maintained that whatever Yorkville had been prior to
1968, and whoever its villagers had been, it was no longer anything of
the sort.