T.O's SUMMER OF LOVE

40 Years Ago, Yorkville Belonged To The Hippies And Queen's Park Was
Made For Grooving

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.