Making the scene
Subtitle: Yorkville and hip Toronto in the 1960s
By: Stuart Henderson
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Toronto; Buffalo
Language: eng
Number of pages: 384
ISBN-13: 9781442641525; 9781442610712
Subjects: Social conditions; Counterculture; History
Description: "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. Stuart Henderson explores how this neighbourhood came to be regarded as an alternative space both as a geographic area and as a symbol of hip Toronto in the cultural imagination.

Through recently unearthed documents and underground press coverage, Henderson pays special attention to voices that typically aren't heard in the story of Yorkville - including those of women, working class youth, business owners, and municipal authorities. Through a local history, Making the Scene offers new, exciting ways to think about the phenomenon of counterculture and urban manifestations of a hip identity as they have emerged in cities across North America and beyond."--pub. desc.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Setting the scene, to 1963. Remarking the scene ; Getting to Yorkville; title: Performing Yorkville, 1964-6. Riots, religion, and rock'n'roll ; Are you here to watch me perform?; title: Under Yorkville's spell, 1967. Village politics and the summer of love ; Authenticity among the Fleurs du Mal; title: Hold it, it's gone, 1968-70. Social missions in the teenage jungle ; Toronto's hippie disease; title: Conclusion : an immense accumulation of spectacles; title: Epilogue : where they landed.