Yorkville

Our neighbourhoods guide covers the city's districts broadly. Yorkville deserves its own entry because almost no other Toronto neighbourhood has completely flipped identities the way this one has — from bohemian coffeehouse strip to the country's priciest retail block, on literally the same streets.

From farm to annexed village

Yorkville began in the 1830s as a residential subdivision laid out north of Bloor Street by brewer Joseph Bloor and Sheriff William Botsford Jarvis, who bought farmland and divided it into building lots outside the young city of Toronto. It was incorporated as its own Village of Yorkville in 1853. By the early 1880s, running its own waterworks and roads had outgrown the small village's tax base, and on February 1, 1883, Yorkville became the first of several outlying villages annexed by the City of Toronto.

Coffeehouses and the Love-In

Cheap rent in Yorkville's aging Victorian rooming houses drew folk musicians and young bohemians by the early 1960s, who converted houses into coffeehouses serving espresso alongside live folk music — by the mid-1960s roughly two dozen operated on a few blocks. The best-known, the Riverboat, opened in October 1964 in the basement of 134 Yorkville Avenue and hosted Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young before closing in 1978. The scene peaked in summer 1967: a "Love-In" in Queen's Park that May drew thousands, and that August activist David DePoe led sit-ins demanding Yorkville Avenue be closed to cars. A curfew for under-18s followed that fall amid concern over drugs and overcrowding, and rising rents pushed most of the scene out by the early 1970s.

Mink Mile

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Yorkville's central location made it attractive for upscale retail and residential towers. Many Victorian houses on Yorkville Avenue, Hazelton Avenue and Cumberland Street survived structurally but were converted into galleries, boutiques and restaurants. The Bloor Street stretch between Yonge Street and Avenue Road, home to flagship stores for Chanel, Hermès, Louis Vuitton and Cartier, is nicknamed "Mink Mile" and regularly ranks among the world's priciest retail strips.

Sources

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — Riverboat
• CBC Archives — Toronto's Yorkville Was a Hippie Haven in 1967
• Heritage Toronto — Plaques Program