Yorkville

This guide to Yorkville in Toronto opens on an August 1967 street sit-in, when police arrested fifty young people demanding the neighborhood belong to pedestrians rather than cars. It reaches back to the coffeehouse scene three years earlier, when a basement club called the Riverboat hosted a young Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot and Bruce Cockburn on a stage that held barely a hundred and twenty people. Toronto answered the sit-in with mass arrests and a ten o'clock curfew for anyone under eighteen.