Yorkville in the 60s

The Birthplace of Canadian Song

During the 1960s, the Village of Yorkville was the heart of the folk music scene. Some forty coffee- houses and clubs opened their doors nightly to singer-songwriters such as Ian & Sylvia, Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, Murray McLauchlan, Bruce Cockburn and Dan Hill, who performed their first compositions in these smoky venues.

Hundreds of singer-songwriters and musicians from all over Canada flocked to the Village, and their music evolved to include blues, pop and psychedelic rock. Hippies, flower-children, and long-haired teenagers thronged the streets to revel in the sounds of this legendary music mecca.

The Riverboat Coffee House was the most famous of Yorkville’s coffeehouses, where Canadian luminaries including Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot and Joni Mitchell played. Other venues such as the Purple Onion, the Mynah Bird, El Patio, Chez Monique, the Night Owl, and the Penny Farthing featured Leonard Cohen, Buffy Sainte-Marie, David Clayton Thomas, Stitch in Tyme, the Paupers, the Sparrows, the Mynah Birds, Kensington Market, and Luke & the Apostles, to name a few of the many, many singers and musicians who further defined Canadian music.

Three recording studios were located in Yorkville, and attracted major acts like The Guess Who, Anne Murray, and Lighthouse. Yorkville can proudly claim to be the vibrant birthplace of Canadian song.

The Riverboat Coffee House Lament

All the coffeehouses and clubs from those psychedelic love-in days are long gone
The smoke has cleared
Mini-skirts and go-go boots have been tossed aside
Pretty flowers in the hair have long withered
Love beads have lost their lustre
Carefree hippies have settled into middle-age contentment
Yorkville now sanitized with designer boutiques and up-scale condos
And on the Riverboat site sits the five-star Hazelton Hotel

© 2009 Gee Chung

Evolution of Davenport Rd

Ancient Trail - Beneath the winding course of Davenport Road lies hidden an ancient trail created by Aboriginal peoples. The trail linked their settlements with hunting and fishing grounds, and with trade routes that tied this region to the upper Great lakes, the Atlantic coast, and the Midwest.

Between the Humber and the Don Rivers, the ancient footpath avoided difficult terrain by weaving along the foot of the escarpment that is one of Toronto’s most distinctive geological features - the shoreline of 13,500-year-old glacial Lake Iroquois, forerunner of much smaller Lake Ontario. This meandering route, at odds with the city’s rectangular street grid, now connects us to the distant past.

Rural Road - The ancient trail beneath Davenport Road may have become known to Europeans in the 1600s, when French traders, missionaries, and soldiers entered this area.  With the arrival of British settlers and the establishment in 1793 of the Town of York (now Toronto) the footpath was forever transformed. The trail through the forests allowed travel to and from newly settled lands, and was eventually widened to accommodate horses and wagons. The new road was named "Davenport" after a house built on the escarpment for John McGill in 1797.

Urban Street - As the forest along its length was cleared for farms and industry, the ancient trail beneath Davenport Road became an important link to small villages, such as Yorkville and Carlton, and to the City of Toronto's markets. From the 1830s, the former Lake Iroquois deposits of gravel, clay and sand were transported along Davenport Road for the building of the City.

Paved in one section with wooden planks in the mid-19th century, Davenport Road featured toll booths at its major intersections to finance the roadwork - one has survived at Bathurst Street, and is now a museum. By the 1890s, an electric street railway ran along Davenport west from Bathurst. Since the 1930s, increased automobile traffic has led to further widening of the road.

Created by ancient peoples, the Davenport Road route is today a busy urban thoroughfare.