'San Francisco had Haight-Ashbury, London had Carnaby Street and Toronto had Yorkville," said Brock Fricker, adjusting his round, John-Lennon-style glasses.
Mr. Fricker and his partner, Tiffany Davis, braved the late spring heat wave on Saturday, venturing out to Yorkville's Summer of Love event in full hippie regalia. Musicians themselves, they wanted to add to the local colour - and get a promotional push. Inside their guitar case were several bottles of water and some homemade CDs, featuring their "new retro" duo, Dreamerz.
"I bought this fringed jacket and this Hendrix T-shirt in this neighbourhood in the seventies," said Mr. Fricker, handing me a free CD. "It was a wonderful place, full of music and creativity. I used to hang out at the Riverboat on Yorkville and the Flick Club on Avenue. The police shut it down to get rid of the drugs but the drugs just went to Rochdale. They ended up destroying something culturally unique."
The weekend's Toronto Luminato festival tried to get it back again. Well, maybe not all of it. While there was certainly more gelato being consumed on the streets of Yorkville than there were illicit substances (to be fair I did see one long-haired dude smoking a joint at the free concert), and the whippet-thin sales girls at Hugo Boss still made their commissions, it was amusing to see middle-aged tourists walking around in Hawaiian shorts with daisies in their thinning hair. The new flower children, indeed.
Watching tony Yorkville acknowledge its scruffy, bohemian past is a bit like listening to an over-Botoxed, aging socialite reminisce about her time living on a Berkley commune - slightly pathetic, but extremely amusing all the same.
As someone born smack in the middle of the seventies to straight-laced, small-town WASP parents, I grew up hearing about the hard-rockin' Yorkville of yore as the place my mother was never allowed to visit because my grandparents deemed it dangerous and "full of freaks." Later, as a teen, my aunt bought me my first fancy lingerie at the Bra Bar on Cumberland. Now I know it simply as the neighbourhood where all my friends with money live.
All of which is to say, the idea of Yorkville as a hotbed of counterculture and youthful debauchery is not just outdated in Toronto - it's all but disappeared.
All the better for nostalgifying it, you might say. And the organizers of Luminato would heartily agree. Besides, good old hippie bands have to have somewhere to play, don't they? While the ROM Crystal opening concert may have drawn the big names, Luke and the Apostles, the Kensington Market and Sylvia Tyson were busy sweating it out under the blazing sun for a small crowd in Cumberland Park.
Unlike the real 1969, Yorkville's Summer of Love 2007 was entirely sponsored by the hair-care company Matrix. Down the street from the concert, 10-year-old Katherine Bancroft was getting a free Sixties makeover, including kitty-cat eyeliner and a bouffant with flowers. Asked what she thought of her new retro look, Ms. Bancroft, who was born in 1997, admitted she was feeling groovy.
"I think it's actually pretty cool," she laughed, adding that she still wouldn't consider wearing bell bottoms. "No way!"
Apart from the little kids having their photos taken in the life-size VW van cardboard cutout, there was not much youth culture in evidence in Yorkville on Saturday (or, for that matter, as a rule). It was a relief then, to meet Charlotte Clarke, Franni Maychak and Caitlin Irvine, all 15, loitering in a suitably bored and teenage way outside the high-end maternity shop Formes. Grade 10 classmates at Rosedale Heights Secondary School, the girls were all dressed in their vintage Sixties best (think aviator shades, mini-dresses, Birkenstocks and glitter eye-shadow).
"My dad works for the provincial government and he told me about it," Franni said of the festival.
The girls told me they'd spent most of the day sitting on a rock in the park. They also tried to play guitar until the concert drowned them out.
"It's cool, the whole Sixties thing, but it's also kind of sad," Franni added. Her girlfriends nodded in sombre agreement.
"It's like a festival to remind us of a time we'll never get to experience - which sucks."