PopMatters raves about Torontonian Stuart Henderson's newest book "Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s". Yorkville in the 60s was Toronto's preeminent (counter)culture hub -- the hangout place of, among others, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Gordon Lightfoot. In "Making the Scene", Hederson examines the hippies and hipsters who once made Yorkville their stomping ground and who helped redefine what it meant to be "cool" in Toronto.
"In fact, this book astutely charts the transformative effect of Yorkville as a community, revealing it be a place that was greatly changed over the course of a few scant years. In the '50s, the area was a bit of a no-man's land of cheap row houses that attracted both an artistic clientele that would go on to open high-end boutiques in the area, and a displaced immigrant working class, which brought the concept of the coffee house to the region. While Yorkville would eventually be home to literally a couple dozen of these coffee houses by the mid-'60s, when they started to crop up they became home to quiet, intimate folk performances and to a youth market looking for somewhere to hang out. (The legal drinking age in Toronto at the time was 21; it is now 19.)"
"The book serves as a preserver of heritage, considering that the Yorkville of today looks absolutely nothing like the Village of the '60s. That, perhaps, is Making the Scene's greatest strength: offering a detached, non-sentimental and objective account of one of Canada's most lively countercultures and the impact that resonates to this day, despite the fact that the only coffee house you might find near the area today would be a Starbucks. And even though Henderson's observations about what constitutes hip culture might be heady, it's an appropriate examination as one comes to realize through the reading of this book that Yorkville was, in many ways, an act: a place to perform (not only as a musician, but as an individual searching for identity and an authentic experience) and a place to see or be seen. Yorkville, then, is a metaphor for any hip community in the world today, a place that made and remade itself over a turbulent decade of radical change. That, and the take-away of the historical and cultural importance of this little strip of downtown Toronto, is the conduit for some essential reading � no matter if you were there during Yorkville's heyday or not."
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