Tuesday Treasures - Yorkville

Tom the backroads traveller hosts this weekly meme.

Toronto ON

In the 1960s, Yorkville was a sanctuary for the counterculture movement in Canada - an equivalent to New York's Greenwich Village.

The cheap cost of rent in Yorkville led many German and English immigrants to buy property in the area. The charming, but often neglected Victorian homes were converted into coffee houses.

At the time, the drinking age in Ontario was 21, and these venues provided an alternative gathering space for Toronto's young, hip crowd.


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York University Archives

The cream-coloured building in the photo above (Yorkville Avenue just east of Hazelton Avenue) is the former home of the Penny Farthing coffee house.

In 1963, John and Marilyn McHugh, owners of one of Yorkville's first coffee houses, the Half Beat, opened the Penny Farthing in this Victorian house. For the next seven years, the venue hosted folk, blues, and jazz performances.

Inside, patrons heard such Canadian musicians as Malka & Joso, the Allen-Ward Trio, and The Dirty Shames, as well as international stars including José Feliciano, John Lee Hooker, and Josh White. Jazz artists Jim McHarg, Jim Galloway, and others recorded the album Stompin' at the Penny (1965) here with the legendary Lonnie Johnson. The coffee house also featured a backyard patio with a swimming pool.

The Penny Farthing gave two prominent Canadian artists their starts. A young Canadian folksinger-songwriter, Joan Anderson, who performed here in 1965, went on to international acclaim as Joni Mitchell. One year later, the Stormy Clovers debuted the songs of poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen.

The Penny Farthing now (July 2023) you can see the above plaque on the right side of the building just above the plant.

Opened in 1964 in the basement of a Victorian row house that once stood on this site, the Riverboat coffee house quickly became one of North America's premier intimate venues for singer-songwriters.

 

On the leading edge of the surging folk and blues music scene, the Riverboat featured performances on its small stage by such legends as John Lee Hooker and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, as well as by young performers like Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, and Arlo Guthrie. It also provided an early stage for musicians who would become some of the biggest names in Canadian music, including Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Cockburn, Murray McLauchlan, and Dan Hill. Neil Young immortalized the Riverboat in his song "Ambulance Blues."

A legendary music venue of the 1960s and one of the longest-running coffee houses of its era in Canada, the Riverboat outlived Yorkville's hippie scene but closed its doors in 1978.

In “Ambulance Blues”, singer-songwriter Neil Young reminisces about the "old folky days." In the song, he immortalizes the Riverboat Coffee House, one of the world's best intimate venues for singer-songwriters during the hippie heydays of the 1960s. It was the longest-operating coffee house of several dozen venues that lined Yorkville's cobblestone streets, north of Toronto's Bloor Street.

Ambulance Blues