IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE THAT a nondescript high-rise on Bloor Street between Huron and St. George was once the city’s most contentious piece of real estate. But, fifty years ago, it was exactly that. This building, not even really a high-rise anymore when measured against Toronto’s ever-rising altitude, once towered over its surroundings with anarchic grandeur. Its beginnings were as well-intentioned as beginnings come. It was meant to be “a place where men and women who love wisdom can pursue it under the forms and by the avenues which seem best to them.”[i] By the time it came to an end, it was considered “North America’s largest drug distribution warehouse.”[ii] It survived seven years – and, on the final day of its existence, police officers carried the remaining tenants from the building in handcuffs.[iii]
That high-rise was Rochdale College. It was, in its time, the largest free university in North America.[iv] It was envisioned as an alternative to the droning, mechanical, career-driven turn that higher education had taken in the mid-20th century. Despite the brevity of its lifespan and the disastrousness of its end, it became something more permanent than its founders could have envisioned: a symbol of the 1960s, an analogue of that decade’s ideals and its failings – and both the culmination and the termination of the counterculture movement in Toronto.
But this is not so much the story of Rochdale College as an overview of those fateful conjunctions which led to Rochdale’s extraordinary development and dramatic end. So, let’s
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Anthony Salvalaggio is one of the editors of Toronto Journal.