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 talk about Toronto in the 1960s: about coffeehouses and the counterculture, about Yorkville Village and Rochdale College – and how the latter went from being a dream of a new way forward in higher education to “little more than a massive commerce in marijuana, hashish, LSD, and other illicit substances.”[v]
The Name
OUR STORY BEGINS IN 1844, when a group of weavers in the town of Rochdale, England, founded a grocery co-op in a cotton warehouse.[vi] Hold that thought.
Immigration and the Coffeehouse
OUR STORY BEGINS WHEN, ONE FINE SUNDAY, the dull decade of the 1950s began. The birth of rock-n-roll notwithstanding, the 50s were less the start of something new than the prosperous old age of the chaotic first half of the 20th century. It was a decade awaiting its replacement. Nelson Wiseman writes: “We cannot say of the 1950s, as we can of the 1940s and the 1960s, that they represented a turning point in Canadian or world history.”[vii] In other words: no Hitler and no hippies. The 50s were well-behaved. The decade did, however, usher in change of a subtler sort . . . and, though it’s tempting to write off 1950s Canada the way we’re tempted to write off any event in this country – as nothing but a dull, grey facsimile of whatever was happening directly to the south of us – there was at least one field in which Canada outperformed the United States: population growth (as a percentage, of course). Canada’s population grew by 3.7 million (an almost 30% increase) over the course of the decade.[viii] Of that 3.7 million, 40% (about 1.5 million) were immigrants.[ix]
This was the escalation of a trend that had begun earlier, following the end of the Second World War. By 1951, “three quarters of the four-hundred thousand immigrants who had arrived since the end of the Second World War were living in urban areas, and mostly worked in manufacturing and construction.”[x] At the same time, suburban development outside of Toronto resulted in the city’s up-to-that-point still majority British and Protestant population moving outwards, as new waves of immigrants stepped into the urban centre to take their place.[xi]
Most of these immigrants came from postwar Europe – in some cases displaced by revolution, in others taking advantage of lifted immigration sanctions (emigrants from Italy and Germany, for instance, were not permitted to enter Canada again, postwar, until 1950).[xii] These immigrants added new dimensions and dynamic markers to the life of the downtown core. One of the areas where many immigrants settled was along Gerrard Street, directly south of Yorkville.[xiii]
Adjacent to the University of Toronto and just north of the downtown core, Yorkville would eventually become the heart of the counterculture movement in Toronto and the hippie hangout spot. In 1944, however, Yorkville (then still largely residential) was declared by the city to be “one of the three residential areas most in need of municipal attention”[xiv] – very different from today’s Yorkville, which is home to one of the more upscale shopping districts in Toronto. While Yorkville is sometimes presented as a working-class neighbourhood that became the centre of hippie culture until it gentrified the hippies out of existence, these different phases of its character overlapped more than this timeline admits.
From being direly underdeveloped in 1944, Yorkville quickly became home to enterprising business owners who, between the late 40s and the early 60s, opened offices, antique shops, studios and art galleries in the neighbourhood.[xv] By the time the 60s began, the neighbourhood’s transformation from working class residential to fashionable shopping and dining district was well underway – helped along by the promise of the Bloor Street subway line (on which construction began in the mid-50s).[xvi] Between 1945 and 1961, forty-five businesses were opened in Yorkville.[xvii] This development notwithstanding, Yorkville continued to offer affordable rents, which drew new residents, including many from the recently defunct Gerard Street Village less than a kilometre to the south.[xviii] And it was these residents who brought the 1960s to Yorkville.
Toronto’s original beat/proto-hippie scene developed not in Yorkville but south of it, along Gerrard Street, in the mid-50s. The Gerard Village (or ‘Greenwich Village,’ as, with a blatant lack of originality, it was sometimes called), was home to art galleries, music venues and other businesses, many of them opened by the immigrants who had settled in this area. These immigrants brought with them one institution which, completely alien to the Toronto of the 1950s, would eventually become a Yorkville staple: the coffeehouse.[xix] As Stuart Henderson writes in Making the Scene, Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s: “For many cynical Toronto students and artists . . . the coffeehouse suggested a Euro-bohemian hangout unlike any previously known to the city.”[xx] When the Gerard Village was displaced by the expansion of Toronto General Hospital,[xxi] many of the Village residents moved a few blocks north – and, in 1960, Yorkville’s first coffeehouse, the Purple Onion, opened its doors. [xxii] Welcome to the new decade.
These coffeehouses were not originally envisioned as performance venues, but as places where people could sit and talk and drink (drink coffee, that is – almost none of them (initially, at least) were licensed to serve alcohol).[xxiii] But by 1964, nearly every such venue in Yorkville had transformed into a spot for live acts.[xxiv] Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, Ian and Sylvia Tyson – these were just a few of the many musicians whose early careers were spent in Yorkville. During the first half of the 1960s, the number of Yorkville coffeehouses grew, peaking at twenty-two in 1965.[xxv] The most famous of these was located in the basement at 134 Yorkville Avenue.[xxvi] “The Riverboat, perhaps Yorkville’s most enduring symbol . . . became the premier folk club in the Village almost immediately after it opened.”[xxvii] It would outlive every other coffeehouse in the neighbourhood before closing in 1978[xxviii] – by which point the Yorkville of the 1960s was long gone.
Rochdale the Dream
OUR STORY BEGINS IN 1964, when – right around the time the Yorkville coffeehouses were reaching their peak – Rochdale College became an incorporated educational institution.[xxix]
Taking its name from the Lancashire town which had founded that grocery co-op 120 years earlier, Rochdale College was to become “the largest co-operative student residence in North America, the largest of more than 300 free universities in North America, and [by the early seventies], known across the country as the largest drug supermarket in North America.”[xxx] This last could never have been imagined by those who first dreamed up the idea for Rochdale in the mid-sixties. The most prominent of its early advocates was Dennis Lee. In Rochdale: The Runaway College, David Sharpe says of Lee that he “serves in the Rochdale story as a figurehead for the many heads who contributed.”[xxxi] Known today as a poet, children’s author, and co-founder of House of Anansi Press[xxxii] Dennis Lee was, in the mid-sixties, a lecturer at Victoria College at the University of Toronto.[xxxiii] It was from this vantage that Lee began to understand what he felt had gone wrong with higher education. The idea that animated Rochdale College was radical in the original sense of the word: to reform university education at its root, and bring it back to what it had been at its inception. To reintroduce the scholastic culture that went back as far as universities themselves – to learn for learning’s sake. Rochdale College would put the emphasis on “[promoting] a disinterested curiosity” which “[despised] job training.”[xxxiv]
On paper, it’s difficult to disagree with these aims – and in practice, too, Rochdale College began promisingly. Through the work of Campus Co-op (the organization that had incorporated the college in 1964), Rochdale was able to obtain a mortgage for their planned high-rise in 1966. By the end of that year, construction had begun. The plan was for the building to be completed by June 1968.[xxxv]
From The Globe and Mail, March 25, 1967:
“Rochdale College’s unique education experiment has the go-ahead. It will be new and different from anything else in North America. It won’t be a free university like those set up by U.S. radicals, where LSD and everything goes, or an exercise in anarchy. Instead, Rochdale will be a democratic experiment in higher education, which has been planned as a visionary alternative to the present system at the University of Toronto. It will be owned and operated by the students and will not be affiliated with the U of T.”[xxxvi]
While the high-rise at 341 Bloor Street was under construction, Rochdale College began on a smaller scale in September 1967. Over the course of the 67-68 school year, “Rochdale . . . commandeered six rented buildings scattered over four areas of downtown Toronto, and had enlisted eighty-six residential members, eighty external members, and two full-time organizers, Dennis Lee and John MacKenzie.”[xxxvii]
It was during this year that a point of contention emerged between the Rochdale Council and Campus Co-op. Finding that the College would not receive any financial support from the provincial government, and knowing that they could not aspire to offer formal accreditation, the Rochdale Council decided to open up college membership to everyone – in other words, just about anyone could pay rent to live in the building, despite Campus Co-op’s objections. Rochdale began to put out ads for members, receiving over 2000 applications (for 800 spaces) by the time the high-rise was open for business in the fall of 1968.[xxxviii]
Trouble in Yorkville
JUST A FEW BLOCKS AWAY, things in Yorkville were beginning to go awry. Though the neighborhood had, over the course of the mid-sixties, become the symbol of the counterculture in Canada, 1968 was in some respects the beginning of the end. That summer, Dr. Anne Keyl, medical supervisor of ‘The Trailer’ (a mobile home at 70 Avenue Road which offered support, both medical and legal, to Village residents[xxxix]) noticed an apparent increase in the number of hepatitis cases among her patients and, after meeting with the city’s medical officer, undertook a survey to determine how prevalent the disease actually was.[xl] When a well-intentioned doctor, hoping to secure resources for the medical personnel handling the situation, alerted the press, a series of sensational articles caused a public panic.[xli] Soon, the word ‘epidemic’ was being used freely despite the protests of Toronto’s medical officer.[xlii] But the damage has been done. “Almost immediately following the initial newspaper articles of 3 August, Villagers started to evacuate.”[xliii] When the official report on the so-called epidemic was released by the provincial government the following year, it was clear that this was “a minor outbreak which was virtually confined to intravenous drug users, and had nothing to do with the water, food, or sanitary practices of the vast majority of Villagers.”[xliv]
Following the Yorkville hepatitis ‘epidemic’, news coverage of the Village tended to paint it as a violent place, filled with drug-addicts and mental illness – and many of the people who had previously been Yorkville’s most outspoken advocates were now distancing themselves from the scene, if not outright denouncing it.[xlv] It didn’t take long for many Yorkville denizens to look for a new spot. As Stuart Henderson writes, “many of the Villagers who would otherwise have been spending their days and nights very publicly on Yorkville’s thin streets found a new home and hangout at Rochdale College.”[xlvi]
Rochdale the Reality
OUR STORY BEGINS AT ROCHDALE’S GRAND OPENING in September 1968, when the first batch of residents arrived to find the college under-furnished, overrun with construction workers, and – perhaps most startlingly – lacking glass for a number of its windows.[xlvii] Though work on the building had begun in good time, two strikes – one by cement haulers in the summer of 1967 and another by sanders in September ’68 – set work on the building back significantly. This did not, however, stop people from moving into the building when opening day arrived.[xlviii]And who were these bold residents?
From early on, the residents of Rochdale formed a big part of the college’s story and the way it was reported. Take, for instance, a cautiously non-committal piece in the December 16, 1968, edition of The Globe and Mail entitled “Rochdale’s reality is something else.” The article asks: “Is it Rochdale, the exciting, free communal university? Or, as some outsiders snipe, is it Yorkville gone high-rise?”[xlix]
One could be excused for asking that question. Soon after the building opened its as-yet unfinished doors, a large influx of uninvited guests began to visit (and, in some cases, occupy) the high-rise. “There are the crashers – young drifters, most of them Yorkville habitues, who have moved surreptitiously (and in many cases with a galling lack of surreptitiousness) into the building, cadging free meals from the cafeteria, stealing food from the storeroom, sleeping in the lounges.”[l]
These drifters seemed not to mind the lack of glass on high-rise windows. Soon after its opening it became clear that:
”Rochdale was collecting the accrual from an eroding Yorkville: ‘crashers’ and otherwise homeless teens, runaways and speed addicts, poets and radicals, hippies, bikers and greasers looking for a new scene. Improving on Yorkville in a variety of ways (no cops, no parents, no politicians, no money, fewer – well, different – hassles) . . . Rochdale was the pushbroom that swept through the Village in the late 1960s, carrying most everyone away.”[li]
As for the building’s physical shortcomings: the high-rise would not be certified as complete until June of 1969.[lii] In the meantime, people continued to move into Rochdale under what were most certainly dangerous (and most probably illegal) conditions. Incidents such as the below probably did the budding institution no favours:
From The Globe and Mail, February 24, 1969:
“Student falls from window at Rochdale”: “Donald Waldorf, 18, of McCaul Street, a student at the Ontario College of Art, is in favourable condition in Toronto General Hospital after falling from a sixth-floor window at Rochdale College, Bloor Street West near Huron Street, early Saturday. He suffered two broken legs and a broken arm and nose, when he landed on a concrete roof . . . students at the 18-story residence . . . said window ledges in the rooms are lower than desk tops.”[liii]
It didn’t take long for Rochdale College’s pool of residents to include virtually anyone who had a mind to crash there. “Street people, cash poor and often hash rich, were claiming the same roof that students were finding half-built. The ideal that admitted any kind of study also admitted any kind of colleague.”[liv] One of the major consequences of this opening of Rochdale’s doors to anyone and everyone? Drugs.
Toronto was not exactly a hub for drug distribution in the dull 1950s. The number of marijuana-related convictions in Canada had hit its all-time high in 1959 – a grand total of 22. This number had dropped to a mere 17 by 1961.[lv] By 1968, cannabis-related cases had risen to over 2300[lvi], and “Toronto was being called the speed capital of North America.”[lvii] Rochdale, as a high-rise, provided drug dealers with an ample maze in which to traffic, store, and deal. “Street people and drug dealers thronged to the cheap accommodations and the opportunities for profit from easy pickings and lucrative sales.”[lviii]
In short, the problems which would plague Rochdale College throughout its brief history appeared early on.
On May 31, 1969, less that one year after the high-rise had opened its doors, Dennis Lee, who had from the beginning been Rochdale’s main visionary, resigned from the college.[lix]
The Fall
TO READ THE GLOBE AND MAIL COVERAGE of Rochdale College from 1969 to 1975 is to be a witness to the proverbial train wreck in slow motion. One bad news story follows another:
From The Globe and Mail, October 18, 1969:
“Rochdalers warn of the ‘speed that kills’”: “A delegation from Rochdale College lectured the federal drug commission yesterday on the dangers of amphetamine, the speed that kills . . . Rodney Hummel, 23, who serves as security guard at Rochdale, says it takes only five or six hits before a young person is hooked. He has had 11-year-old girls come into the lobby asking for speed.”[lx]
From The Globe and Mail, September 24, 1970:
“Rochdale death ruled a suicide at inquest”: “A Toronto student who fell from the 18th floor of Rochdale College last month committed suicide while in a state of acute depression, a coroner’s jury ruled yesterday. David Allen Cameron, 22, fell 170 feet to his death from the College’s laundry room in the early hours of Aug. 10 after leaving a suicide note at his home in Canton Avenue where he had gone to bed the previous evening. The jury recommended that security and registration procedures at Rochdale College be tightened up and screens fitted to all windows.”[lxi]
From The Globe and Mail, May 28, 1971:
“Riot predicted if college closed down: Rochdale ‘contributed to many deaths’, should be shut: jury”: “Rochdale College has ‘contributed to many deaths’ and should be closed down as soon as possible, a coroner’s jury said yesterday. The recommendation was made, despite warnings that a sudden closing of the college, at Bloor Street West and Huron Street in Toronto, could result in a riot, ‘the like of which Toronto has never seen.’”[lxii]
From The Globe and Mail, March 24, 1973:
“Raid by 50 police at Rochdale College biggest in 9 months”: “At least 50 metro policemen poured into Rochdale College last night in the largest raid on the co-operative residence in nine months. The uniformed and plain-clothes officers were jeered at and pelted with a dozen eggs as they withdrew to Bloor Street West with three young prisoners.”[lxiii]
Two Globe and Mail articles from September 1974 show how definitively a new era had been entered upon. A September 13th article reports on the largest eviction carried out by police since Rochdale had opened.[lxiv] Another article from two weeks later celebrates the arrival of two books of children’s poetry (Alligator Pie and Nicholas Knock and Other People) by Dennis Lee: “At 35, Lee seems on the threshold of a new renown . . . there’s a heady expectation in publishing circles that the books will prove to be a remarkable rarity: genuine Canadian children’s classics.”[lxv] Nearly fifty years later, Alligator Pie is still in print.
One decade removed from the incorporation of Rochdale College, we find Dennis Lee a celebrated children’s author – and, ten years since the opening of the Riverboat, Neil Young is in the midst of releasing a trilogy of albums that bid a somewhat bitter goodbye to the 1960s. July 1974 saw the release of On The Beach, featuring Young’s most direct tribute to that scene and that time, “Ambulance Blues.” The song finds N.Y. reminiscing about “the old folky days” at the Riverboat. He then goes on to describe a Toronto of empty subways and cafes, Isabella Street (where Young had lived in the mid-60s) changed beyond recognition.
One can imagine that those folks who’d had such lofty ambitions for Rochdale College might have shared some of Neil’s gloom as they watched the last of Rochdale’s determined residents being carried out in handcuffs. That end finally came in 1975. The year began with the guilty verdicts delivered in the Watergate hearings. The Vietnam War ended on the 30th of April. And, exactly one month later, on the 30th of May, “Rochdale’s last reluctant residents were physically carried out of the building by police offices, and the doors were welded shut.”[lxvi] It was an end remarkably removed from its beginning, a far cry from the original goal, which:
“. . . as it came to be expressed in the Rochdale College Calendar of 1967-1968, was to ‘create an academy; a place where men and women who love wisdom can pursue it under the forms and by the avenues which seem best to them.’ By Dennis Lee’s vision of a liberal college, Rochdale would provide ‘an idealized Oxbridge education – immersion in the subject, testing conclusions against the mind of a tutor, re-immersion in the subject by which that initial liberation could be repeated and extended as he pushed into new disciplines or deeper into one which became his vocation.’”[lxvii]
‘The old folky days’ indeed.
Conclusion
WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE OF ROCHDALE COLLEGE? The press coverage of the high-rise suggested a descent into chaos – and, in many respects, it’s difficult to argue.
Nonetheless, Rochdale was not without supporters. In a December 12, 1970 letter to The Globe and Mail, J.J. Watt of Scarborough, a recent visitor to Rochdale, wrote that, while Rochdale seemed to have lost its original vocation as a college, and while the building most certainly had its problems, its residents were ”courteous and well-informed”: “the problem facing the youthful and inexperienced management is one of operating the residence free from restrictions while keeping the residents and others from destroying it by their words and actions.”[lxviii]
In the Toronto Star’s “Voice of the People” section from Saturday, January 19th, 1974, among letters to the editor on topics as diverse as the acquittal of Dr. Henry Morgentaler (supported by C.W. Hancock of Corner Brook), the thrills of ‘motoring’ before the Great Depression (a pastime looked back on fondly by Gordon Powell of Deep River) and three par for the course complaints from dissatisfied TTC customers (substandard Sunday morning service, under-bussed and overcrowded routes), you will find a letter from J.A. Post, titled “‘Rochdale keeps drug distribution under control’ Whitby resident says,” mounted by an ominous-looking photo of the by-then infamous building. While Post does argue that “criticism of Rochdale College has been too subjective: emotions seem to have overruled all facets of objectivity,” the Whitby resident probably didn’t do Rochdale much of a favour by arguing that one of its primary virtues was keeping the city’s drug distribution concentrated in one spot.[lxix]
For all of its problems, it is interesting to note that Rochdale was associated with more than one enduring Toronto institution. The publisher Coach House Press (now Coach House Books) was located behind the high-rise, and its team welcomed residents interested in learning to print.[lxx] Many of Rochdale’s internal publications were produced on the presses at Coach House[lxxi], as was its in-house currency, the “Rochdollar.”[lxxii] House of Anansi Press was co-founded by Rochdale’s original champion, Dennis Lee. Today, Coach House and Anansi are two of the most prominent independent publishers in Canada. The Theatre Passe Muraille, “one of the first alternative theatre companies in Canada” found its first home at the college.[lxxiii] It still operates today.
The most conspicuous monument to Rochdale College is The Unknown Student, which came out of the college’s Sculpture Shop. It still sits near the corner of Bloor and Huron, now turned from its original orientation to face the street.[lxxiv]
In a TVO interview with Mike McManus, former Rochdale resident Jim De La Plante talks of the way that living at the college opened his eyes to a broader, more interesting world: “The main thing I learned was that, my god, middle-class suburbia isn’t the world, which I had always thought it was.”[lxxv]
David Sharpe, in writing of Rochdale’s ultimate accomplishment, says that:
“At its best, Rochdale was a noble experiment. It tested new approaches to education, creativity, and community, and like the testing of new products in industry, the limits of the new product cannot be known until the point of destruction is reached . . . an institution that was not allowed to be self-destructive about such sweeping questions would have tested nothing at all.”[lxxvi]
On a larger timeline, Rochdale can be said to represent the ultimate expression of those remarkable changes Toronto had undergone over the thirty years following the end of the Second World War. The growth of new immigrant populations, the influx of artists and reform-minded educators and students, the rise of coffeehouses and co-operative living . . . all of these factors had a role to play in the story of Rochdale College, which was in some ways the culmination of all these developments.
Culmination though it may have been, there is no denying that Rochdale has stood out sharply from everything else in Toronto’s history before or since. In his book about the college, David Sharpe cites some of the key points in the Rochdale Governing Council’s “Creed for Head Meetings” – among them, the following:
“Don’t Go Back – There was No Last Meeting/Don’t Go Forward – There is Nothing”[lxxvii]
In other words, live in the moment. Perhaps that is why Rochdale stands out as such a singular episode in this city’s history: a thing which acknowledged no past and admitted no future could have no predecessors and no descendants. For better or for worse, Rochdale College was, in its uniqueness, an embodiment of all those cliches about uniqueness. It was lightning in a bottle.
[i] Sharpe, David. Rochdale: The Runaway College (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, Inc., 2019), 20.
[ii] Palmer, Brian D. Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era (Toronto, University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 2009), 208.
[iii] Ibid., 208.
[iv] Ibid., 207.
[v] Ibid., 208.
[vi] Sharpe, Rochdale, 19.
[vii] Wiseman, Nelson. 1950s Canada: Politics and Public Affairs (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2022), 31.
[viii] Ibid., 191.
[ix] Ibid., 195.
[x] Ibid., 30.
[xi] Henderson, Stuart. Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto in the 1960s (Toronto, University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 2011), 32.
[xii] Ibid., 32.
[xiii] Ibid., 33.
[xiv] Ibid., 34.
[xv] Ibid., 35, 36.
[xvi] Ibid., 36.
[xvii] Ibid., 35.
[xviii] Ibid., 37.
[xix] Ibid., 33.
[xx] Ibid., 33.
[xxi] Ibid., 33-34.
[xxii] Ibid., 39.
[xxiii] Ibid., 39.
[xxiv] Ibid., 39-40.
[xxv] Ibid., 39.
[xxvi] “Riverboat.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada. Article published September 04, 2013; Last Edited December 15, 2013. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/riverboat-emc
[xxvii] Henderson, Making the Scene, 39.
[xxviii] “Riverboat.” The Canadian Encyclopedia.
[xxix] Sharpe, Rochdale, 24.
[xxx] Ibid., 15.
[xxxi] Ibid., 23.
[xxxii] Sorfleet, John R. “Dennis Lee.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada. Article published February 10, 2008; Last Edited March 04, 2015.
[xxxiii] Warren, Gerard. “Will be owned, operated by members: Students Back Democratic Education Experiment at Rochdale College.” The Globe and Mail, Mar 25, 1967, https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/will-be-owned-operated-members/docview/1313734052/se-2 (accessed November 12, 2023).
[xxxiv] Sharpe, Rochdale, 21.
[xxxv] Ibid., 29-30.
[xxxvi] Gerard, “Will be owned, operated by members.” Mar 25, 1967.
[xxxvii] Henderson, Making the Scene, 25.
[xxxviii] Sharpe, Rochdale, 30-31.
[xxxix] Henderson, Making the Scene, 230-231.
[xl] Henderson, Making the Scene, 248.
[xli] Ibid., 249.
[xlii] Ibid., 250-251.
[xliii] Ibid., 249.
[xliv] Ibid., 253.
[xlv] Ibid., 254-255.
[xlvi] Ibid., 268.
[xlvii] Sharpe, Rochdale, 29-30.
[xlviii] Ibid., 31.
[xlix] Valpy, Michael. “Rochdale’s Reality is Something Else.” The Globe and Mail, Dec 16, 1968, https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/rochdales-reality-is-something-else/docview/1242401804/se-2 (accessed November 14, 2023).
[l] Valpy, “Rochdale’s Reality is Something Else.” Dec 16, 1968.
[li] Henderson, Making the Scene, 268-269.
[lii] Sharpe, Rochdale, 40.
[liii] “Student Falls From Window at Rochdale.” The Globe and Mail, Feb 24, 1969. https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/student-falls-window-at-rochdale/docview/1242317303/se-2 (accessed November 12, 2023).
[liv] Sharpe, Rochdale, 41.
[lv] Henderson, Making the Scene, 55.
[lvi] “Historical And Cultural Uses Of Cannabis And The Canadian “Marijuana Clash.”” Senate of Canada. 12 April 2002.https://sencanada.ca/en/content/sen/committee/371/ille/library/spicer-e#_ftn122 (accessed November 16, 2023).
[lvii] Sharpe, Rochdale, 53.
[lviii] Palmer, Canada’s 1960s, 208.
[lix] Sharpe, Rochdale, 70.
[lx] Lind, L. “Amphetamine Alarm: Rochdalers Warn of the ‘Speed That Kills’.” The Globe and Mail, https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/amphetamine-alarm/docview/1313735889/se-2.
[lxi] “Rochdale Death Ruled a Suicide at Inquest.” The Globe and Mail, Sep 24, 1970. https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/rochdale-death-ruled-suicide-at-inguest/docview/1242204460/se-2 (accessed November 12, 2023).
[lxii] Solomon, Michael. “Riot Predicted if College Closed Down: Rochdale ‘Contributed to Many Deaths.’ Should be Shut: Jury.” The Globe and Mail, Mar 24, 1973. https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/riot-predicted-if-college-closed-down/docview/1239982334/se-2 (accessed November 12, 2023).
[lxiii] Whelan, Peter. “Raid by 50 Police at Rochdale College Biggest in 9 Months.” The Globe and Mail, May 28, 1971. https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/raid-50-police-at-rochdale-college-biggest-9/docview/1241835365/se-2 (accessed November 12, 2023).
[lxiv] “Only One Egg Greets Police, Security Guards When They Padlock Food Store at Rochdale.” The Globe and Mail, September 13, 1974, https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/only-one-egg-greets-police-security-guards-when/docview/1239768516/se-2 (accessed November 12, 2023).
[lxv] Taylor, C. “A Heavyweight Poet Becomes Children’s Troubadour.” The Globe and Mail, September 28, 1974, https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/heavyweight-poet-becomes-childrens-troubadour/docview/1239793881/se-2
[lxvi] Palmer, Canada’s 1960s, 208.
[lxvii] Sharpe, Rochdale, 20-21.
[lxviii] Watt, J. J., “Rochdale College.” The Globe and Mail, Dec 12, 1970. https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/rochdale-college/docview/1242266969/se-2 (accessed November 13, 2023).
[lxix] Post, J.A. “‘Rochdale Keeps Drug Distribution Under Control’ Whitby resident Says,” The Toronto Star, Jan 19, 1974, https://www.proquest.com/historical-newspapers/page-b3/docview/1399301444/se-2 (accessed November 13, 2023).
[lxx] Sharpe, Rochdale, 51.
[lxxi] Ibid., 180.
[lxxii] Ibid., 205.
[lxxiii] “About Us.” Theatre Passe Muraille. https://www.passemuraille.ca/about/ (accessed November 16, 2023).
[lxxiv] Sharpe, Rochdale, 178, 313.
[lxxv] “The Rise and Fall of Rochdale College.” TVO Today. https://www.tvo.org/video/archive/the-rise-and-fall-of-rochdale.
[lxxvi] Sharpe, Rochdale, 314-315.
[lxxvii] Ibid., 73.
Anthony Salvalaggio is one of the editors of Toronto Journal.