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Toronto's hippie disease
May 28, 2006. 10:34 AM
STUART HENDERSON
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
It is the belly button of Toronto.
Yorkville, a district consisting of two main arteries sandwiched between Avenue Rd. to the west, Yonge St. to the east, Bloor St. to the south and Davenport Rd. to the north, sits in the geographic centre of the city.
And, for a short period during the 1960s, this half a square kilometre of boutiques, cafés and art galleries also found itself at the centre of Toronto's youthful counterculture — its students, hippies, artists, greasers, bikers, and others who congregated in and around the district, enjoyed the live music and theatre in its many coffee houses, its low-rent housing in overcrowded Victorian walk-ups, and its perceived saturation with anti-establishmentarian energy.
As early as 1964, city council was actively trying to curtail the development of this hip community right in the heart of what had been, since in the late-1950s, a highly successful gentrification project.
In perhaps the most telling example, city council tried to shut down the intensifying Yorkville music scene by instituting a moratorium on licenses for coffee houses in the spring of 1965, an act which served as a rather attractive bit of accidental propaganda for young people who found this to be incontrovertible evidence that hanging around coffee houses in Yorkville was, indeed, cool.
Meanwhile, beginning after a small-scale riot the previous spring, undercover and beat cops were dispatched to fill the streets in impressive numbers, charged with rooting out the "rowdies" and the "toughs," along with the drug-takers, the drug dealers and the prostitutes whom many believed to have set up shop in the area.
But as the early 1960s became the late '60s — a paradigm shift frequently characterized (both then and now) as a swing from innocence to cynicism — Yorkville moved beyond its role as a mere popular nuisance in the public imagination.
When Syl Apps, the Chair of the Parliament's Select Committee on Youth (and former captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs), famously decried Yorkville as "a festering sore on the face of the city" in the spring of 1967, a new era was beginning in earnest.
By the end of that year, Yorkville was increasingly linked to violence, drug abuse, homelessness, and disease.
As 1967 drew to a close, the real question was: Where do Yorkville and the village scene go now? In San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the hip old guard had already symbolically killed the Hippie, holding a mock funeral in early autumn as a statement on the co-optation and commercialization of the scene and the saturation of the district by media, municipal and other unwanted attention.
But what of Yorkville? Since winter was never a particularly hopping season in the village — cold, rain and snow tended to frustrate the ascetic and frugal lifestyle of many indigent hippies accustomed to sleeping where they lay during the balmy summer months — all eyes were turned toward the summer of 1968.
In mid-summer 1968, Yorkville became the very "festering sore" that Apps and other conservatives had claimed it to be. Throughout July, Dr. Anne Kyle of Toronto's Women's College Hospital (through her role as supervisor of Trailer, the "hippie clinic" in Yorkville) had admitted an "unusual number" of patients suffering from hepatitis, and "most of these individuals, both in-patient and out-patient, were associated with the Yorkville district."
Kyle and her staff met with the Medical Officer of Health for the City of Toronto and the Provincial Epidemiologist on July 30, and then again on Aug. 2, where it was concluded that, although "the number of cases of infectious hepatitis reported in Toronto in July 1968... was still less than half the number reported in July 1966," the right move would be to undertake a survey to try to determine the extent of hepatitis in Yorkville.
"Subsequently, two unforeseen events took place," stated the final report of the hastily assembled Hepatitis Co-ordinating Committee in September 1969, "either of which would have been sufficient to transform the `quiet' survey into a front page news story."
On the afternoon of the first survey clinic (Aug. 2), at least two newspapers received telephone messages advising that the clinic would begin work that day and suggesting that this would be a good opportunity for a news story.
The second incident was the wide distribution in Yorkville, on Aug. 5, of a typewritten single-sheet flier headed, "Danger! Danger! Danger! Hepatitis." The source was unidentified but the news media were in possession of copies in time for the daily papers of Aug. 6.
This well-timed invitation was actually the brainchild of Wilfred (Bill) Clement, chief pharmacologist at Queen Street Mental Health Centre and well-known Yorkville guru. Following a particularly unproductive meeting with local health officials, Clement had taken matters into his own hands.
"I recall being in a meeting [on Yorkville and hepatitis] with the people from Toronto General and Women's College Hospital," he said. "The nice ladies from Women's College Hospital were asking the province to put up the money for needles to score the blood. The province doesn't want to pay for it. This goes on for half an hour — they're arguing about the f---ing spikes!"
Clement, infuriated by this apparent lack of interest in helping the villagers — Toronto's hospitals were notorious for a paucity of concern for hip youth and their health issues — was also dumbfounded that the province wouldn't pay for the needles necessary to measure the spread of the illness.
"We're talking about maybe $1,000," he explained recently. "We were also talking about an epidemic that we were trying to nip in the bud. That's the whole purpose — we're going to nip this thing in the bud. [Hepatitis] is a drag!"
In the end, Women's College Hospital found the money to buy the needles, but not before Clement, enraged by the apathy he had witnessed in the meeting, had alerted the local press to the situation.
The Trailer clinic played a central role in the humanitarian effort to contain the hepatitis outbreak, with The Grab Bag, a local "head shop" among the first spots in the district to offer free testing for the disease.
The incendiary leaflet, it must be assumed, was designed to coax certain otherwise indolent villagers into action. Yet, in constructing the possibility of a hepatitis epidemic as a kind of foregone conclusion, the flyer acted as an extraordinarily effective anti-advertisement to the district.
Clement's alerting of the media to the flyer and to the hepatitis testing stations also helped to re-establish boundaries around Yorkville and to reinforce the popular perception that it was a community in crisis.
The arousal of public alarm had been an unreliable tactic for limiting Yorkville's appeal. The threats of violence, sexual depravity and pervasive drug use that had been variously employed by media and municipal authorities to foster a public outcry and an eventual cleanup of the district had virtually always achieved the awkward effect of further attracting curious youth to the district.
And yet at the same time, a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy had seen the district become increasingly violent, sexually decadent, and drug-fuelled.
Suddenly, with this possible hepatitis epidemic came the opportunity to establish Yorkville as a new variety of sick community. Yorkville was no longer figuratively ill — it was now literally infected.
Almost immediately following the initial newspaper articles of Aug. 3, Yorkville's villagers began to evacuate. Although the first report in the Toronto Star made it plain that the suspected cause of the outbreak was needle-sharing, it also explicitly claimed (incorrectly) that intravenous drug use was a typical hippie behaviour.
"Ten doctors from two Toronto hospitals spent last night in Yorkville looking for cases of a form of hepatitis often found among hippies. The disease is believed to be transmitted by hippies using contaminated hypodermic needles."
The Globe and Mail went a step further, referring to an apparent epidemic of "a little known variety [of the disease] that has come to be known as hippie hepatitis."
Meanwhile, many of the city's police officers, hugely over represented in the Yorkville district in their efforts to curb illegal drug activity, vandalism and underage vagrancy, became concerned that their beat was hazardous to their health.
Perhaps as a result of hearing that Women's College Hospital had set up a clinic in anticipation of an epidemic among Yorkville youth, many cops from the Yorkville beat refused to get their prophylaxes anywhere but there.
"There was a cop ward at Toronto General," Clement explains, but "the cops refused to go to the cop ward to get shots. The cops were terrified! They insisted on going to Women's College because they didn't trust anyone else."
The following morning, photographs of a throng of uniformed police lined up to get shots appeared in local papers. "Some asshole ... seems to have phoned all the newspapers," recalls Clement. "I was shocked and appalled — I open the paper, what a lovely picture!"
To the casual observer, little question would have remained: Yorkville was infected with a dangerous and unpredictable disease. Even the police were having a collective freakout.
As the Trailer and the Grab Bag established their testing stations, reporters and observers from various media took up their vantage points in the village. And, because frenzied reports of a probable epidemic were floated by doctors and the police even before the results of blood testing came back, reporters were left with a very easy front-page headline for the following Tuesday morning: "Hepatitis among Villagers now an Epidemic, Doctors Fear."
Toronto was about to get a crash course in epidemiology. A combination of serum hepatitis (now known as hepatitis B) and the more communicable infectious hepatitis (hepatitis A) was apparently found in up to 20 villagers on that first weekend.
While the serum form of the liver disease had been expected (as it was well-known to be communicated through needle-sharing and sexual contact), the second form was not. The presence of infectious hepatitis, which could be spread through contaminated food, water, human contact and a variety of other media, threatened to move the epidemic beyond the boundaries of hippiedom.
But A.R.J. Boyd, the medical officer of health for the City of Toronto, was quick to make it clear in press statements that infectious hepatitis had yet to be conclusively found in Yorkville, and he emphasized that, until it was found, the word "epidemic" was being misused.
"And," he cautioned, "the word `epidemic' is itself sometimes misleading. All the word means is that a great many more cases of a certain disease are showing up than is usual. So far, that is not the case with hepatitis. After all, there have been some years we've had 500 reported cases of the disease."
Rather than heeding his words, reportage of the apparent epidemic continued unabated — and Boyd, along with those city councillors who took up his line, were castigated for dragging their feet.
Even on Aug. 8, when Boyd was forced to admit that two cases of infectious hepatitis had been conclusively found among the stricken villagers — and that one of them was David DePoe's younger sister and minder of Trailer, Suzanne DePoe — he still refused to pander to pressure from the press (and, increasingly, the community at large) to dub the situation an epidemic.
He also attempted to clarify the muddied results of the initial rounds of testing in Yorkville, which had come back variously reporting up to 500 possible cases of the disease.
"[These] blood tests are inconclusive," he said. "The same test could be positive if someone were beaten up and badly bruised. It just shows tissue damage... The picture is still not at all clear."
In spite of Boyd's statements, the nefarious tourist activity that was Yorkville was being explicitly reconstructed in media reportage, and likely in the minds of many frightened Torontonians, as potentially lethal. Just going to Yorkville could kill you.
The Star, on Aug. 7, underlined this characterization with a dire front-page pronouncement:
"In theory, any visitor to Yorkville who ate in a café, bought any object or contacted any person, may have been exposed to the disease, a liver infection which can eventually lead to death."
Newspaper reports in the following days painted a grim portrait of a community in peril. As the apparent numbers of victims escalated — almost 150, including as many as six policemen, were reportedly felled by the disease by Aug. 9 — the papers published editorials critical of the city for its slow response to such an obvious catastrophe.
Before the end of the week, the province had taken over the investigation, "because people in Yorkville may have spread the disease outside the city of Toronto."
While Boyd attempted to quell the fears of a frightened public by blaming the press for overzealous and inflammatory reportage, downtown hospitals were overrun by spooked kids, "desperate" for a test.
Fear, knowing no boundaries, was in no way confined to Toronto: It was reported that three days after the initial accounts of the Yorkville outbreak, a public swimming pool in London, Ont., (some 200 km away) was being drained as a "precautionary measure."
By the following Monday, the province was formally asking the public to "stay out of Yorkville," and appealing to them to "satisfy their curiosity at a later date." Businesses began to suffer. Coffee houses and rock clubs sat empty. There were reports that, even in 30-degree heat, cars passing through Yorkville were rolling up their windows.
One villager, using the pseudonym "Luke the Drifter," explained to the Star that hippies were being treated as pariahs, more than ever before.
"All sorts of guys are swearing at you if you come near them. They all think you're going to give them hepatitis. One lady screamed at me, `Don't breathe near me, you ----!'"
On Aug. 12, York Council voted 5 to 4 to ask the province to close off Yorkville to the general public — establishing a makeshift quarantine — and to order all of the restaurants and coffee houses in the district to close down.
Fears of diseased hippies spreading their infection throughout Metropolitan Toronto, along with an apparent desire to keep countercultural youth in one place, culminated in the scuppering of a project to build a badly needed youth shelter at the corner of Queen and Bathurst Sts., about four kilometres from Yorkville.
Originally in favour of the project, if only grudgingly and apprehensively, the Queen-Bathurst Merchant Association had now turned vehement in its attempts to quash the venture. Armed with the profoundly effective (apparent) evidence that hippies carried an infectious and lethal disease, the association petitioned Mayor Dennison and Controller Margaret Campbell to shut down the plan.
"We said we would go along with the shelter," explained George Starr, president of the Merchant Association, "but that was before the sickness."
Even local celebrities found themselves subject to a new kind of prejudice. Three members of the band Kensington Market, among the biggest local draws on the Toronto scene, were asked to leave a coffee shop on Bloor St. (at Lothian Mews, just adjacent to Yorkville) because they looked like villagers.
"I don't care too much about who we serve," said Stephen Kefkoto, manager of the Coffee Mill. "But, you know — the hepatitis scare. They were obviously village residents. Usually they don't come in here."
For businesses in the village, it was not so much a question of turning people away as trying to attract them. On the first Friday after the outbreak was reported, it was estimated that the crowds on Yorkville Ave. were but one-tenth their usual size. Coffeehouses and other hangouts were sparsely populated, and dining spots were reporting a dip (by up to 80 per cent) in reservations.
Many wondered openly if the village could ever bounce back.
By Aug. 15, blame for the outbreak was being ascribed to the lax laws that had allowed Yorkville to become a hotbed for infection. As a result, city controllers concluded that "stronger laws [were] needed to put down hippies."
Now afforded the opportunity that many on the Board of Control had been looking for, the move to clean up the district was underway.
"As strange as it may seem," said Controller Fred Beavis, "this [hepatitis outbreak] may have done a lot of good for Yorkville."
In a sense, Beavis's assumption was correct: Countercultural Yorkville was beginning its long goodbye, fading into the murky twilight of the 1960s. The hepatitis outbreak was just another signpost along the way, but it was the one that clearly marked the beginning of the end.
After almost a month of constant media and municipal announcements that it was the epicentre of an incurable infection, hip Yorkville would never recover.
And yet, the truth is that the Yorkville hepatitis epidemic never really took place.
When, more than a year later, the Final Report by the Co-ordinating Committee for the Ontario Department of Health was published, it admitted that the vast majority of the very few cases of the illness were easily traced back to the unsanitary practices of intravenous drug users, never more than a small minority in the Yorkville scene — the basic point that Boyd was making all along.
In fact, the report concluded that, of the total of 32 patients hospitalized for probable hepatitis during the outbreak, "the 27 who were classified as probable [serum] hepatitis and the three as possible hepatitis used drugs intravenously. The remaining two, who did not use drugs intravenously, [were] classified as probable infectious hepatitis."
According to one clinical account that was included in the Final Report, only 25 patients with a diagnosis of hepatitis were admitted to Women's College Hospital during the period July 3 to Sept. 30 — a period three times the length of the epidemic episode.
Of these 25 patients, 20 were male, and the age range spanned 16-27, with a mean age of 19. Only one of these patients did not use any drugs, but the remaining 24 all used drugs (amphetamines) intravenously.
All of the turmoil and confusion, the fear and anxiety, it would seem, was massively exaggerated. This was no epidemic. Rather, it was, as the medical officer of health had maintained throughout the three-week panic, a minor outbreak that 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.
In mid-summer 1969, the conservative daily The Toronto Telegram declared that Yorkville's "hippies are gone."
The article, entitled "Yorkville Re-visited," took a retrospective view of a bygone era, an era that was said to have reached its zenith during the highly publicized "Siege of Yorkville" in August 1967, that two-week period characterized by sit-ins, confrontation, and police over zealousness.
But, at the Telegram, this zenith had come into focus only with a little perspective: "Looking back now from the distance of two years, the famous hippie sit-down in the middle of Yorkville Ave. takes on another coloration. It seems, if anything at all, rather quaint."
Written on the occasion of the termination of the last of the criminal trials of participants in the protest — David DePoe had been recently acquitted of two counts of causing a disturbance — the article reads like a sinister eulogy.
Casually reducing the phenomenon of Yorkville youth culture to a triumvirate of interrelated (perhaps identical) shorthand, the article concluded, but certainly did not lament, that since "David DePoe is gone, the hippies are gone, the Yorkville of 1967 is over, [and] the trials have ended," Yorkville can now move on.
If, in 1966, one could be said to be a "Yorkville hippie" by donning the proper garb and smoking drugs in suburban Lawrence Park, by 1969 to do so would simply make one a "hippie."
The idea of a specific hip space was losing relevance, ceasing to carry any deeper meaning. Performances of hipness — from the outlandish clothing to the heretofore underground psychedelic music, from the spread of dope through public schools and universities to the liberalization of sexual relations amongst young people — were no longer specifically tied to Yorkville in the public imagination. "Yorkville youth" was no longer shorthand for "hippie"; by the end of the summer of 1968 it had become synonymous with a certain needy, distressed and alienated portion of the counterculture: its homeless, its disturbed, its junk-sick, its infected.
And the truth is that from 1968 to 1970, as developers tightened their hold on the district, as police managed to arrest ever more villagers on dope offences, as disease and drug addiction was spread thick as oil on water over the dwindling numbers of young people who congregated in Yorkville's all-night restaurants and cafés, the hip village community fell into a complicated, and often bleak, downward spiral into irrelevancy.
And so, the hepatitis epidemic that never really was kick-started the development of the popular view that Yorkville and the hippies were played out. The "true hippies" were gone, and the new ones were sick, infected, "damaged."
The petals thus off the flower, the Yorkville activity was associated more and more with the new villagers, people like "Beatle Bill" and "Murray the Speed Freak," well-known to many in the scene toward the end as exemplars of the scourge of speed and indigence in the village. Recalls Suzanne DePoe:
"Beatle Bill was the most famous speed freak in Yorkville. Oh, and Murray the Speed Freak. There was Murray and Beatle Bill. They're probably dead. They were characters around the village, so people knew them. They were social. Well, Beatle Bill wasn't social. He was just famous because he did so much meth that nobody could figure out how he was walking around, you know? And his teeth were rotten. It's what meth does. His general health was terrible. These guys were young, too!"
The final years in the Yorkville youth scene saw the hurried development of hotels and other noisy eyesores, further distancing the village from its quaint early '60s atmosphere. Rents went up, forcing more students and otherwise underfunded young people farther away from the little district. Police crackdowns on drug use (and especially speed) were stepped up; biker violence was more common, and gang rapes at their hands were being reported with alarming frequency.
When the Health of Yorkville report (begun as an offshoot of the hepatitis study of 1968-'69) came out in 1970, it left little doubt as to the sorry state of the majority of the locals it surveyed.
But, it also maintained that whatever Yorkville had been prior to 1968, and whoever its villagers had been, it was no longer anything of the sort.
yorkvilleproject@hotmail.com
May 28, 2006. 10:34 AM
STUART HENDERSON
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
It is the belly button of Toronto.
Yorkville, a district consisting of two main arteries sandwiched between Avenue Rd. to the west, Yonge St. to the east, Bloor St. to the south and Davenport Rd. to the north, sits in the geographic centre of the city.
And, for a short period during the 1960s, this half a square kilometre of boutiques, cafés and art galleries also found itself at the centre of Toronto's youthful counterculture — its students, hippies, artists, greasers, bikers, and others who congregated in and around the district, enjoyed the live music and theatre in its many coffee houses, its low-rent housing in overcrowded Victorian walk-ups, and its perceived saturation with anti-establishmentarian energy.
As early as 1964, city council was actively trying to curtail the development of this hip community right in the heart of what had been, since in the late-1950s, a highly successful gentrification project.
In perhaps the most telling example, city council tried to shut down the intensifying Yorkville music scene by instituting a moratorium on licenses for coffee houses in the spring of 1965, an act which served as a rather attractive bit of accidental propaganda for young people who found this to be incontrovertible evidence that hanging around coffee houses in Yorkville was, indeed, cool.
Meanwhile, beginning after a small-scale riot the previous spring, undercover and beat cops were dispatched to fill the streets in impressive numbers, charged with rooting out the "rowdies" and the "toughs," along with the drug-takers, the drug dealers and the prostitutes whom many believed to have set up shop in the area.
But as the early 1960s became the late '60s — a paradigm shift frequently characterized (both then and now) as a swing from innocence to cynicism — Yorkville moved beyond its role as a mere popular nuisance in the public imagination.
When Syl Apps, the Chair of the Parliament's Select Committee on Youth (and former captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs), famously decried Yorkville as "a festering sore on the face of the city" in the spring of 1967, a new era was beginning in earnest.
By the end of that year, Yorkville was increasingly linked to violence, drug abuse, homelessness, and disease.
As 1967 drew to a close, the real question was: Where do Yorkville and the village scene go now? In San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the hip old guard had already symbolically killed the Hippie, holding a mock funeral in early autumn as a statement on the co-optation and commercialization of the scene and the saturation of the district by media, municipal and other unwanted attention.
But what of Yorkville? Since winter was never a particularly hopping season in the village — cold, rain and snow tended to frustrate the ascetic and frugal lifestyle of many indigent hippies accustomed to sleeping where they lay during the balmy summer months — all eyes were turned toward the summer of 1968.
In mid-summer 1968, Yorkville became the very "festering sore" that Apps and other conservatives had claimed it to be. Throughout July, Dr. Anne Kyle of Toronto's Women's College Hospital (through her role as supervisor of Trailer, the "hippie clinic" in Yorkville) had admitted an "unusual number" of patients suffering from hepatitis, and "most of these individuals, both in-patient and out-patient, were associated with the Yorkville district."
Kyle and her staff met with the Medical Officer of Health for the City of Toronto and the Provincial Epidemiologist on July 30, and then again on Aug. 2, where it was concluded that, although "the number of cases of infectious hepatitis reported in Toronto in July 1968... was still less than half the number reported in July 1966," the right move would be to undertake a survey to try to determine the extent of hepatitis in Yorkville.
"Subsequently, two unforeseen events took place," stated the final report of the hastily assembled Hepatitis Co-ordinating Committee in September 1969, "either of which would have been sufficient to transform the `quiet' survey into a front page news story."
On the afternoon of the first survey clinic (Aug. 2), at least two newspapers received telephone messages advising that the clinic would begin work that day and suggesting that this would be a good opportunity for a news story.
The second incident was the wide distribution in Yorkville, on Aug. 5, of a typewritten single-sheet flier headed, "Danger! Danger! Danger! Hepatitis." The source was unidentified but the news media were in possession of copies in time for the daily papers of Aug. 6.
This well-timed invitation was actually the brainchild of Wilfred (Bill) Clement, chief pharmacologist at Queen Street Mental Health Centre and well-known Yorkville guru. Following a particularly unproductive meeting with local health officials, Clement had taken matters into his own hands.
"I recall being in a meeting [on Yorkville and hepatitis] with the people from Toronto General and Women's College Hospital," he said. "The nice ladies from Women's College Hospital were asking the province to put up the money for needles to score the blood. The province doesn't want to pay for it. This goes on for half an hour — they're arguing about the f---ing spikes!"
Clement, infuriated by this apparent lack of interest in helping the villagers — Toronto's hospitals were notorious for a paucity of concern for hip youth and their health issues — was also dumbfounded that the province wouldn't pay for the needles necessary to measure the spread of the illness.
"We're talking about maybe $1,000," he explained recently. "We were also talking about an epidemic that we were trying to nip in the bud. That's the whole purpose — we're going to nip this thing in the bud. [Hepatitis] is a drag!"
In the end, Women's College Hospital found the money to buy the needles, but not before Clement, enraged by the apathy he had witnessed in the meeting, had alerted the local press to the situation.
The Trailer clinic played a central role in the humanitarian effort to contain the hepatitis outbreak, with The Grab Bag, a local "head shop" among the first spots in the district to offer free testing for the disease.
The incendiary leaflet, it must be assumed, was designed to coax certain otherwise indolent villagers into action. Yet, in constructing the possibility of a hepatitis epidemic as a kind of foregone conclusion, the flyer acted as an extraordinarily effective anti-advertisement to the district.
Clement's alerting of the media to the flyer and to the hepatitis testing stations also helped to re-establish boundaries around Yorkville and to reinforce the popular perception that it was a community in crisis.
The arousal of public alarm had been an unreliable tactic for limiting Yorkville's appeal. The threats of violence, sexual depravity and pervasive drug use that had been variously employed by media and municipal authorities to foster a public outcry and an eventual cleanup of the district had virtually always achieved the awkward effect of further attracting curious youth to the district.
And yet at the same time, a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy had seen the district become increasingly violent, sexually decadent, and drug-fuelled.
Suddenly, with this possible hepatitis epidemic came the opportunity to establish Yorkville as a new variety of sick community. Yorkville was no longer figuratively ill — it was now literally infected.
Almost immediately following the initial newspaper articles of Aug. 3, Yorkville's villagers began to evacuate. Although the first report in the Toronto Star made it plain that the suspected cause of the outbreak was needle-sharing, it also explicitly claimed (incorrectly) that intravenous drug use was a typical hippie behaviour.
"Ten doctors from two Toronto hospitals spent last night in Yorkville looking for cases of a form of hepatitis often found among hippies. The disease is believed to be transmitted by hippies using contaminated hypodermic needles."
The Globe and Mail went a step further, referring to an apparent epidemic of "a little known variety [of the disease] that has come to be known as hippie hepatitis."
Meanwhile, many of the city's police officers, hugely over represented in the Yorkville district in their efforts to curb illegal drug activity, vandalism and underage vagrancy, became concerned that their beat was hazardous to their health.
Perhaps as a result of hearing that Women's College Hospital had set up a clinic in anticipation of an epidemic among Yorkville youth, many cops from the Yorkville beat refused to get their prophylaxes anywhere but there.
"There was a cop ward at Toronto General," Clement explains, but "the cops refused to go to the cop ward to get shots. The cops were terrified! They insisted on going to Women's College because they didn't trust anyone else."
The following morning, photographs of a throng of uniformed police lined up to get shots appeared in local papers. "Some asshole ... seems to have phoned all the newspapers," recalls Clement. "I was shocked and appalled — I open the paper, what a lovely picture!"
To the casual observer, little question would have remained: Yorkville was infected with a dangerous and unpredictable disease. Even the police were having a collective freakout.
As the Trailer and the Grab Bag established their testing stations, reporters and observers from various media took up their vantage points in the village. And, because frenzied reports of a probable epidemic were floated by doctors and the police even before the results of blood testing came back, reporters were left with a very easy front-page headline for the following Tuesday morning: "Hepatitis among Villagers now an Epidemic, Doctors Fear."
Toronto was about to get a crash course in epidemiology. A combination of serum hepatitis (now known as hepatitis B) and the more communicable infectious hepatitis (hepatitis A) was apparently found in up to 20 villagers on that first weekend.
While the serum form of the liver disease had been expected (as it was well-known to be communicated through needle-sharing and sexual contact), the second form was not. The presence of infectious hepatitis, which could be spread through contaminated food, water, human contact and a variety of other media, threatened to move the epidemic beyond the boundaries of hippiedom.
But A.R.J. Boyd, the medical officer of health for the City of Toronto, was quick to make it clear in press statements that infectious hepatitis had yet to be conclusively found in Yorkville, and he emphasized that, until it was found, the word "epidemic" was being misused.
"And," he cautioned, "the word `epidemic' is itself sometimes misleading. All the word means is that a great many more cases of a certain disease are showing up than is usual. So far, that is not the case with hepatitis. After all, there have been some years we've had 500 reported cases of the disease."
Rather than heeding his words, reportage of the apparent epidemic continued unabated — and Boyd, along with those city councillors who took up his line, were castigated for dragging their feet.
Even on Aug. 8, when Boyd was forced to admit that two cases of infectious hepatitis had been conclusively found among the stricken villagers — and that one of them was David DePoe's younger sister and minder of Trailer, Suzanne DePoe — he still refused to pander to pressure from the press (and, increasingly, the community at large) to dub the situation an epidemic.
He also attempted to clarify the muddied results of the initial rounds of testing in Yorkville, which had come back variously reporting up to 500 possible cases of the disease.
"[These] blood tests are inconclusive," he said. "The same test could be positive if someone were beaten up and badly bruised. It just shows tissue damage... The picture is still not at all clear."
In spite of Boyd's statements, the nefarious tourist activity that was Yorkville was being explicitly reconstructed in media reportage, and likely in the minds of many frightened Torontonians, as potentially lethal. Just going to Yorkville could kill you.
The Star, on Aug. 7, underlined this characterization with a dire front-page pronouncement:
"In theory, any visitor to Yorkville who ate in a café, bought any object or contacted any person, may have been exposed to the disease, a liver infection which can eventually lead to death."
Newspaper reports in the following days painted a grim portrait of a community in peril. As the apparent numbers of victims escalated — almost 150, including as many as six policemen, were reportedly felled by the disease by Aug. 9 — the papers published editorials critical of the city for its slow response to such an obvious catastrophe.
Before the end of the week, the province had taken over the investigation, "because people in Yorkville may have spread the disease outside the city of Toronto."
While Boyd attempted to quell the fears of a frightened public by blaming the press for overzealous and inflammatory reportage, downtown hospitals were overrun by spooked kids, "desperate" for a test.
Fear, knowing no boundaries, was in no way confined to Toronto: It was reported that three days after the initial accounts of the Yorkville outbreak, a public swimming pool in London, Ont., (some 200 km away) was being drained as a "precautionary measure."
By the following Monday, the province was formally asking the public to "stay out of Yorkville," and appealing to them to "satisfy their curiosity at a later date." Businesses began to suffer. Coffee houses and rock clubs sat empty. There were reports that, even in 30-degree heat, cars passing through Yorkville were rolling up their windows.
One villager, using the pseudonym "Luke the Drifter," explained to the Star that hippies were being treated as pariahs, more than ever before.
"All sorts of guys are swearing at you if you come near them. They all think you're going to give them hepatitis. One lady screamed at me, `Don't breathe near me, you ----!'"
On Aug. 12, York Council voted 5 to 4 to ask the province to close off Yorkville to the general public — establishing a makeshift quarantine — and to order all of the restaurants and coffee houses in the district to close down.
Fears of diseased hippies spreading their infection throughout Metropolitan Toronto, along with an apparent desire to keep countercultural youth in one place, culminated in the scuppering of a project to build a badly needed youth shelter at the corner of Queen and Bathurst Sts., about four kilometres from Yorkville.
Originally in favour of the project, if only grudgingly and apprehensively, the Queen-Bathurst Merchant Association had now turned vehement in its attempts to quash the venture. Armed with the profoundly effective (apparent) evidence that hippies carried an infectious and lethal disease, the association petitioned Mayor Dennison and Controller Margaret Campbell to shut down the plan.
"We said we would go along with the shelter," explained George Starr, president of the Merchant Association, "but that was before the sickness."
Even local celebrities found themselves subject to a new kind of prejudice. Three members of the band Kensington Market, among the biggest local draws on the Toronto scene, were asked to leave a coffee shop on Bloor St. (at Lothian Mews, just adjacent to Yorkville) because they looked like villagers.
"I don't care too much about who we serve," said Stephen Kefkoto, manager of the Coffee Mill. "But, you know — the hepatitis scare. They were obviously village residents. Usually they don't come in here."
For businesses in the village, it was not so much a question of turning people away as trying to attract them. On the first Friday after the outbreak was reported, it was estimated that the crowds on Yorkville Ave. were but one-tenth their usual size. Coffeehouses and other hangouts were sparsely populated, and dining spots were reporting a dip (by up to 80 per cent) in reservations.
Many wondered openly if the village could ever bounce back.
By Aug. 15, blame for the outbreak was being ascribed to the lax laws that had allowed Yorkville to become a hotbed for infection. As a result, city controllers concluded that "stronger laws [were] needed to put down hippies."
Now afforded the opportunity that many on the Board of Control had been looking for, the move to clean up the district was underway.
"As strange as it may seem," said Controller Fred Beavis, "this [hepatitis outbreak] may have done a lot of good for Yorkville."
In a sense, Beavis's assumption was correct: Countercultural Yorkville was beginning its long goodbye, fading into the murky twilight of the 1960s. The hepatitis outbreak was just another signpost along the way, but it was the one that clearly marked the beginning of the end.
After almost a month of constant media and municipal announcements that it was the epicentre of an incurable infection, hip Yorkville would never recover.
And yet, the truth is that the Yorkville hepatitis epidemic never really took place.
When, more than a year later, the Final Report by the Co-ordinating Committee for the Ontario Department of Health was published, it admitted that the vast majority of the very few cases of the illness were easily traced back to the unsanitary practices of intravenous drug users, never more than a small minority in the Yorkville scene — the basic point that Boyd was making all along.
In fact, the report concluded that, of the total of 32 patients hospitalized for probable hepatitis during the outbreak, "the 27 who were classified as probable [serum] hepatitis and the three as possible hepatitis used drugs intravenously. The remaining two, who did not use drugs intravenously, [were] classified as probable infectious hepatitis."
According to one clinical account that was included in the Final Report, only 25 patients with a diagnosis of hepatitis were admitted to Women's College Hospital during the period July 3 to Sept. 30 — a period three times the length of the epidemic episode.
Of these 25 patients, 20 were male, and the age range spanned 16-27, with a mean age of 19. Only one of these patients did not use any drugs, but the remaining 24 all used drugs (amphetamines) intravenously.
All of the turmoil and confusion, the fear and anxiety, it would seem, was massively exaggerated. This was no epidemic. Rather, it was, as the medical officer of health had maintained throughout the three-week panic, a minor outbreak that 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.
In mid-summer 1969, the conservative daily The Toronto Telegram declared that Yorkville's "hippies are gone."
The article, entitled "Yorkville Re-visited," took a retrospective view of a bygone era, an era that was said to have reached its zenith during the highly publicized "Siege of Yorkville" in August 1967, that two-week period characterized by sit-ins, confrontation, and police over zealousness.
But, at the Telegram, this zenith had come into focus only with a little perspective: "Looking back now from the distance of two years, the famous hippie sit-down in the middle of Yorkville Ave. takes on another coloration. It seems, if anything at all, rather quaint."
Written on the occasion of the termination of the last of the criminal trials of participants in the protest — David DePoe had been recently acquitted of two counts of causing a disturbance — the article reads like a sinister eulogy.
Casually reducing the phenomenon of Yorkville youth culture to a triumvirate of interrelated (perhaps identical) shorthand, the article concluded, but certainly did not lament, that since "David DePoe is gone, the hippies are gone, the Yorkville of 1967 is over, [and] the trials have ended," Yorkville can now move on.
If, in 1966, one could be said to be a "Yorkville hippie" by donning the proper garb and smoking drugs in suburban Lawrence Park, by 1969 to do so would simply make one a "hippie."
The idea of a specific hip space was losing relevance, ceasing to carry any deeper meaning. Performances of hipness — from the outlandish clothing to the heretofore underground psychedelic music, from the spread of dope through public schools and universities to the liberalization of sexual relations amongst young people — were no longer specifically tied to Yorkville in the public imagination. "Yorkville youth" was no longer shorthand for "hippie"; by the end of the summer of 1968 it had become synonymous with a certain needy, distressed and alienated portion of the counterculture: its homeless, its disturbed, its junk-sick, its infected.
And the truth is that from 1968 to 1970, as developers tightened their hold on the district, as police managed to arrest ever more villagers on dope offences, as disease and drug addiction was spread thick as oil on water over the dwindling numbers of young people who congregated in Yorkville's all-night restaurants and cafés, the hip village community fell into a complicated, and often bleak, downward spiral into irrelevancy.
And so, the hepatitis epidemic that never really was kick-started the development of the popular view that Yorkville and the hippies were played out. The "true hippies" were gone, and the new ones were sick, infected, "damaged."
The petals thus off the flower, the Yorkville activity was associated more and more with the new villagers, people like "Beatle Bill" and "Murray the Speed Freak," well-known to many in the scene toward the end as exemplars of the scourge of speed and indigence in the village. Recalls Suzanne DePoe:
"Beatle Bill was the most famous speed freak in Yorkville. Oh, and Murray the Speed Freak. There was Murray and Beatle Bill. They're probably dead. They were characters around the village, so people knew them. They were social. Well, Beatle Bill wasn't social. He was just famous because he did so much meth that nobody could figure out how he was walking around, you know? And his teeth were rotten. It's what meth does. His general health was terrible. These guys were young, too!"
The final years in the Yorkville youth scene saw the hurried development of hotels and other noisy eyesores, further distancing the village from its quaint early '60s atmosphere. Rents went up, forcing more students and otherwise underfunded young people farther away from the little district. Police crackdowns on drug use (and especially speed) were stepped up; biker violence was more common, and gang rapes at their hands were being reported with alarming frequency.
When the Health of Yorkville report (begun as an offshoot of the hepatitis study of 1968-'69) came out in 1970, it left little doubt as to the sorry state of the majority of the locals it surveyed.
But, it also maintained that whatever Yorkville had been prior to 1968, and whoever its villagers had been, it was no longer anything of the sort.
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