What to know
- Historian Adam Bunch is speaking at the Toronto Heliconian Club on Nov. 4 as part of its new Heliconian History Series.
- The talk traces Yorkville from a 19th-century village to the centre of Toronto’s 1960s counterculture.
- Bunch will share stories involving escaped pet alligators, brewer Joseph Bloor and anarchist Emma Goldman.
- Yorkville later became a major music hub associated with artists including Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot.
- Doors open at 6:30 p.m. at 35 Hazelton Ave.; tickets are $25 for members and $35 for the public.
Toronto was once known as a conservative and reserved city. Its nickname, “Toronto the Good,” reflected its reputation. But beneath that buttoned-up exterior is a strange history, involving everything from pet alligators to the world’s most dangerous woman.
You can hear all about it today (Nov. 4) at The Heliconian Club (35 Hazelton Ave.) in Yorkville from 7 to 9 p.m. as part of its Heliconian History Series.
The inaugural talk is Weird Toronto: Hidden Histories of Yorkville and Toronto with Adam Bunch, author of The Toronto Book of the Dead and The Toronto Book of Love.
The historian, author and storyteller opens the series with an evening of unusual and little-known stories from the city’s past. Through the talk, he traces Yorkville’s evolution from a remote 19th-century village into the epicentre of Canada’s 1960s youth counterculture, revealing how its eccentric characters, unconventional communities and cultural movements helped shape modern Toronto.
Doors open at 6:30 p.m., with the presentation beginning at 7 p.m., followed by a Q&A and refreshments. Admission is $25 for members and $35 for the general public. Buy them here.
“This talk is going to be all about the weird history of Yorkville, and I’m going to use it to talk about some of the ways in which Yorkville has helped make all of Toronto a more delightfully weird place,” Bunch tells Now. “I’m going to do it by looking through the whole history of the city and of Yorkville, tracing their evolutions and Yorkville’s influence on the city at large, and sharing as many weird stories as I possibly can about the history of Yorkville itself.”
He says he’ll begin with Toronto’s founding on Indigenous land and its identity as a deeply conservative, British and Protestant city. That reputation would endure well into the 1900s, with the nickname “Toronto the Good.”
“It was a very notoriously boring, reserved, quiet place, especially on Sundays,” says Bunch. “And in a lot of ways, that’s the opposite of the vibrant multicultural city of today. It’s taken generations and generations of Torontonians to gradually chip away at that, and then, finally, over the last half-century or so, really transform it into the Toronto we know in 2026 — and Yorkville has played a role in that.”
In the 1800s, Yorkville was an independent village far beyond Toronto’s boundaries, surrounded by countryside at what is now Yonge and Bloor. One of its founders was Joseph Bloor, the brewer for whom Bloor Street was named.
Bunch will talk about “one of the strangest photographs in Toronto history,” the infamous portrait of Bloor, in which he looks like “a demon or Frankenstein’s monster.” Bunch calls it is “a really unsettling photograph” but believes that may be due to technological reasons, since it was taken in the 1850s or early 1860s.
Bloor made his fortune brewing beer, profiting from a drinking culture that conservative city leaders would have preferred to keep under control. As Bunch points out, he was “making his money off the fact that Toronto was never quite as quiet and boring as city leaders wanted, but there was lots of rowdiness and drunkenness in the 1800s as well.”
And then there were the alligators. Yes, alligators.
“My favourite story from the Victorian era is when some people went for a picnic, I believe, in a ravine nearby and came across, unexpectedly, an alligator, who later turned out to be an escaped pet, back in the days when you could order pet alligators through the mail and other people would bring them back from trips to Florida, so that Toronto, at one point, had a weird number of alligators within it.”
He adds that he’ll also talk about Emma Goldman, “maybe the most notorious anarchist in the world in the early 1900s,” who was challenging some of the city’s traditional attitudes. She actually gave a talk at the Heliconian Hall, which opened in 1909 as a place for women working in the arts to meet, exchange ideas, and develop as artists. “That talk she gave there was all about expressionism and art, and how this new generation of artists were challenging traditions and fighting new ways of thinking,” says Bunch.
Goldman campaigned against corporal punishment in schools, helping lead efforts to prevent teachers from physically punishing students with rulers. She also delivered public lectures about birth control at a time when contraception was illegal and even discussing where to obtain it could attract the attention of Toronto’s police morality squad.
Yorkville’s transformation accelerated in the 1950s and before the end of the decade had become a gathering place for beatniks, artists, musicians and poets. Bunch will talk about how that came to be, as well as the 60s beatnik and hippie movement and the neighbourhood’s infamous music scene that helped launch the careers of Neil Young and Joni Mitchell.
“You can keep going from there and trace it all the way through the history of this neighbourhood that was once this quaint Victorian village, but a place where weird things have always happened throughout the history of the city,” says Bunch.
