Dossier, Volume 14 #1

The Jungle Collided with Rochdale College

On a cold, post-snowfall Saturday in December, I am gingerly circling a grey, eighteen-story seniors' apartment building on the northern fringe of the University of Toronto campus. This is, or was, Rochdale College. And it is part of my personal history.

Rochdale College, financed by a Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation mortgage, ten floors of conventional co-op housing for conventional U of T and Ryerson students, topped by six floors of radical experiment in alternative education for us unconventional types. "Degrees" sold as fundraisers. Design your own classes. Do your own thing. People came from all over North America in those ever-so-hopeful days of the fall of 1968.

But as the weather did its thing and fall shaded into winter, a snowball was building momentum. The two-block-by-three-block slice of countercultural street life known as "the Yorkville scene" knew a good thing when it saw one and began to move the couple of blocks west to the warmth and nonhierarchical verticality of the grey high-rise. Before long the brutal urban/human jungle blew into the benign vacuum of "do your own thing" and collided with the Rochdale experiment. Grimy questions of power, advantage and privilege reasserted themselves. Could we have expected anything different? Yes, we could. We did.

In 1995, I peek into the management office of these "Senator David A. Croll Apartments"--the office where, in the later stages of Rochdale's history, the enforcers of "Rochdale Security" used dogs to control outsiders' access to an exotic, promising and forbidden interior. Now a garish bust of Elvis sits elevated in one corner, overlooking the business of administering seniors' housing. "The King" presides here in a time of "strange days," a time of confusion, a time of moving forward and backward at once, when the urban seems in danger of becoming the jungle in the worst sense, when might is right, the image commands, profits rule and "security" is a commodity to be purchased by those who can. Another experiment about to spiral out of control?

Ray Bennett teaches English as a second language in Toronto and is completing a master's degree in environmental studies at York University.