The Hippie High-Rise (Darts Re-Run)

This week, we’re taking a little break before continuing our latest season, the Rationality Wars. We’re playing one of the our best documentary episodes from the large archive of our previous show, Darts and Letters. The episode called the Hippie High-Rise.

For seven years, from 1968 to 1975, one eighteen story high-rise was the heart of Canada’s counterculture. Rochdale College in Toronto, ON, was jammed full with leftist organizers, hippies, draft dodgers, students, artists, and others just looking for a good time.

Although, Rochdale wasn’t really a “college.” It was something much bigger: a political, educational, communal, artistic, and psychedelic experiment. During its time, it was endlessly lambasted by conservatives and leftists alike–until it reached its inglorious end. Today, like much of the counterculture, it’s often remembered for its problems: its ideological contradictions, drug-addled hedonism, bourgeois individualism, sexism, suicide, and more. However, is that the whole story? Were the kids in the hippie highrise onto something, …or was it indeed just one giant waste of time? Marc Apollonio investigates.