The Riverboat Coffee House (site) — Neil Young in Yorkville

The Riverboat Coffee House operated in the basement of 134 Yorkville Avenue in Toronto from 1964 to 1978 — fourteen years during which the Yorkville neighbourhood was the centre of Canadian folk and singer-songwriter culture in the way that Greenwich Village had been for American folk music a few years earlier. Gordon Lightfoot built his early reputation at the Riverboat. Joni Mitchell played there in her pre-California years. James Taylor played there. And Neil Young, who arrived in Toronto from Winnipeg in 1965 at the age of nineteen, played the Riverboat in the months before he left Canada for good.

Young arrived in Toronto with a hearse — he travelled in it because he could sleep in it, which solved the problem of where to stay when you had no money — and began working the Yorkville coffee house circuit. He was already writing songs of considerable quality; the Yorkville audience, shaped by the folk revival and its accompanying seriousness about original material, gave him a context in which those songs could be heard. He lasted in Toronto for about a year before driving the hearse south to Los Angeles, where he spotted Stephen Stills in traffic, was recognised, and the sequence of events that produced Buffalo Springfield began.

The Riverboat building at 134 Yorkville Avenue still stands, now occupied by upscale retail — the neighbourhood having transformed from bohemian enclave to luxury shopping district in the decades since the coffee house closed. No marker acknowledges the basement room beneath it. The hearse Young drove south was the subject of a lawsuit he later filed against a company that claimed to have found and restored it — a dispute that occupied Canadian courts for several years and is entirely consistent with his character.