0:03  
This is a society, he chose to drop out of society. {overlapping news clips}

0:29  
This is where I was sitting at the time that we had the annual general meeting at the end of the first year, and there on the stage was a bunch of people. They wanted radical openess. My name is Dan King, and I am the only original Rochdale resident that still lives in the building.

0:50  
While I was there, I started to become something more of a rebel than I was even before. My name is Paul Evans and I was a first Rochdale student.

0:58  
I first arrived in 1968, so that would mean I was 22 years old. 22, it was quite a change. for me.

1:08  
The educational system in the high schools was was a very controlling. One of my gym teachers. He had us actually, instead of doing gym classes, he had his marching round and round and round. And when I played funny with that, he would smash me with a hockey stick. That particular gym teacher failed me for gym, which is pretty difficult to do and I said, well, you failed me. I'm dropping out.

1:36  
I had just finished my first year at University of Toronto, I thought I'd failed. I thought I flunked out my first year, but amazingly, I actually managed to pass. But I'd already made the decision, I'm just going to drop out the university system.

1:50  
By virtue of me being a dropout, I was the prime candidate for the kind of student Rochdale thought could be a Rochdale student. 

1:58  
It's hard not to hear about Rochdale at the time, because it was being promoted all over the place as a new way to innovate on education, getting rid of a lot of a lot of sort of what you might call hierarchical ideas. 

2:13  
That Rochdale college idea was a higher education facility for lack of a better term that would be run by the students. This would be an institution, if you will, reflected the idea that people ought to be able to control their own lives, especially the most significant parts of it. 

2:32  
 So when we moved to the building, there was a lot of ideas about openness and open to anybody who wanted to come here and open to ideas about drugs and sex.

2:41  
It turned out the front door had to be locked because it was essentially a large apartment building at that point. I borrowed it too from me, went to the front door and smashed the lock off, thereby enabling anybody of any kind to get into the building. The population of Yorkville learned that Rochdale college was open,

3:01  
And we had people coming and trying different drugs. And people were crashing at the floor above us and people crashing in a variety of the other floors.

3:12  
People sleeping the halls, people sleeping in the elevators, people sleeping in all the public spaces, including the education spaces that we set aside. 

3:19  
One pivotal moment came when we had somebody who didn't live in the building, who broke into the cigarette machine.

3:26  
Oh a few weeks or so after I tore the locks off and we started to get the crashes with big time. Somebody going into the cigarette machine stealing money and also the cigarettes and thereby depriving Rochdale people of their cigarettes. 

3:40  
This fellow called Larry the lawyer, he made a citizen's arrest of this person who broke into the cigarette machine. 

3:48  
Larry, the lawyer was a very interesting character. He was about six foot three and dressed in a suit all the time, which made him stand out dramatically. And he liked to present to us the consequences of the way we were living and to think about what that meant in terms of actions like turning in the guy who broke into the cigarette machine.

4:12  
They basically had an all night argument about whether we should turn this guy over to the pigs.

4:19  
A citizens arrest was like the knee jerk reaction of almost like a western town or western movie. And it felt really failed to take into account the subtleties of the situation we were in in terms of we were trying to establish ourselves as being independent, relatively autonomous and so on. And yet making a citizens arrest tied us into the establishment and the mainstream way of doing things and did we want to do that did we want to do that? I n fact, reinforce the way things are done in the outside world?

4:51  
The big question was, here we have an asset, which is a benefit to all we allowed people to break into it. Then the machine wouldn't be there anymore and we'd end up having to go elsewhere to buy our cigarettes. 

5:05  
The whole discussion about citizens arrest really enabled people to start to think about what we were doing there, as as a political unit and as an organization, as a community, not just as a crash pad. 

5:19  
As far as I know, the brake in artist was not turned over to the pigs and the end result was part of a long decline of mad rush into chaos.

5:33  
Being at Rochdale was great. We had to actually face go beyond the simplicity's of going to a polling booth and voting. We had to go past that, to understanding what what taking responsibility for our own lives meant when we had the opportunity to do that. And a lot of people weren't prepared. 

5:55  
10 years later, almost exactly 10 years later, I was walking by, and I saw this sign saying, apartments for rent. So taking advantage of the serendipity of a moment. I just went up and I said, what have you got? And he showed me a suite. And I said, this is fine. And I signed right there on the spot.