[URBAN NOTE] The Binary Cafe
Oct. 8th, 2007 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldToday, a poster in the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
toronto community on Livejournal made a brief post that linked to memorial site for Toronto's first internet cafe, the "Binary Cafe and Hexadecimal Emporium," located on the second floor of 502 Yonge Street. As Jon, the memorial site's author, makes clear in a well-written and photograph-laden website, this internet cafe was very much an experiment; one contemporary review by K.K. Campbell seems to capture the ethos superbly.
Unfortunately for the Binary Cafe, the business wasn't self-sustaining and folded after just six months of operation, leaving the author of 1995 guide to proclaim with horror that the Binary Cafe's former location has been "turned into a Shiatsu parlour !" (The ground floor of 502 Yonge Street is now, as it has been for some time, the address of gay bar Sneakers, home to "Pool, bingo, pinball, and boys!") Still, the Binary Cafe's ineradicable electronic spoor remains for the interested.
toronto community on Livejournal made a brief post that linked to memorial site for Toronto's first internet cafe, the "Binary Cafe and Hexadecimal Emporium," located on the second floor of 502 Yonge Street. As Jon, the memorial site's author, makes clear in a well-written and photograph-laden website, this internet cafe was very much an experiment; one contemporary review by K.K. Campbell seems to capture the ethos superbly.I cross the second threshold and enter Binary Cafe space. Small. Jazz plays. A handful of tables are scattered by two windows overlooking Yonge, at which humanoids yap. On the far wall, three computers (two PCs and a Mac). A hardcore fat-boy gamer sits at one, a downtown-ish looking fellow is cruising the Internet on the Mac, a game of DOOM beckons on the unoccupied third. A diverse collection of Torontonians, to be sure, but all clearly off the mainstream track, no suit-and-tie UNIX yuppies.
I scrutinize the old walls for writing. Plenty of curious literature here, true anarchist evening entertainment -- journals of hard science, skeptics guides, Loompanics shit, 2600, Iron Feather Journal and other underground delights. I love this kind of shit. (There's also .tiff (tiff@io.org), an attitudinal net.savy Toronto publication worth scanning.)
A little kitchenette dominates the centre of this converted residential flat. The sink has freshly washed dishes drip-drying in one of them dish racks circa the Cleaver household 1958 (or any installment of Wombat -- actually, Wombat would have a blast at the Binary).
No alcohol. Lots of caffeine -- coffee or stacks of Jolt cola. Cyberspace abhors booze, adores the caffeine jag. Cigs if you want. Holographic chocolates. Prepared sandwiches.
Unfortunately for the Binary Cafe, the business wasn't self-sustaining and folded after just six months of operation, leaving the author of 1995 guide to proclaim with horror that the Binary Cafe's former location has been "turned into a Shiatsu parlour !" (The ground floor of 502 Yonge Street is now, as it has been for some time, the address of gay bar Sneakers, home to "Pool, bingo, pinball, and boys!") Still, the Binary Cafe's ineradicable electronic spoor remains for the interested.
