The Learning Annex is an American education company based in New York City. It was founded in 1980 by Bill Zanker in his New York City studio apartment with a $5,000 investment.
It is hard to exactly recapture the zeitgeist of that era, but in 1984, I moved to The Bain Apartments Co-operative Inc., the oldest housing co-op in Toronto, located at 100 Bain Ave. in the Riverdale area of Toronto, where it provides affordable housing to mixed income people. Our neighbourhood was a rectangle formed, give or take a few blocks, by Broadview Avenue in the west, Danforth Avenue in the north, Withrow Park in the east, and Gerrard Street in the south. My good friend, Ron Graham, from university days a few years earlier at Trent University, who has lived in Vancouver for more than three decades now, lived around the corner on Logan Avenue near Withrow Park at the time.
It is easy to poke fun at Toronto’s sense of self-importance; we did it more than 40 years ago. But truth be told, the Riverdale, Broadview/Danforth area was one of the most beautiful areas I’ve lived in anywhere, including lots of small cities and towns in Canada and the United States, as well as larger cities such as Ottawa, Halifax, Boston, and Durham, North Carolina.
In 1984, I was writing for Ontario Lawyers Weekly, and perhaps as close as I’d ever come to being a “young urban professional,” albeit minus the money and upward-mobility, as this was still journalism after all.
A big part of the mid-1980s’ zeitgeist was self improvement: mind, body and soul. The Learning Annex, with its ubiquitous street boxes, filled an important niche, providing continuing adult education for all kinds of general interest and hobby courses and workshops, often in the evening or over a two-day weekend. If you wanted to learn about tax planning strategies or how to deal with stress, for instance, The Learning Annex likely had a seminar on the subject. While I took several offerings in the autumn of 1984, the one I recall best was a bicycle repair workshop weekend at a bike shop, the name of which I’ve long forgotten, on King Street. I think I still recall it best because I was a pretty unlikely participant. I have been an avid cyclist for most of my life; avid bike repair guy, not so much. From 2007 to 2014, Ian Graham, then sports editor of the Thompson Citizen (now editor), was my go-to-bike repair guy. I’d grab a few Allen keys at home, and deliver my bicycle to the newspaper’s abandoned pressroom at the back of the building on Commercial Place for Ian to work his magic in about 30 seconds on my latest handlebar fiasco. These days, my bike gets dropped off at Doug’s Source for Sports as needed.
Zeitgeists change, of course. While The Learning Annex still exists as a shell of its former self in some larger American cities, it decamped from Toronto some 15 years ago in 2007.
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