Produced by Kit Hood and Linda Schuyler, the team behind the long-running Degrassi series of television shows,[2] Liberty Street was an attempt to create a similar series depicting the lives of a group of young adults living on their own for the first time.
[6] The show's characters included Mack Fischer (Joel Bissonnette), the superintendent of the building and a recovering drug addict; Frank Pagnozzi (Pat Mastroianni), the nephew of the building's owner; Janet Beecher (Kimberly Huie), a single mother and law student; Marsha Velasquez (Marcia Laskowski) and Nathan Jones (Billy Merasty), roommates who are also coworkers at a bike courier company where Nathan is having problems with their supervisor because he's gay; and Annie Hamer (Henriette Ivanans), Frank's ex-girlfriend.
The original pilot's cast had also included Gordon Michael Woolvett as Tony Foster, the owner of the building, and Stacie Mistysyn as River, who was renamed Annie in the series.
[4] In the second season, four new characters were added: Ben (Hamish McEwan), a civil servant; Cynthia (Nahanni Johnstone), a style-conscious woman with designs on marrying Frank; Lionel (Jim Codrington), Janet's ex-boyfriend; and James (Keith Knight), Nathan's new partner.
[8] The series received a $250,000 grant from the federal Ministry of Health to include health promotion messaging in the scripts, including Mack's addiction recovery, Marsha's struggle to quit smoking cigarettes,[9] and an anti-homophobia episode in which Nathan was gay-bashed.