Past Lives on Milton Street
I’ve always loved this house on Milton Street, between Ste. Famille and Jeanne Mance, in Montreal’s McGill Ghetto. For awhile, I used to eat breakfast across the street at Milton Place, a greasy spoon, and wonder what it would be like to live there.
I’ll probably never know, but at least I can find out who did. According to the city’s property records and Lovell’s Directory, the house was built in 1900 by John Greig and his wife Janet. John was a “commercial traveller” (a euphemism for door-to-door salesman?), which must have been a pretty good job because he and Janet stayed put in their house until 1942.
After that, a procession of different people occupied the house. The last Lovell’s directory, issued in 1976, reported that it was home to R. Minard and David Brant Reid.
One block west on Milton is another interesting house. It looks like it was converted, at some point in its history, into an apartment building. Its main entrance was bricked over and a new one was built on the west side of the building.
The city, strangely enough, has no record of this building’s address, but it was probably built sometime around 1900. Its early residents, like most of those on Milton Street and in the surrounding neighbourhood, were probably middle-class WASPs. In 1904, for instance, nearly all of Milton’s residents had Anglo-Saxon names, except for a few French-Canadians and a handful of Chinese families.
Montreal Apartments
slutsky says:
Haha I used to eat at Place Milton every day when I went to McGill (I even remember when it was just a little diner). Always wondered about that place too.
January 4th, 2008 at 12:18 am
BobR says:
Thanks for the interesting piece, in particular the pointer to Lovell’s directory. Does checking city’s historical property records require a trip to the office at Bluery and Kennedy?
January 9th, 2008 at 9:36 am
Blork says:
Wow, that Greig house has always been one of my favorite little houses in Montreal. I’ve been wondering about it for more than 20 years, most recently just last week when I was having breakfast at Place Milton.
January 9th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
Christopher DeWolf says:
Bob, the city’s property records can also be accessed online:
http://evalweb.cum.qc.ca/
January 9th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
Stephen says:
Re: Second house. Sometimes its hard to pinpoint an exact address on older properties, because the city changed its numbering system a few times in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, to accomadate for the growth of the city and the increasing number of buildings. Most of the city’s addresses changed about 1928. I find that if you open Lovell’s for 1927 and 1928 and compare the residents it helps when trying to pin down the address of a particular property.
January 24th, 2008 at 12:19 am