The Resurrection of Mile End
Mile End Station, built in 1878, rebuilt in 1911 and demolished in 1936
The name Mile End might now be associated with Montreal’s trendiest neighbourhood (a distinction that will surely move elsewhere in a few years), but three decades ago, it was in danger of extinction. Though the area north of Mount Royal Avenue was known as Mile End in the first half-century of its development, it became an anachronism after World War II, used only by old-timers and by newspaper journalists who had to explain its past significance.
I was reminded of this when I was browsing through the Gazette’s archives, which were recently digitized and made available by Google News. In a trivia column published on March 15, 1969, a resident of Mount Royal Avenue named Edward McElligott asks about the origin of Mile End’s name, noting that “though few English-speaking people today know much of it, both English-speaking and French-speaking folks of years ago knew it well.
I’ve never seen a map showing the actual boundaries, if there was such a thing. And what is the meaning of the name?
To us, as children, it always seemed to indicate the area bounded by Sanguinet Street (now Henri Julien) west to the Main (St. Laurent); and from Mount Royal Avenue up to the old CPR hotel on the east side of Bernard at the Main.
To English-speaking folks of St. Giles Church or St. Michael’s Church the words ‘the Annex’ were applied to that fine section of Clark Street west to, I think, Park Avenue. Every space had a very nice house, all with gardens, trees, etc. at the front, and old Fairmount School was in the middle of it. That section had a large portion of English-speaking residents.
The French-Canadians seem to keep the name Mile End alive even today. Up at St. Lawrence and Beaubien Streets is a clothing store of that name. Up off Jean Talon Street, east of Park, is a little street still called Mile End.
To us of years ago the French Roman Catholic Church of “Enfant Jésus” on St. Dominique Street, looking across little Lahaie Park between Laurier and St. Joseph Boulevard, was always called “Mile End Church.”
The Gazette’s writer comes up with a rather pat answer: the name Mile End comes from the old Mile End racetrack, which was located in the area between Mount Royal Avenue, Mentana Street, Berri Street and St. Joseph Boulevard, “exactly one mile north of the boundary of Montreal” at present-day Bagg Street. According to the writer, the racetrack’s name came to be adopted for the whole area after the village of Saint-Louis-du-Mile-End was founded in 1878.
Unfortunately, this can’t possibly be true, because the name Mile End was in use as early as 1815, when the Bagg family owned the Mile End Hotel and Tavern, which was probably located at the present-day corner of St. Laurent and Bernard. The CPR opened Mile End Station near that intersection in 1878. Chances are, Mile End’s name was inspired in some way or another by the much older London suburb of Mile End. (There’s also a Mile End in Adelaide.)
Whatever its origins, the name Mile End was quickly being forgotten in the 1960s and 70s. At the time, the area around Park Avenue was an overlooked neighbourhood of immigrant Greeks; in 1971, according to another article in the Gazette, its unemployment rate was 35 percent and the average annual income was $3,200, or $17,388 in today’s dollars.
The decline in use was reversed in 1978, when the name Mile End was revived and given to a new municipal electoral district. Though Mile End historically referred to the entire area from Mount Royal Avenue up to Jarry Park, the electoral district stops at the CPR tracks, effectively defining the boundaries of the present-day neighbourhood. The name was further enshrined in the Mile End Library, which opened on Park Avenue in 1984.
These two official acts seem to have set the stage for an even more broad-based revival of the name Mile End, which gradually began finding its way back into the names of businesses and community organizations. This trend seems inextricably linked with the neighbourhood’s gradual gentrification, which began in the 1980s but really only started in earnest in the late 1990s and 2000s, when academics and journalists began lavishing it with attention. Reclaiming the name Mile End was a way to establish an identity in a gentrifying neighbourhood that had become fairly anonymous — at least to outsiders — during the days of its economic marginalization.
A somewhat ironic footnote to this story is that in 1902, the Bagg family enshrined the area’s name in Mile End Street as a way to ensure its posterity — but since the coverage of the Mile End electoral district in 1978 was limited to the area south of the CPR tracks, Mile End Street is now well north of present-day Mile End.
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Tags: Mile End, Montreal, Toponymy
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slutsky says:
Haha I found that same column. Mile End was one of the first things I looked up (after my own name, of course…)
December 27th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Christopher Szabla says:
So what was the area known as before 1978?
December 27th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
Kate M. says:
For a long time it wasn’t called anything special. My dad lived there in the 1940s and never referred to living in Mile End, just to “when we lived on Waverly” and so on. I don’t think it was felt to be anything definable – it was central Montreal, you lived near Park Avenue, and that was that.
December 28th, 2009 at 12:18 am
Christopher DeWolf says:
From what I can tell, it didn’t have much of a neighbourhood identity. The streets were more important: you lived on Park Avenue, or Waverly, or Fairmount. My dad lived in Montreal in the 60s and 70s and never heard of Mile End, and the same is true for my other relatives and family friends who grew up in Montreal and left in the 70s or 80s.
Even in the 1990s it doesn’t seem to have been as widely-used as it is today. Back at the height of the Plateau’s trendiness, it seemed to include just about everything below Fairmount; the rest of Mile End was known by real estate agents as “Outremont-adjacent.”
Until the late 1990s, most news stories about Mile End focused on poverty; the narrative changed around 2002 or 2003, after the Plateau had become saturated with media attention and the taste-makers broadened their gaze. Now the neighbourhood seems to occupy as much cultural and psychological space as it does geographic.
December 28th, 2009 at 12:23 am
Alain says:
In the 60’s I went to primary school on the corner of St-Dominique and St-Joseph, adjacent to the ‘mile-end church’ refered to in the article. Its official name was ‘Jardin de l’enfance St-Enfant-Jesus’ but I’ve always heard it called the mile-end school or something with mile-end in it. I remembered we were sent by the nuns to give baskets of food in the weeks before christmas. The poverty of those lugubrious and dark interiors left a durable impression on a young mind used to the bright bungalows of the 60’s.
December 28th, 2009 at 8:25 pm