Underneath

Railroad viaduct, Griffintown

Highway 40, Villeray

Place d’Armes

Patte de porc

Boarded Up and Postered Over

Left, the Main between Duluth and Rachel in 1988; right, the former Laurier Cinema, now a bookstore, in 1988. Below, posters on a brick wall in 1996

Ginkgo / Silver Maple

Jarry Park, Park Extension, November 2nd, 2008

Pop Art

Posters for Pop Montreal, early October, in an alley near St. Viateur in Mile End

Cloud Cover

Scenes from around the Lachine Canal

Waiting for Customers

Through the window on St. Viateur Street

Underpass

Underpass in Ahuntsic

Back Doors

Various alleys in Montreal

Oblongs

Following My Father

My father was born in 1919 in a town near Manchester. His parents were both of Irish background, part of a wave of people who had migrated there to find work in the Lancashire mines and mills. He was an only child. By the time he was ten years old his mother had died and his father, for reasons that remain unknown, brought him to Montreal and left him with a relative of his wife’s, Margaret Ryan, and her daughter May. They hadn’t been in Canada long before my father joined their household, where he stayed until he married my mother in the late 1950s. Thomas McDonnell returned to England and never saw his son again.

When I found out that the Bibliothèque nationale had digitized Lovell’s street directories, a catalogue of Montreal residents and businesses from 1842 to 1999, I spent a few hours tracing where the Ryan household had lived in Montreal long before I was born. The directories functioned for many years much like a phone book: look up someone’s name and it gives you their occupation and a street address, although not a phone number.

I knew that the Ryans had lived in various rented premises over the years and recalled mentions of the street names and parishes. The directories made it easy to find out the exact addresses where my father had lived: 1720 Nicolet, from 1931 to 33; 4354 Fullum, in 1934; 4324 Messier, from 1935-41; 5973 Waverly, from 1942 to 50; and 5352 Park Avenue, from 1951 to 57. So I went to have a look.

More

Montreal East

Montreal East is a small separate city whose territory is mostly occupied by oil refineries and other industrial installations, some of which are objectively interesting as photographic subjects, whether by day or glittering with lights at night.

There’s always a tang of sulphur in the air from the hydrocarbon cracking. The streets are in poor shape and the sidewalks rudimentary: people mostly don’t walk here, they drive to and from work, and big tanker trucks chew up the roadbed. Even so, Wikipedia says 3,822 people lived here in 2006. There are still some overgrown lots, and plenty of wildflowers in nooks and crannies, and of course there are tracks for freight trains too.

Recent stats show that the refineries in east-end Montreal put out as much greenhouse gas as all its cars do, if not more. Some of it would be for heating oil, asphalt and other products, but most would be for diesel and gasoline.

Side Street

Probably Bélanger St. – somewhere just east of Saint-Hubert anyway. I was looking at those back stairs and these folks strolled into the frame.