The Evolution of McGill College Avenue

Yesterday, on Spacing Montreal, I wrote about several elegant synagogues that once graced the streets of downtown Montreal. One of them is the old Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, built in 1886 and destroyed sometime in the 1920s, which stood on McGill College Avenue near Sherbrooke. At the time, the surrounding neighbourhood, near the corner of McGill College and Sherbrooke, right next to McGill University, was an affluent mix of rowhouses and apartment buildings, not unlike Boston’s Back Bay.

In the 1960s, though, most of the area’s old urban fabric was destroyed by new development. Parking lots and office towers eliminated what little residential texture was left. You can see the process underway in the photos below, which were taken on Victoria Street in 1973 and 2007. The two remaining rowhouses on this downtown sidestreet had already been converted into commercial use; a parking lot stands in between them. Office towers, which were built as part of the business district’s post-Place Ville Marie expansion, loom behind.

In the early 1990s, the building housing Café André was replaced by an expanded McCord Museum. Not long before, in the late 1980s, the site of the former Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue was redeveloped with a glass office tower, part of an ambitious renovation that turned McGill College Avenue into something resembling a cross between a boulevard and an office park. It’s pleasant enough, especially on a warm day when outdoor cafés line its sidewalks, but it’s still one of the more anonymous parts of Montreal. Aside from a few lonely rowhouses, little remains in the area around McGill College that would suggest it was ever anything but a humdrum office district.

Photos by Guillaume St-Jean

Turn on the Red Light

The video screen of a silhouetted stripper was once a landmark at the corner of Ste. Catherine and the Main. It was a symbol of sorts for Montreal’s rapidly-dwindling red light district, a seedy neighbourhood of cheap bars, diners, peep shows juxtaposed with music venues, theatres and university buildings. It was about the only remarkable thing left on the building it occupied, a hideous, dilapidated, mostly-abandoned structure that was an eyesore even for a scuzzy part of town.

It’s a bit of a surprise to look at the above photos, compiled by Spacing Montreal’s Guillaume St-Jean, only to realize that that ugly building is in fact quite old. When it was built around the turn of the twentieth century, it was solid and elegant, if somewhat unremarkable. Over the course of a century it was brutalized to such an extent as to be all but unrecognizable, save for its distinctively narrow width.

Sometime next year, the building will make way for a landmark that represents a different kind of Montreal. The municipal government has expropriated the two properties at the corner of Ste. Catherine and the Main for a new cultural centre that will be called the Red Light. The name is an awfully cynical appropriation of the area’s often rough-and-tumble history (and I’m sure some might take offence at the way it glorifies the sex trade), but the building itself doesn’t seem too bad. That is, if we can get a clear idea of how it will turn out, because the renderings that have been released are not exactly detailed.

The Red Light will anchor the new Quartier des spectacles, an attempt to reinforce the arts-driven character of the east end of downtown. Last month, $120 million worth of public space improvements were announced, including the creation of new plazas and squares and the part-time pedestrianization of Ste. Catherine St. There’s plenty of things to be wary about in this plan, but as far as the Red Light is concerned, I can think of worse things to build at one of Montreal’s more infamous intersections.

Mile End’s Country Hotel

Mile End once had its very own country inn. There was a Mile End hotel and tavern as early as 1815, when one of its regulars, an English businessman and landowner named Stanley Bagg, made a number of references to it in some ads he placed in the Gazette.

It’s likely that the hotel you see above is a descendant of that early inn. Built in 1850 at the corner of what is now St. Laurent and Bernard, I like to imagine that it was one of those out-of-town spots where you could hitch your horse, get a beer and find a room for a night. Whoever built it must have been awfully grateful in 1882 when, less than a block from the hotel, the CPR built Mile End Station. Over the next couple of years, every train heading west to the Prairies passed through Mile End.

I know very little about the history of the hotel in the twentieth century, although its ground floor remained a tavern. Alas, as happens all too often, this unassuming but historically remarkable building burned down sometime in the 1990s. The top photo you see was taken around 1985; the bottom one in 2007. It would be nice if a longtime Mile End resident could share some information about this building.

(Incidentally, does anyone know why the lot has remained vacant for so long?)

The before-and-after photo was created, as usual, by Guillaume St-Jean. I’m happy to say that Guillaume has joined Spacing Montreal as a contributor, so be sure to check it out for regular dispatches from Montreal’s past.

Montreal from Above, 1930

It turns out that Natural Resources Canada has a fairly impressive collection of old aerial photographs. They’ve been kind enough to provide a few samples online; among those are some interesting shots of Montreal from above taken in 1930 and 1952.

The above photo shows the Jacques Cartier Bridge and Lafontaine Park at bottom and Windsor Station at top. In a way, it’s almost like a photographic version of that 1894 map I posted a couple of months ago: you can see how the city was knit together by development before being torn apart by the megaprojects, highways and road widenings of the 1960s. Just look at the area between Victoria Square and the two train stations near the top of the image: this part of town, so densely packed with buildings and crisscrossed by small streets and lanes, has essentially vanished.

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The Death and Life of Charlotte Street

Regular readers will know that Guillaume St-Jean is an exceptionally dedicated enthusiast of Montreal history. His growing collection of then-and-now photos is fascinating and informative. Often, the best ones look back not to the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries but to recent decades—the 1970s, 80s and 90s—which offer clues as to what we’ve done wrong and what we’ve done right in recent urban history.

A case in point is the above photo of an early nineteenth century cottage on Charlotte Street, an easily-overlooked downtown sidestreet near the corner of Ste. Catherine and St. Laurent. Sometime after 1985, when the top photo was taken, the house burned down and was never replaced.

Charlotte Street is in the midst of a neighbourhood that has been neglected for decades. It first developed in the eighteenth century as a faubourg strung along the old chemin Saint-Laurent. In the early twentieth century it became an important commercial district, but by the 1930s, it was better-known as Montreal’s red light district, a seedy, seething conglomeration of bars and brothels. Much of the neighbourhood was razed in the 1960s to build the Habitations Jeanne-Mance, a large public housing project in the typical Modernist mould.

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Expo’s Urban Legacy

A blogger named Pluche has compiled a fascinating collection of photos that documents the remains of Montreal’s Expo 67 site exactly forty years after the World’s Fair took place. Many consider it to be one of the most successful Expos in history; it was certainly well-attended, drawing more than 50 million visitors over six months, setting a record for World’s Fair attendance that still stands today. Most importantly, however, Expo 67 was a turning point in Montreal, Quebec and Canada’s history, a sort of debutante ball for all three.

For such an important event, one whose effects still linger today, it is remarkable how much of the actual Expo grounds have been wasted. The Expo site was created with dirt excavated for Montreal’s metro system, which was used to expand St. Helen’s Island and create an entirely new adjacent island in the St. Lawrence River. (The metro itself was built in preparation for the fair.) A metro stop and an elevated train, the latter now gone, linked the islands to the city. Today, St. Helen’s and the man-made Notre Dame Island are used for recreational purposes. Some of the old Expo pavillions remain, such as that of France, which has been converted into a casino, and that of the United States, a Buckminster Fuller-designed geodesic dome whose shell now houses a water museum. Others were destroyed and a few have been left in ruin. Many of the public spaces created for the Expo are also vacant.

The legacy of Expo 86 stands in contrast to that of its Montreal predecessor. Like Expo 67, Vancouver’s World’s Fair earned the city a rapid transit system and unprecedented international exposure, setting the stage for decades of international investment and, one could argue, a hugely influential wage of immigration from Hong Kong. Unlike Montreal, however, Vancouver’s Expo site was integrated into the city, built on a former railyard between downtown and False Creek. After the fair ended, British Columbia’s government sold the Expo land to the Hong Kong developer Li Ka Shing, who transformed it into a vast, mixed-use development that is now home to 20,000 people. This development was the catalyst for a new approach to urban design that is known in planning circles as the Vancouver Model.

Expo 86 set the stage for an urban revolution in Vancouver. Expo 67 might have revolutionized Montreal culture and politics but its impact on the city’s built form was negligible. For decades, its architectural heritage has been neglected. Will this change with Expo’s fortieth anniversary?

Then and Now #5: St. Urbain Triptych

This triptych, arranged by Guillaume St-Jean, pays three visits to St. Urbain Street as it descends the slope between Sherbrooke and Ontario streets. The first photo, taken in 1931, reveals a row of classic Victorian greystone houses. By the following year, however, the houses had given way to a new school. Sometime after WWII, the entire block was demolished for a large parking lot. Then, in 2004, the Université du Québec à Montréal expanded its science campus onto the lot.

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Then and Now #4: Mutilated in Mile End

When it was built in 1929, Reding Apartments was a building both beautiful and modest. Clad in greystone, its façade was embellished with playful etchings that depicted seashells, flowers and lots of swirly things. It was perfectly proportioned, a brilliant example of the solid Main Street architecture that was common on Montreal’s commercial streets in the first half of the twentieth century. Judging by the top photo, found by the brothers J.D. and Kristian Gravenor and posted on Coolopolis, Park Avenue was lined by such quietly elegant buildings.

Something went wrong after the war. The Reding Apartments’ façade was stripped and replaced with plain, ugly orange brick. All of the decoration was lost. Perhaps worst of all, new horizontal windows were installed that make the building appear squat, its ambitions crushed. The symmetry of the building’s original storefront was scrapped in favour of mismatched retail spaces topped by awful aluminum siding. The new restaurant on the right deserves credit for replacing the siding with a new stainless steel sign, but the wood terrace recently constructed out front looks like it belongs in a suburban backyard.

The buildings on either side of the Reding Apartments weren’t spared the devastation: both saw their ornamentation ripped off, presumably to give them a more “modern” appearance. The irony, of course, is that the buildings now look terribly cheap and dated. Nothing symbolizes the neglect of traditional main streets in the postwar era more than these misguided renovations.

Then and Now #3: The Concrete Chapel

Guillaume St-Jean, urban history buff extraordinaire, has pointed me towards some remarkable then-and-now photos. The Nazareth Institute, (visible in the top photo, taken around 1910) opened in 1861 as an orphanage and home for delinquent boys. At the time, Guillaume reports, the insitute’s chapel was affectionately known as les buisonnets or “the chapel of the bush” due to its location in a wooded area at the base of the Sherbrooke Street ridge. After a twentieth century stint as a commercial academy and then again as an orphanage, the old chapel was demolished to make way for Place des Arts, a large Modernist performing arts centre that opened in 1963.

As much as I appreciate Place des Arts (especially the terrace that opens onto Ste. Catherine Street, which was actually built in the early 90s), I’m sorry to say that the Nazareth Institute’s chapel didn’t make way for a grand concert hall or museum. No, it was replaced by a concrete tarmac that is currently used for about four weeks per year during the Jazz Festival and Francofolies. The tarmac is in fact a place-holder for a future addition to Place des Arts; the site now occupied by the Musée d’art contemporain was similarly vacant for thirty years. Eventually, a new concert hall for the Montreal Symphony Orchestra is supposed to be built there, which I suppose will be good considering the MSO’s revival under the leadership of conductor Kent Nagano.

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Then and Now #2: Gas Station

This image was created by Guillaume St-Jean, an urban planning student at the Université du Québec à Montréal who has been doing an admirable job of exploring Montreal’s history on Flickr. In the top photo, which was taken in 1929, you see the old Molson house at the corner of St. Laurent and Sherbrooke. It was built in the mid-nineteenth century when Sherbrooke Street marked the edge of the city. By the early twentieth century, though, St. Laurent had become a full-fledged commercial street. Sometime in the 1910s or 20s, when car ownership was still rare enough that it carried with it an air of privilege and distinction, the house was converted into a rather striking gas station.

Alas, as tends to happen all too frequently in Montreal, the house burned down in 1937—but the site retained its vocation as a gas station. The bottom photo reveals its current incarnation: a bland, unremarkable chunk of suburbia marooned at one of Montreal’s most prominent corners. To its credit, the retail portion of the gas station, which contains a depanneur and a Tim Horton’s, faces the corner of Milton and St. Laurent with a streetside entrance and a café terrace. But that doesn’t make up for its profound waste of space in such a bustling neighbourhood. Personally, I’ve always thought that the gas station site, which forms a neat square between Sherbrooke, Milton, Clark and St. Laurent, would make for a beautiful and well-located plaza.

Juifs, caodaistes et la Petite Italie

Entrée principale du Temple Caodaiste de Montréal

Le Temple Caodaiste de Montréal, ancienne Synagogue Poale Zedek, a une histoire qui remonte près d’un siècle. Cet édifice jaune vif se démarque des entrepots industriels ternes au coin de Saint-Urbain et Jean-Talon. Il témoigne d’une présence juive et vietnamienne dans un quartier traditionellement associé aux Italiens.

Lors de la construction de la synagogue Poale Zedek, qui commence en 1911, le quartier au nord de la voie ferrée CPR est tout jeune. Des immigrants provenant du sud de l’Italie s’y installent. Cet endroit peu habité avec ses grands terrains vagues avait sans doute l’allure de leurs campagnes natale. On pouvait cultiver son jardin et ses légumes tout en étant près des lieux de travail de l’ère industrielle.

Des Juifs s’installent également dans ce quartier. Ils sont un peu excentrés des grands bassins de population juives de l’époque, qui se trouvent majoritairement sur le Plateau Mont-Royal. Qui sont ces juifs de la «Petite Italie» ? Le nom de leur synagogue, signifiant «ouvriers pour la justice» , démontrent qu’ils sont de la même classe sociale que les ouvriers italiens. Ils travaillant dans les usines ou pour le CPR. Le nom de la synagogue laisse également entendre des affiliations socialistes ou communistes.

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Then and Now #1: The Windsor Hotel

In the top photo, taken in August 1936, the grand Windsor Hotel sits at the corner of Peel and Dorchester in downtown Montreal. By 2004, at the same corner (Dorchester now renamed René-Lévesque), the Windsor Hotel was no more, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce tower rising in its place.

The major part of the hotel burned down just before New Year’s Day 50 years ago, and was replaced by the starkly modern CIBC tower, finished in 1962. Only the annex survived, visible beyond the CIBC tower; it has since been converted into high-priced retail and office spaces.

1936 photo: Ville de Montréal. Gestion des documents et archives.
Newspaper clipping from the Montreal Gazette, December 31, 1957.