Montreal’s Lost Rivers

In Montreal, “river” usually means one of two things: the all-important St. Lawrence River, godlike in its power and presence, and the Rivière des Prairies, whose lazy nature is perhaps better reflected in its informal English name, the Back River. Before it was urbanized, however, Montreal Island was covered with creeks and rivers. Some have disappeared altogether, but many still exist, entombed in stone and concrete well beneath the city surface.

Andrew Emond, who first made his mark with well-seen photographs of abandoned buildings in Toronto and Montreal, recently embarked upon a quest to explore subterranean Montreal. His new blog, Under Montreal, is not only visually striking, it’s well-written and well-researched, with some fascinating entries on the city’s lost rivers. “Charting the evolution of the island’s creeks can often be a daunting task,” he writes. “Older maps from the early 1800s show only approximate paths with many minor creeks apparently deemed unworthy of inclusion. By the time more detailed maps started to emerge around 1820, we see that many of these watercourses had already started to disappear.”

Barely any traces remain. There’s a small stretch of creek—the ruisseau Provost, or Springrove Creek—remaining in an Outremont park, but that’s about it. “Even the twin ponds of Parc Lafontaine whose curves take the approximate shape of the creek that once passed through Logan’s Farm are concrete-lined fabrications,” writes Emond. To find what’s left of Montreal’s lost rivers, you have to go underground, which is exactly what Emond has done. Read about his exploration of the underground network of sewers and streams that make of the remnants of the Rivière Saint-Pierre.

Victoria Harbour in 1915

When I look at old maps of Montreal, I marvel at how entire neighbourhoods have vanished and streets renamed. What’s interesting about old maps of Hong Kong, by contrast, isn’t what has disappeared, but what has appeared. The above map, which dates back to 1915, is recognizable in its depiction of Hong Kong, Kowloon and Victoria Harbour, but upon closer examination, you you realize just how the shape of the city has changed since then.

On the Hong Kong side of the harbour, Causeway Bay is just that — a bay — and most of present-day Wan Chai still hasn’t been reclaimed from the harbour. Kowloon side, the changes are even more dramatic. Hung Hom is separated from Tsim Sha Tsui by a bay that has since been filled it; looking at Hung Hom’s position on the shore gives you an idea of why this older neighbourhood exists in the first place. Similarly, it’s interesting to see now-landlocked Yau Ma Tei as a waterfront district.

Perhaps the most revealing thing about this map, though, is the way it demonstrates how harbour reclamation was already well underway by 1915. Causeway Bay and most of the Kowloon waterfront had already been dramatically reshaped by landfill. Connaught Road, running west from Admiralty to Sai Ying Pun, was once a waterfront promenade, but it became an inland road in 1889 when the adjacent water was filled. That wasn’t Hong Kong’s first major reclamation project; a few decades earlier, the waterfront ran along present-day Des Voeux Road.

The Isles of Montreal

Today, Montreal Island tends to exist in opposition to everything around it. “On-island” is code for diversity, cosmopolitanism, multilingualism, urbanity. “Off-island” means suburban, homogeneous, unilingual. Those are gross stereotypes, obviously, and while there is a grain of truth to them, they ignore the more complicated reality of metropolitan Montreal. They also ignore just how vast the Île de Montréal really is: 55 kilometres long and, at its widest point, more than 15 kilometres across. This is no Manhattan: all of the extremes of Greater Montreal are found right on the island itself.

The above map dates back to 1760, when the British first conquered Montreal. At that point, it was a lush and sparsely-populated isle, home to nine tiny villages and one cloistered town, Ville-Marie, that would soon evolve into the modern-day city. For the inhabitants of Ville-Marie the island must have seemed enormous, a vast land surrounded on all sides by equally vast bodies of water. I think this is reflected in many ways by the map, which exaggerates many of Montreal’s geographical features: Mount Royal is made to look about twice the size it actually is and it is particularly generous in its rendition of the islands in the Rivière des Milles-Îles.

Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Montreal set out to conquer its geography, a process that has culminated in the rather tame landscape we inhabit today. Numerous streams and small rivers were covered, not to mention the entirety of Lake St. Pierre, and an entirely new island was created in the middle of the St. Lawrence. None of this compares to the massive landfill projects that transformed Boston from a virtual island to a rather chunky peninsula, but it’s still pretty remarkable nonetheless.

Montreal and its Suburbs… in 1843

Way back in 1843, Montreal, population 50,000, was big enough to have six whole suburbs to its name. On the west, there was the Recollet Suburb, St. Ann’s Suburb, St. Joseph’s Suburb and the St. Antoine Suburb. On the north, the St. Lawrence Suburb followed the path of St. Lawrence Street, already the city’s main north-south axis. To the east, finally, was the Quebec Suburb, strung along St. Mary Street, the eastern extension of Notre Dame and the main road down river to Quebec City.

Traces of these old extra-muros neighbourhoods are still visible — to an extent. In the early 1970s, nearly all of the Faubourg Québec, commonly known as the Faubourg à m’lasse, thanks to the pervasive odour of molasses from one of its sugar refineries, was demolished for the Maison Radio-Canada, a vast complex home to the Canadian Broadcast Corporation. Around the same time, most of the rest of it was razed for the east end of the Ville-Marie Expressway. Since the late 1990s, what was left has been redeveloped as a residential area known, naturally enough, as the Faubourg Québec. Wholly uninspired in its architecture and design, one of the only remarkable aspects is a reconstructed viaduct and a small plaza that retraces the old rail line that once ran through the area.

Now, a large part of the old Quebec Suburb is set to be transformed into a high-density, mixed-used neighbourhood centered around the old Viger Station, the Canadian Pacific Railway’s first railroad station/hotel combo. Nearby, the giant CHUM hospital complex is set to be built on the remains of the old neighbourhood that emerged on lower St. Denis after a fire devastated most of the Quebec and St. Lawrence suburbs in 1852. Among the buildings slated to be demolished is the St. Sauveur Church, one of the first buildings to emerge after the fire.

Across town, meanwhile, in the remains of the old St. Ann’s Suburb, better known as Griffintown, the stage is being set for an even more massive redevelopment. Today, details were announced for a $1.3 billion retail, residential, office and entertainment district that will contain at least 3,800 housing units, a theatre, a cinema, office space, two hotels, plenty of retail, a tramway connection to downtown, new parks and plenty of parking.

This area was already decimated in the 1960s and 70s, when much of its old industry and housing stock was demolished, as well as St. Ann’s Church, the focus of its large Irish community, so this redevelopment is almost working with a blank slate. At least it will respect the area’s existing street pattern and incorporate many of its surviving historic structures. It looks like, in both east and west, Montreal’s first suburbs are being remade once again — hopefully this time with a bit more sensitivity than before.

Riding the Rails in 1941

Considering the mayor’s enthusiasm over bringing back tramways to Montreal—the city’s new transport plan, unveiled yesterday, proposed three new lines that will be built over the next several years—I thought it would be fun to take a look at this old tramway route map from 1941. What I find most fascinating is the way it’s possible to tell, from looking at where the streetcars go, why neighbourhoods and commercial districts developed as they did.

As in pretty much any other city, Montreal’s tramway network funnelled streetcars into major streets and transit hubs. Often, important business districts sprung up around those hubs. Five streetcar routes and one bus line met near the corner of Queen Mary Road and Decarie Boulevard at what was called the Snowdon Junction. It’s easy to see why Snowdon became the west end’s downtown, a bustling neighbourhood of bulky apartment blocks and landmarks like the Snowdon Theatre and a Reitmans department store. Nearby, a commercial district arose where the number 3A streetcar travelled along Monkland Avenue, before turning onto Grand Boulevard and heading up to Somerled Avenue. Even today, nearly half a century after the last streetcar was removed from service, the Monkland retail strip ends abruptly at Grand.

Although some of today’s buses follow the same routes as the long-gone tramways, the opening of metro lines in the 1960s and 70s was accompanied by a drastic reconfiguration of Montreal’s transit system. Streets once served by several streetcar and bus lines, like Notre Dame in St. Henri, became marginalized as their transit connections were removed. It didn’t help that some metro stations were located far away from traditional main streets, as is the case in Hochelaga, where the metro is a good seven-minute walk from Ontario Street.

Thanks to Marc Dufour for the tramway route map.

Tourists Lost on Three Continents

Boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris

Finding Your Way in 1894

I was one of those kids who decorated his room with National Geographic maps. I am still fascinated by them—especially by old maps. Take the above, for example. This 1894 map of Montreal (click on it to see the full version) is a guide to a city that is at once familiar and strikingly, surprisingly, foreign.

What stands out most are all of the places that no longer exist. The whole lower town has changed enormously; look at how seamlessly it flowed into the areas now known as downtown and Old Montreal. Today, this part of the city is strangled by expressways, its landmarks erased: Bonaventure Station, Chaboillez Square, Haymarket Square.

What is also fascinating is how the toponymy has changed. The streets bordering St. Louis Square were known as Ernest Street and Albina Street; what happened to these names? Sometime after 1894, the name of Mitchison Street was changed to Clark Street, Shuter Street and Oxenden Avenue were merged into Aylmer Street and Madison Avenue became Hutchison Street. Peel Street below Dorchester used to be named Windsor, which explains how Windsor Station got its name.

There is one thing about this map that leaves me scratching my head: it would seem that today’s Duluth Street used to be called Brébeouf Street; the current Brébeuf Street was once named Duluth Street. Did they swap names and lose the o?

Mapping the City — But Whose?

Navigating urban worlds, New York

According to British novelist Will Self, “people don’t know where they are anymore.” The “student of psycho-geography” was recently chronicled walking from JFK Airport in Queens to his hotel in Lower Manhattan, an apparently perilous journey involving the traversing of a sidewalk-less overpass at night and being tailed by a suspicious black SUV in a rather desolate portion of the outer boroughs. What is Self after? “In the post-industrial age, this is the only form of real exploration left,” he claims. “Anyone can go and see the Ituri pygmy, but how many people have walked all the way from the airport to the city?”

I once heard a professor of physics claim that one could not really experience travel unless one’s feet literally hit the pavement and one could stop and observe every little oddity passed or occurrence transpired along the way. For reasons I can’t seem to remember, he also claimed that, setting out from New York, the average pedestrian could get no further than New Haven walking continuously. This, he noted, was the greatest distance within which humans could truly embrace the true nature of the terrain they passed through; longer distances, and swifter conveyances, would ultimately distort one’s impression of passing towns and fields to some degree. Relativity results in blurred and refracted images of passed-through places; their topography cannot be internalised. Self refers to this problem as one of “windscreen-based virtuality.”

Along with Self and the discipline of physics, it has been a number of French thinkers, particularly the existentialists, who have attempted to define what such internalisation means. Michel de Certeau famously wrote of subjective self-impression’s capacity to “appropriate” the city’s terrain for oneself even in the face of the most totalitarian attempts at planning. Memories, he writes, create a sort of personal geography which can be grafted atop the sort Corbusian rationalising schemes imposed from city leaders on high. In this sense, appropriation, and by extension internalisation, becomes a template for personal freedom and agency.

Appropriation, however, holds an inherent double meaning. Where there are no demigods dwelling in the clouds of the city planning office, such rhetoric implies less of an insurgency and necessitates more consideration of its diametric consequence: loss.

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