When it first launched, Urbania magazine had a pretty useless Flash-based website that replicated selected content from its print magazine. I’m glad to see it has embraced the full potential of the web. 14 “channels” of video, images and text add a new, more dynamic aspect to the quarterly magazine. One of my favourite features is the Urbania Minutes series of videos: one-minute vignettes of Montreal life.
Above is L’exil, rue Sainte-Catherine Est, a brief portrait of a Chinese dépanneur deliveryman in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. Despite the annoying synopsis, which exoticizes Chinese immigrants (“En quête d’une vie meilleure, désireux d’offrir un avenir à leurs enfants, les ressortissants de l’Empire du milieu sont prêts à trimer dur pour réaliser leur rêve. Travailler 18 heures par jour dans une buanderie ou un dépanneur, ce n’est qu’une manière d’acheter sa liberté”), it’s a worthwhile glimpse into both immigrant life and the peculiar tradition of dep delivery, which has disappeared from other parts of the city.
Le métro de Montréal s’éveille, below, is one of those always-interesting behind-the-scenes looks at something we take for granted. We see the metro come to life in all of its antiquated glory, a 1960s flashback that begs to be seen as an old episode of Batman or something.
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 Canada 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.
This map of “The Isles of Montreal as they have been Survey’d By the French Engineers” was drawn in 1761, one year after the British conquest of New France. It depicts most of the Hochelaga Archipelago, including the walled town of Ville-Marie, or Montreal, which at the time was home to about 5,500 people living in 900 dwellings. Montreal was still quite rural in character, consisting mainly of two-storey houses with large gardens, and it was already spreading beyond its walls into the surrounding lands.
Even though this map takes a somewhat liberal interpretation of Montreal’s geography — the mountain does not extend nearly as far west as it would seem to indicate — what strikes me is how many of the island’s natural features have been suppressed over the course of its development. Entire streams, rivers and lakes have been completely done away with, including Otter Lake and the Rivière Saint-Pierre, which ran through the area now known as the Turcot Yards.
Such geographic alterations occurred in every major city. In Boston, they were quite dramatic. Whereas the city was practically an island for the first two centuries of its existence, landfill projects in the early nineteenth century transformed it into a much chunkier peninsula. Beacon Hill was carved up in order to provide the soil that was used to fill Back Bay and the South End.
Montreal developed as a geographically disparate patchwork of independent municipalities. Many of these old towns and suburbs were long ago absorbed into the city, but traces of their past character can still be seen in their streets.
Last week, Guillaume St-Jean wrote on Spacing Montreal about three one-storey buildings in Villeray that will be demolished for condos. Clad in brick, these kinds of flat-roofed brick houses were built mostly in the 1910s and 1920s in the neighbourhoods north of the CPR tracks, like Little Italy, Park Ex, Villeray and Youville (an old village in what is now northern Villeray and southern Ahuntsic). I’ve always found them funny because they look like triplexes missing their top floors.
In the east end, it’s not unusual to find another type of one-storey building: old woodframe cottages, many of them set well back from the street in contrast to the plexes that surround them. That’s the case on Joliette Street in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, where I spotted the two houses above. According to the city’s property bank, the green house was built in 1910. You wouldn’t know it from the vinyl siding.
I’m curious to know who built these houses and why. Were they too poor to invest in a full-fledged duplex or triplex, which were far more lucrative? Did they simply predate the mass development of plexes?
In a city with as many layers of history as Montreal, the demolition of a building usually entails the relevation of something else, like a ghost ad. I’ve written before about these old painted advertisements faded by time and the elements; they can be found in cities and towns right across North America and Europe, where the practice of painting advertisements on building sides was long ago usurped by billboards and other media. No matter how many I find in Montreal, though, there are always more lurking in tight corners, dark alleyways and, of course, behind brick walls.
Not too long ago I was walking down St. Denis Street when I noticed that the old building that housed L’Barouf had been completely demolished. (It caught fire in July and was badly damanged.) Behind the construction hoardings that separated its rubble from the street, I spotted the remnants of an old wall sign, mostly obscured by soot and debris. It’s pretty much illegible but a nice discovery nonetheless, just like the much more intact Lea & Perrins ad that was uncovered by another demolition on the Main. The owner of L’Barouf has vowed to rebuild as soon as possible, which means it won’t be long before this ad is hidden once again.
The old Coca-Cola ad on Ontario Street in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, near the corner of Valois, was never obscured by a building. In fact, judging by its use of Helvetica and the slogan “Coke, le vrai de vrai,” I would guess it was painted as recently as the early 1970s. (“Le vrai de vrai” is probably a translation of Coke’s 1969 slogan “It’s the real thing.”) Until recently, the ad loomed over a autobody shop, but the garage has been demolished and will soon be replaced by the Cours Valois, a three-storey apartment building. Like so many other painted wall advertisements in Montreal, this ghostly Coke ad will soon be entombed behind a brick wall.
In the end, though, that might actually be a good thing: there’s no better way to preserve a ghost ad than to protect it from sunlight, the rain and fresh air. If and when, decades from now, the Cours Valois is demolished, Montrealers will once again have another window into the past.
Poster advertising keytar legend “Gils” at Limoilou’s Pub Chez Jean
The image above summarizes my perception of Limoilou: a neighbourhood locked in time where mullets, keytars, and bikers rule. I don’t go there often, and when I do I always experience culture shock (but I suppose it also makes me laugh).
Largely planned and built in the early 20th century, Limoilou looks more like Montreal’s triplex neighbourhoods than any other part of Quebec City. Spiral staircases, tree-lined streets, and a “balconville” atmosphere reigns. Locals in Nordiques caps and short shorts drink Labatt Bleue on their balconies. It could almost be Rosemont/Petite Patrie or Hochelaga/Maisonneuve, but not quite.
In order to get a different perspective on the place, I asked my British friends Tom Welham and Judith Kirby why they live there. After circling the world a few times and cycling across Australia, Tom and Judith decided Limoilou was the best place on earth. They immigrated from England, bought a flat here, and intend to stay.
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.
This year, December in Montreal has been distinctly green, with few flakes to be seen, especially not on the twenty-fifth day of the month. It wasn’t much of a surprise, then, when I came across a snowman who was absolutely devastated by the lack of snow.
Montrealers have a particular fondness for tacky Christmas decorations: blinking lights, plastic raindeers, inflatable Santa Clauses that lord threateningly over the street from their third-floor perches. One evening I came across a reindeer doing things to a freakishly skinny Santa that are normally done behind closed doors. It’s like something you would find in a working-class suburb of Buffalo (or, at least, my own image of Buffalo, since I’ve never actually been there), except transplanted to a city where people have balconies, not front yards, which results in particularly dense and outrageous phantasmagoria.
The tacky holiday decorations even extend to Hanukkah: witness the menorah-mobile, which was parked on Park Avenue for all eight days.
Montreal Apartments