July 16th, 2011
“No, I told you, you can’t go upstairs if you’re not a guest,” the teenage hotel desk clerk scowled at my camera.
Just then, a portly middle-aged man waddled up to the counter and interrupted me, “How much for a room for 3 hours?” Her suspicious eyes not leaving me, the desk clerk pointed to a board on the wall which indicated day and overnight rates.
As the man contemplated, I noted his lady friend seated on the couch, her long legs encased in a mini-skirt, examining her fingernails. Without missing a beat, he grunted, “I’ll take the small room.”
I couldn’t resist a quiet laugh. So there I was, in the tiny lobby of a budget inn watching a man preparing for some afternoon delight, in what was a former Seventh-day Adventist Church (沪北会堂).
It was hard to miss this handsome red-bricked building along Wujing Lu (武进路), close to Wusong Lu (吴淞路), with its Gothic-inspired equilateral arches yet built in a manner reminiscent of its times. It was the first church built by the Seventh-day Adventist in Shanghai in 1905 and later expanded in 1924 to its present two-storey, Settlement design.
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November 24th, 2010
“Sauvons l’église Saint-Sauveur!” I wrote three years ago on Spacing Montreal. And for three years, it seemed vaguely possible that the 145-year-old church on lower Saint-Denis Street wouldn’t be demolished. The huge hospital for which it was supposed to make way, the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montreal (CHUM), has been stalled for years, and for awhile it would have been reasonable to guess that it would eventually crawl into the back room where tired, abandoned Montreal megaprojects go to die.
Alas, that wasn’t the case. Kristian Gravenor broke the news in yesterday’s Gazette that Montreal’s city council has issued a demolition permit for the church, which has sat empty and abandoned for years. It isn’t in the best shape — its prized stained glass windows, designed by the renowned Guido Nincheri, were stolen in 2006 — but its bones are strong. More importantly, it remains a testament to the city’s history.
Saint-Sauveur was built thirteen years after a fire swept through the Faubourg Saint-Laurent in 1852, its greystone façade, neo-Gothic architecture and tin steeple a testament to the fashion of the era. In the beginning, it was actually an Anglican church named Holy Trinity. It didn’t become Catholic until the 1920s, when Holy Trinity moved west to NDG and the church was sold to a Syrian congregation.
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April 13th, 2008
Over the years I’ve heard people surmise it to be a temple, a mosque, an Orthodox church, even a synagogue. Familiar sight though it is in central Montreal, the first thing the huge domed building at Saint-Urbain and Saint-Viateur brings to mind is not the Roman Catholic church.
At the turn of the last century there was something of a migration of Irish-Canadian working people from their overcrowded Point St. Charles and Griffintown haunts north into Mile End. In 1902, the Catholic archbishop of Montreal, Mgr. Paul Bruchési, gave his approval for a new parish to be created. The first mass was said upstairs of a fire hall at Laurier and Saint-Denis that no longer exists. Their first small church building was on rue Boucher near there; it no longer exists either.
By 1914 the growing parish decided it needed something bigger and grander. In July of that year excavations began. Work stopped briefly when war broke out that autumn, but resumed in April 1915, and the church was ready to use by that December. The price tag was $232,000 and the church could hold 1400 people.
This information comes from a booklet published in 1927 when the parish was already 25 years old. The text describes, and images show, that the dome and the cap on the tower were both decorated with patterns, and the massive façade with the words Deo dicatum in honorem St. Michaeli and a smaller motto on a banner over the doors. Those flourishes are gone, but carved shamrocks are still part of the façade, a nod to the time when the parish was pretty well a monoculture, with priests called McGinnis, Fahey, McCrory, Walsh, O’Brien, Cooney and O’Conor and church wardens Keegan, Gorman, Dillon, McGee and Flood.
Also, unusually, there’s no mention of bells, and no evidence that the tower ever contained any: unlike most church towers it’s closed all the way to the top.
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March 30th, 2007
Today, the corner of University and La Gauchetière is as cold and forboding an intersection as you are likely to find in Montreal, bordered on all sides by charmless office towers. In 1945, however, as this photo shows, the corner provided a spectacular cutaway view of three remarkable buildings. Each represents a different facet of Montreal’s history.
On the far left, the St. James Cathedral (now dedicated to Mary, Queen of the World) was commissioned by Monseigneur Ignace Bourget, the Bishop of Montreal, shortly after the city’s previous cathedral was destroyed by fire in 1852. Bourget was an ambitious man, an ultramontanist who believed firmly in the supremacy of the Catholic Church over life in Quebec. It made sense, then, that he decreed that the new cathedral would be built in the Golden Square Mile, Montreal’s bastion of Anglo-Protestant privilege, where more than three-quarters of Canada’s wealth was concentrated. Bourget was making a political statement, using geography to assert the power of the church.
By the time it was completed, in 1894, its copper dome could seen from throughout Montreal. It remained unchallenged until 1931, when an even more impressive temple to another religion—commerce—was erected across the street.
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