August 16th, 2009
My first experience of urban exploration came thanks to an abandoned steel foundry on St. Ambroise St. in St. Henri, on which there was still a piece of 1995 referendum-era graffiti urging us to vote “Oui.” My girlfriend and I walked around the building, exploring some of the more easily accessible areas on the ground floor.
Just as we were about to leave, two kids from the neighbourhood came up to us. “Do you want to see something cool?” they asked. We followed them to a steel garage door that had been pried open, squeezing ourselves underneath and into a dark building.
The boys ran up a staircase to the left. Upstairs was a large room, brightly lit by the setting sun, filled with huge piles of debris, toilets and empty bottles. “GOGGLE AREA,” read a sign hanging crookedly from the ceiling. “Wear your safety goggles. Portez vos lunettes de sûreté.” As I looked around, flipping through the pages of 1980s fashion magazines that were sitting in a pile on the floor, the two boys started picking up bottles and smashing them on the ground.
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August 2nd, 2008
“It’s not much of a park,” said Jocelyne, a middle-aged woman sitting on a bench in St. Henri, gesturing to the small green space behind her.
“It’s okay, but you can’t call it a park because it really isn’t one. There’s no place to wander, nowhere for kids to play. It’s just two benches and a bus stop.”
Nonetheless, the small parcel of land at the corner of Notre Dame and Rose de Lima Sts. is indeed a park, and one whose name — the Parc du Bonheur d’occasion — carries far more heft than its 263-square-metre area. With a handful of trees, an attractive stone path, two benches and a bus shelter, this tiny park is one of the smallest in Montreal.
“It came into being on Nov. 30, 1994, as part of an operation by the city that gave names to a lot of other small parks in the area,” explained Dominic Duford, an urban planner for the city. “Thirteen parks were named in St. Henri on the same day, like the Parc des Hommes Forts or the Parc des Cordonniers. They’re all names that reflect the history of the area.”
Bonheur d’occasion, known as the Tin Flute in English, is the title of Gabrielle Roy’s groundbreaking 1945 novel about working-class life in St. Henri. Its stark yet compassionate realism was a revelation in a city that had long overlooked the dire conditions in which many of its citizens lived. Some even claim that Roy’s book helped inspire the social reforms of 1960s Quiet Revolution.
For such an important work, the Parc du Bonheur d’occasion might seem a somewhat underwhelming tribute. In fact, until two years ago, the park stood adjacent to a vacant lot, and the position of its sign gave the impression that the park was actually the weedy, trash-strewn terrain next door. Eventually, however, a a three-storey building with retail shops and apartments was built on the lot, giving the city the opportunity to rebuild the park.
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September 18th, 2007
Even now, 40 years after Bill 101 mandated that Montreal conduct its official business in French only, it is not uncommon to find old English or bilingual public signs. While some ideologues might consider this a bad thing, I’m inclined to view it as a window into Montreal’s past, and a fascinating one at that.
I’ve written about Montreal’s street signs before — you can find my photos and articles listed under the Signage category — but I’m still finding plenty of nice examples of old or unusual street signs.
The Ste. Catherine St. sign pictured above is particularly interesting because it does not seem to conform to any street sign standard, linguistic or otherwise. Found in Westmount, it is written “St-Catherine St.,” using the English abbreviation of “saint,” but with a French hyphen instead of an English period. It is also unusual in that it contain an English generic (“street”) whereas most Westmount signs omit the generic altogether.
Below is the corner of “Rue Rose-de-Lima” and “Workman St.” in St. Henri. It’s a nice example of the old tradition of using a French generic for French street names and an English generic for English names.
October 4th, 2006
Storm brewing over the Atwater Market, St. Henri, Montreal
There was a bit of a local controversy last spring over plans to convert Montreal’s former Imperial Tobacco factory and headquarters into condos. The complex, which has stood in the working-class neighbourhood of St. Henri for more than a century, has been empty since 2003 when Imperial shut down the last of its operations, putting several hundred neighbourhood residents out of work. Then, much to the surprise of approximately zero Montrealers, in stepped a developer with ambitious plans to convert the former cancer factory into condos.
One evil replaced by another, right? That was certainly the line of thought propagated by local housing activists, who took an all-or-nothing approach and demanded that the city buy the factory and convert it entirely into social housing. Otherwise, they threatened, they would shut the project down by forcing a local referendum on the issue. (Last May I wrote a Maisonneuve column on the issue, which you can read here.) They failed. The project is going ahead as planned and, soon, St. Henri will be home to nearly a thousand new condo-dwelling residents. Huzzah for gentrification!
But that’s a bit of a simplification. Okay, make that massive oversimplication. Because the Imperial Tobacco project is actually a model of how old brownfield sites should be converted into residential use.
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