'A giant losange': La Grande Bibliothèque du Québec

Photograph courtesy of Claire Roberge

'Announcement', Emilie Gamelin

'The Railway Station District'. Old Montreal

Acknowledgement

Portions of the research on which this essay is based were undertaken within the 'Digital Cities' project, funded by the Fonds Québecois de Recherche sur la Société et Culture (Michael Longford: Principal Investigator.) My thanks to the whole Digital Cities team for this richly rewarding experience. Particular thanks are due to Bita Mahdaviani, who helped with initial research on these three blocks, and Claire Roberge, who continued this research and took the original photographs used in this article. Thank you as well to Wade Nelson, for help with my discussion of the Taz Mahal.

Action terroriste 2007

Atlas of Canada, The 2007

Auf der Maur 1993

Baillargeon 2007

Baker 1968

Banham 1976

Bibliothèque et Archives 2007

Biennale de Montréal 2000

Brett 1954

Canadian Encyclopedia, The 2007

Cauchy and Lévesque 2007

Cloutier 1997

Divers Cité Stage 2007

Expo '67

The 1967 International Exposition, known officially as 'Man and his World' and popularly as Expo '67, figures prominently in the collective memory of Canadians, Quebecois and residents of Montreal.

The year 1967 was Canada's official centenary, and has come to stand in at least one popular recollection as 'the last good year' in Canadian history. The 1967 World's Fair was dominated by both a technological futurism and optimistic humanism, and if both of these have withered in the four decades since Expo '67, this has only served to brighten the memory of this highly successful event.

For Montreal, 1967 marked the climax of a period of growth in which demographers and city planners predicted the city's population would reach 10 million by the end of the century. (In 2001, that population was just over 3 million.) A decade later, as the city confronted recession, sharpened political conflict over language and the status of Quebec, and little growth in its population, it invested in another mega-project, the 1976 Olympic Games. The corruption, cost over-runs and relentless destruction of working-class neighbourhoods that marked the construction of the Olympic facilities on the city's eastern edges are seen as having dramatically closed an era in which Montreal sought international stature through the investment in megaprojects and events of global scale.

Google Map, 'Three Blocks in Montreal – East' 2007

Google Map, 'Three Blocks in Montreal' 2007

Google Map, 'Three Blocks in Montreal: City Overview' 2007

L'UQAM 2005

Lamarche 2000

Larose 1988

Lavigne 1999

Lepage 1994

Levesque 2001

Longford 2009

Mac Orlan 1997

Marchitecture 2007

Marsan 2005

Miller 1993

Montreal Hub, The 2007

Montreal Montage 2007

Montrose 1951

Palais Métro 2007

Paré 2007

Patkau Architects 2008

Pilgrimage 2007

Place des Arts 2008

Place Ville-Marie 2007

Quartier Latin 2008

Sciardet 2003

Straw 1992

The St Catherine/St Laurent intersection

The perceived degradation of the area around the St Catherine/St Laurent intersection was a familiar theme of early 1950s pulpy crime novels set in Montreal.

Here are two descriptions of this area:

The evening had begun to crawl. The night birds were emerging from their little nests. The movie-cum-striptease joints had their lights on, and the barkers were out front hollering that we were all just in time to see this week's extrah-speshul show. In the doorways, and peering from the pinball saloons, the earliest birds were gathered: the straight drunks; the alcoholics trying to bum the price of one; the fags hoping for something quick with the guys coming home from work; the super-annuated whores hoping for something at any speed with anyone who had fifty cents; the pencil-mustached pimps in fedoras, casting the crowd for guys who looked like they had five dollars, because flashy headgear costs money and a feller never knows when he might need another hat (Brett 1954: 102-3).

I'd seen some of those addicts. I'd been down on St. Catherine Street by Clarke in black holes that smelled like unflushed toilets, looking for men who'd disappeared months, maybe even years before. Sometimes I'd found them, too, but I'd never brought one back. They weren't men at all when they'd been there awhile taking the stuff. They were like the old wrecks that float in the Sargasso Sea; all stove in, covered with slime and parasitic growth, circling endlessly and uselessly in decreasing circles toward a vanishing point (Montrose 1951: 104).