I just know a lot of you are thinking, "Where in the heck does Michelle live!?" and more pressing, "What is the historical significance of her neighbourhood!?" Well I am finally going to tell you through the magic of my digital camera...
I live in Pointe-St-Charles in the South-West of Montreal. Now, the Grand Trunk railway, which opened in 1852, was Montreal's largest employer during it's time and shaped PSC back in the day. It had tons of local employees and called itself Grand Trunk because it was thought to be the trunk from which all railways in Canada would stem. Here's a picture of it's head office, now a government building.
As you can see, it's covered in scaffolding. It is a grand building with a beautiful marble staircase inside. PSC has a truly working-class history, from working for the railway to building the Lachine canal. This means its residents for the last couple hundred years have been relatively poor and needy, so that things like the flood of 1886, one of the worst in the 19th century, pretty much devastated the surrounding neighbourhoods and farms. Here's a mark on the Allan building (Hugh Allen was one of the richest men in Canada in the late 19th century).
Where does a poor working-class schmuck go when he's feeling down and out, his home is flooded and he's on strike again? Why, Joe Beef's tavern of course!
Famous for helping out those on strike and anyone in need, Joe Beef also helped non-humans. In the basement of his tavern, which he ran from 1870 to 1889, he was known to keep bears, monkeys, wild cats, and a porcupine. If those wild strikers got too rowdy, Joe Beef would bring up one of the bears to restore order.
And boy did the workers ever strike! Imagine building a 12km canal, it's back-breaking work. And then imagine widening it. And then imagine building locks. It takes time, it takes 16-hour days in fact. The canal also allowed ships to bypass the rapids in the St-Lawrence which allowed for steamships to reach Montreal and thus more industry into the PSC, which meant even more working-class Irish and Scottish to move in.
The Darling Brothers foundry is one of 20 that provided work for the residents of PSC and Griffintown in the late 19th century. Now, it's a restaurant and art gallery.
Back in the day, people got around by horse and buggy. The Griffintown Horse Palace, an Irish-owned stable since the 1860s, is still pretty much in working order.
Of course, all those Irish needed a place to worship and St Ann's Catholic church was built in 1854. At the time, as now, there were two types of people, the unskilled labourers and the rich industrialists. Everyone was Catholic, but poor Catholics went to St Ann's and the rich Catholics went to St Patrick's. Naturally, St Patrick's still exists, but St Ann's was demolished in 1970, which marks the beginning of serious decline in the PSC, but more on that in a bit. Here is what's left of St. Ann's. It's now a park which some of the foundation still marks the church's outline.
St. Ann's also ran a nursery around the corner from the Horse Palace. Here is the building which now houses a transport company started in 1926 and still run by the original owner's grandson.
Now, the Lachine canal was crucial in Montreal's growth which is why it was built (requiring tons of workers) and why it was widened (requiring more workers). Not only did it allow ships to bypass the rapids in the St. Lawrence, it also provided hydraulic energy to the early factories built in the area. Foundries, silk and ribbon factories, sugar factories and mills filled the area and so a lot of manpower was needed and a lot of manpower was taken advantage of. The working-class of the PSC could not escape hard times. When the canal was widened, the workers were paid in company money that could only be spent at company stores.
After all this hard work, the canal was closed! The St Lawrence Seaway took over and the port end of the canal was filled in and closed in the 1960s and the Lachine end of the canal was closed in 1970. St Anne's was demolished in 1970, the locals lost their place of meeting and worship. In 1963 the whole area was zoned as industrial. Hence the decline of the PSC into poverty.
As if to foreshadow the area's decline, typhus swept through the area in 1847 killing the most vulnerable, the poor unskilled workers who'd help built it up with their own hands. At the opening of the Victoria bridge is a monument to those Irish. A 30 ton piece of black granite pulled from the St Lawrence during the building of the Victoria Bridge marks a mass grave of thousands of Irish who died during the epidemic.
Stayed tuned for Part 2...
