All you 90 year old whippersnappers lurking here will recognize this place from their youth in the 1920s. It's the bridge over Mountain Street. You can no longer see it for real, but you can see it here on Coolopolis. Don't thank us, don't send us flowers, don't send money, no, all we want is your words of appreciation plus send us big bags full of individually-wrapped small format Tootsie Rolls, that's one of the six main food groups here at the Coolopolis towers and the jar is almost empty.
Get out your handkerchiefs, automobile fiends. After years of careening through the chicanes and straightaways of a fickle retail market, it looks like Bibliauto -- purveyors of fine motor-car literature, die-cast scale models and showcase of local superwheels -- has finally crashed and burned. The windows of the shop at 1524 Notre Dame Street West (near Guy St.) are all papered up. When we called during business hours, nobody answered and the message box was full. And to top it all off, the entire contents of the shop have been up and spirited away (see then-and-now pictures below). It's a dark day in Carland, boyzengoylz.
With more than half-a-dozen bridges and profilerating subway lines that link the island to the mainland these days, it's hard to imagine the time long ago when the warm days of spring would regularly sever the South Shore's communications with Montreal. But that's exactly what happened as the ice broke up -- but not enough to start ferry service -- and the river was no longer safe to cross either by seasonal rail link, foot or horse and carriage. Even when the ice held thick between, say, Longueuil and Montreal, there was always the possibility that crucial patches would be weakened by an unseen sewage discharge. That's exactly what happened to Boucherville farmer Alphonse Desmarteau et cheval, godforsaken stars of this story, which was published 90 years ago today in the Quebec City Chronicle.
A third had his hair cut to more modest length (see photo) but was told it was still too long and was refused a permit. The bylaw enforcement began May 1.
For several months starting last fall, a buncha big named Hollywood stars took over a big old house across the lake from Donald Sutherland's home in Georgeville, Eastern Townships to film
Emotional Arithmetic. The homeowner of the home tells Coolopolis that all the stars: Gabriel Byrne, Christopher Plummer, Max von Sydow, Roy Dupuis and Susan Sarandon offered polite and enjoyable company. The team had a couple of dozen trailers outside and the actors allowed the homeowner to sit in on the filming sessions. They say the film, about a reunion of French concentration camp survivors, is compelling. Plummer is getting on in age but still very familiar and asked about his hometown Montreal peeps. The cast were set up in Township condos and were generally too bushed from filming to party down, but Byrne came to Concordia to talk to students.
Two lightnin' reviews - Romeo and Juliet (until April 1) at Centaur, not bad. The cast is large, but the main faces are young, young, young. Impressivley staged, with a particularly energetic and ballsy swordfight scene. Slightly long. One-manner I am My Own Wife wraps up Sunday at the Saidye Bronfman and is based on the real-life story of a transvestite who survives both the Nazi era and subsequent Communist times, running a little bar and museum in his house. The performance is fine although actor's German accent sounded a bit Swedish. As for the script, it helps to be into that kind of thing, otherwise you might find the protagonist a dullard and the narrator is a grant-obsessed bore.
La ville de Westmount wants to resurface its grass-challenged football field with artificial turf. Unlike in other places, this one will be fenced off on only two of the four sides. The fences are what generally piss nearby residents off. But there's some opposition to this new field nonetheless. In the first such local astroturf controversy, in August 1989, residents of Esplanade hired legal counsel in the form of stuttering Belgian Dominique Neuman. After getting an injunction blocking the resurfacing and fencing off of of a part of Fletcher's Field, a judge deemed that the ville was within its rights to fence off its field, as they are in their right to build a hockey arena or any other type of facility. Montreal, at least the borough of NDG, has repeatedly claimed that insurers insist on these fields being fenced off before they insure them. Westmount officials believe this not to be the case.
You might consider popping over to the Main Hall (5390 St. Lawrence) tonight to catch a local guitar slinger on the rise. It's $10 or $12 at the door to see Neil Young soundalike Jason Kent and his bandmates and for that donation you also catch Autumn Defense, a melodic-acoustic band with some guys from Wilco. I chatted with Kent via computer. "At our last show at the Casa on March 10 we were totally blown out of the water by The Royal Mountain Band. It was a tough act to follow, but we appreciated that. It gave us more drive. It was also our first show with our new drummer, Chris Wise, so that was an added pressure. This Friday we're opening for the Autumn Defense (a modern Simon & Garfunkel). For this show, we thought we keep it interesting so we've dropped a member of the band. This should keep us on our toes. We'll be playing some songs country based songs (a la Crazy Horse) off our debut, as well as a couple new ones. I'll also be playing my 1971 Telecaster that I bought in England."
Maybe, if you've got enough years under your belt, you'll remember this long-vanished streetscape, captured here by news photographer J.P. Laliberte in the spring of 1959. If you don't know it, you're looking towards the southwest corner of Jeanne Mance St. at Pine Ave. It's all gone now, demolished to make way for the Pine-Park interchange -- itself now bulldozed out of existence. A total of 25 vintage row homes in the Jeanne Mance-Pine-Park area were wrecked to make way for the interchange, a $4.5-million series of concrete over- and underpasses that finally came down last year. Nowadays, this sort of expropriation-and-demolition project is always lamented as a kind of loss. But back then, it was progress -- plain and simple. In fact, project engineers wanted to take down even more buildings -- including those still standing on the west side of Park, south of Pine. But the city refused, not in order to preserve the heritage block, but to limit sums paid out for expropriations. 
also pop one in just to make it look as if they're trying. Rosemont Mayor Andre Lavallee guides the transportation file and is coming out with a giant all-inclusive plan next month. The bike ramp hasn't yet been suggested often or vigorously but authorities were receptive on the one time it was floated in their direction at a meeting by Bicycle Bob. And indeed they've been pretty good at acceding to bike path demands in the last few years, so this is do-able. If you want to catch Lavallee to put a bug in his ear, he'll be at the Palais de Concrete tomorrow from 2 to 4 announcing eight new biodiesel buses.
Fiscal imbalance? The environment? Which party leader's tougher on Ottawa? Forget it! The top election issue for voters like Mr. Fortin here is, was and always will be: Which party can get rid of more Anglos? 
Normand Lepine 
This BSCQ remark seems strange but it was impossible to get further comments from the BSCQ president. We believe that the BSCQ took five months prior to authorizing the presentation of the film in Montreal. Quiet Days in Clichy was classified "18 and over."
Some might not know this, but our beloved Grey Nuns joint at Dorch and Guy was almost demolished 33 years ago.
Blvd. convent as an historic site, the Grey Nuns have announced a redevelopment project which would destroy most of the greystone building under the ownership of the property's prospective buyer.
Because of a law protecting all property within 500 feet of the protected chapel any project would have to receive the approval of the cultural affairs ministry even if the convent remains unclassified. A spokesman for the development firm's Montreal subsidiary, Valorinvest Ltd., said yesterday discussion of further development details is "premature." 
The religious order - which says it can no longer afford to maintain the convent whose population has declined from 1,000 to 300 - has announced it wants to move to its original convent in Old Montreal.
MONTREAL - ADDRESSES OF OVER 50 BROTHELS and SHE WAS HER FATHER'S MISTRESS - FOR 23 YEARS. Such breathless reports have boosted circulation to more than 75,000, pushed Midnight to the top of the dunghill among Canadian scandal sheets. 
We have a winner. It was indeed the turning of the sod of the Habitations Jeanne Mance, which was one of the great political battles of our age. Our newby mayor Jean Drapeau was dead-set against it, as he felt it would tarnish the hopes of economic development of the east side of town. The province was heavily in favour of this project and Farto Sournier...err. Sarto Fournier, a Senator beat him in 1957 (Drap beat him 4 other times so don't weep for Johnny Flag). I once heard an old timer suggest that the 57 election was rigged against Drap. So these photos from 1957 must include Fournier, I'm thinking it's the John Goodman lookalike fat guy but other photos show Fournier to be a much more svelte figure. I have no idea who the rest of that crew are, if anybody has an idea, post here. As you know the Habitations Jeanne Mance replaced an entire neighbourhood just east of what's now the St. Lawrence metro, under the controversial concept of slum clearance favoured by Dozier. We have some interesting photos of that neighbourhood prior to demolition that we'll put up when the tea cools. 
Looking for the identity of the guy on the left. Clue: he died on Christmas Eve 1985. Double points of you can identify the guy in the hat. It's a toughie. Any guesses?
Let this be a lesson to all Montreal flaks who think everything they write is true. Seventy years ago today, Montreal's daily La Patrie reported that the Eiffel Tower would be dismantled by 1939 and replaced with a modern structure. (Surely not a mile-high skyscraper!) Not sure what happened there. Maybe a little war got in the way.
Restaurant Association in an aim to keep a new restaurant tax at bay. It 
was officially recognized a decade later and included Murray’s, Scotts, 
Honey Dew, Industrial Caterers, Child’s and Cordners, all names that will surely make your mouth water... if you're about 90 years old that is. Those joints have disappeared but about 4,000 restaurants are now in that same organization. These are their logos over the years. I quite like the red on gray, wonder what that's supposed to be. Coolopolis rang up our inside man Francois "Frank the Bank" Meunier to get some tasty skittles of news. After years of impressive growth our restaurants have been taking a hit since about October. It's the sit-down places that have been getting hammered. Unlike the rest of North America, Quebeckers generally eat at mealtimes and aren't really big tween snackers. The lucrative between-meal snack market of a fries at 3 or a donut at 11 is less prominent here. About half of all restaurant cash is made at dinnertime. Drive-throughs are far rarer here than elsewhere but take-away is a fast-growing sector of the restaurant biz, not sure if this is due to the joy of smoking at home. Do you smoke at home or are you a sidewalk sucktard?
Swiped this chuckleicious truth-in-photoshoping adventure from the Hockey Forum Canadiens discussion group. 
this week. Mario Tremblay alienated his star goaltender (subtext, Tremblay was an avid separatist and Roy was a committed federalist).
Houle built a team by seeking players who looked like they were grabbed out of a March of Dimes ad. The second work of art reveals the less-then-adequate puckstopping duo of Thibault-Jablonski. The new text promises opponents will score 5 goals per period. For budding image saboteurs, the method isn't complicated according to the artist kernkraft: "Just copy the image into a new file, add a text layer on top of it. Then use the smudge tool to blur out the underlying image parts you want removed (this is the step that takes time)."
Hey Mr. Tambourine, man. Play an ancient song for me. This fresco inside L'Original International Inc. (141 Mount Royal Ave. East; 514 843-1755) was hand made in Tunisia, where there is a long tradition of creating mosaics of all shapes and design dating to before the time of Carthage. While this baby isn't exactly for sale, Sam -- who manages this family-run business -- would probably consider any reasonable offer. 
If you stop in to check it out, ask to see the birdcage that Martin Scorcese's art department picked out to use in the film Gangs of New York. (Maybe Leonardo Di Caprio even touched it!) It was made in Sidi-Bousaid, a Tunisian city that is known for its skilled artisans. 
Meanwhile, if you ask (or need to go), Sam will let you ogle the cool tile work in the bathroom -- an inspiring touch. You're always free to linger at L'Original -- even between paycheques. 
And that's cool, because there are lots and lots of goodies and gifts from around the world to browse or buy at warehouse prices -- things like drums (from $4.99), water pipes (from $9.99), kaftans, batik, Bogola wear, belly-dancing gear, ottomans, kites and tiles. And the list doesn't end there -- far from it.
As if the recent cold snap weren't enough to numb your nose... . Now judging by the amount of powder remaining in this envelope spotted on Cathedral at St. Antoine about an hour ago, it looks like some party animal either kicked the habit or just plain missed the pocket. Might still be there, but if any of you unreformed runway models go looking for it, don't say we didn't warn you: maybe it's just a spot of Old Dutch or only ground chalk. (01:16)
In the early years, Canada's labour movement tried to push the Chinese laundries out of business for daring to compete with Canadians theoretically willing to do such thankless low-paid work. In Vancouver some establishments were torched and in Toronto labour reps described them as a "curse." Someone named Gus Francq from Montreal spoke against them in 1906 at a Victoria BC conference. But some of the nastier legislation passed elsewhere in Canada, such as barring white women from working at these places never made it to Quebec.
Memories of Montreal -- and richness My youth was a complex broth of poverty, slaughtered chickens, the rag trade, Yiddish newspapers and Chinese laundries. For my son, it's cherry blossoms and tennis courts. Moses Milstein. The Globe and Mail. Toronto, Ont.: Apr 28, 1998. pg. A.24
IN the April of his youth, my son walks to school in a gentle shower of cherry blossoms. Down the slopes of West Vancouver's Hollyburn Mountain he can see the houses nestled among tall cedars. Bursts of rhododendrons guard the yards and over their tops he can see the sun glinting on the placid waters of Howe Sound. He walks through this serene neighbourhood unmolested, the quiet punctuated by the thwonk of tennis balls coming from cozy courts nearby.And I blame myself.
In the April of my childhood in the Montreal of the fifties, the way to school was still studded with chunks of sandy moraine from winter's retreating ice. With the threat of blizzards gone, I could shed my heavy winter boots, and feel the sidewalk strangely close beneath the thin soles of my shoes.
The corners of our street, like every street then, were held by the four corner stores. The one we used, the "Jewish" store, could be counted on for an emergency box of matzohs, or kosher Coca Cola during Passover. Although Mr. Auerbach practically lived in his store, he did, in fact, go home at night. His French competitors across the street, though, lived amidst their crowded displays of potato chips, soft drinks and fly-paper rolls -- cooking, sleeping, arguing, watching TV, just behind the curtain in the back of the store.
You could buy a tiny bag of potato chips for a penny. My mother insisted that it was filled with sweepings.
Around the corner was Wing Ling, the Chinese laundry, like all Chinese laundries painted green on the outside. Within, great vats seethed with steam where Mr. Lee and his family washed and ironed our sheets, which he would then hand to me in a package wrapped in brown paper and string.
Next to the laundry, across the alley, which ran like a sparkling river of broken glass and urine produced by the hordes of feral cats, giant rats and stumbling drunks who waded therein, was the Jewish Tailor. His narrow house, barely a door and a window wide, extended backwards from his work room and housed his wife and daughter, a sewing machine and a steam iron. An air of sadness, like the tape measure he wore around his neck, enveloped the place.
His old, thick-legged wife shared his melancholic mien. Their daughter was my age and wore braces on her legs. I often wondered whether they were her parents or her grandparents, so great was the difference in their ages. According to rumour, they were, like our family, survivors of the "Krieg," the Holocaust. The tailor and his wife had each had families of their own, children and spouses. They perished somehow, I don't remember the details. Every family I knew then had a story of death and they were all mixed up in my mind. In a DP camp after the war, the tailor met and married this woman and she was able to give birth to one more child, with crippled legs, and then no more.
I would rush by their sad house, and in one block was on St. Lawrence Street, noisy and bursting with commerce. Two long blocks before I reached my school.
My father worked on St. Lawrence Street at the Junior Trend Factory, which he pronounced "Jooniohtren." One April, when school was closed for Passover, I brought him his lunch. The elevator in his building passed floor after floor of angrily buzzing sewing machines. On some floors anonymous contractors were making clothes under other manufacturer's labels; on others I could see fancy offices where men with cigars, manicured fingers and pomaded hair struggled for ascendancy in the shmatte business.
My father worked among his friends from back home. They would usually greet me with jokes, smiles and much cheek-pinching. But when I saw them at their sewing machines their faces were closed and dark and they worked feverishly at piecework, sewing linings, sleeves, buttonholes under the critical eyes of the foreman. I left quickly.
Between these rows of tall, brown brick buildings, I would pass the restaurants that fed the workers. Delicatessens beckoned, their windows steamed from the smoked meat briskets waiting within, festooned with hanging salamis, rows of jars of pickled tomatoes and long banana peppers, green and red. Inside, the esteemed smoked-meat cutter stood resplendent on his pedestal, dispensing thick, greasy, spicy slices of meat onto golden rounds of rye bread. A good cutter was rumoured to be worth his substantial weight in gold and was held in reverential awe by my friends and me. Unhappily, the price of 25 cents, an hour's wages for my father, was beyond our reach.
The smells of the delicatessen mixed with the forest of urban smells welling out of each block -- fruit stores, bakeries, taverns (for men only), poultry and egg stores, fish stores, bagel bakeries, steak houses, all of which would have me slavering until I reached that pinnacle of sensual delights, the Rachel Market. Here, the smells and sights merged as the French farmers, some able to speak Yiddish, backed their trucks up to the wide sidewalks where they set up their tables and displayed their produce. Beneath the market, down a spiral of stone steps slicked with blood, was a subterranean chamber of death. If you stood halfway down the stairs, you could see the hell waiting for the birds below. An open fire to singe their pin feathers burned in an alcove. Hooks covered the walls from which the chickens were suspended by their feet while men in bloodied aprons cut their throats, drained their blood and plucked their feathers which floated in the air until they settled among the clots of gray droppings on the floor and walls.
Across the street, the large bakery, Richstones, held a secret known only to the few. On Fridays, if you went to the door at the top of the loading bays, you could ask for the seconds, the crumbled cakes, broken doughnuts, smeary cupcakes. Sometimes they would give you some and sometimes they would chase you away angrily. Another example of the incomprehensible capriciousness of adults.
As if to remind me of my destination, I would ultimately come to the offices of Der Kanader Adler, one of three local Yiddish papers. Occasionally, one of my teachers would publish a poem there, truly the last song of the Last of the Mohicans. The Jewish Peretz School was just around the corner on Duluth Street. We were educated in Yiddish, spoke to each other in English and lived in a French neighbourhood.
I can recall every building and business along the two blocks to school. Many of the proprietors knew me and my family. I felt as safe and happy on the streets as in my own home and would often linger until dusk on the return home.
When I grew up I bought a house in the gentle forests of the Pacific and my son walks to school among the cherry blossoms. And sometimes I am sad for him.
Moses Milstein is a veterinarian.
Ma's is part of a cluster of black-owned businesses around Royal and Sherbrooke and is a great place to fix your appetite issues. The roti costs less than six bucks and every other traditional plate is ready to be cooked. The original Ma got old and retired, but this is the current cook and I've nominated her to fill in the empty post. Drop in and tell 'em Coolopolis told them you'll enjoy their eats.
