The Montreal apartment is one of the most successful marketing items to ever hit this city. As we know, other cities have a far lower percentage of renters than Montreal and that fact has left many among us in a position where we can gain no equity. It is not a healthy situation but according to some accounts there is one person to blame and his name is Roswell Fisher.
Roswell was born in Montreal to a wealthy family, as his father was a medic. He was a man of ideas and went to Oxford and became a lawyer in this town. But he liked to debate and eventually came across a notion that young men were screwed because when they grew up and married, they only had enough money to live out in crappy little houses far away from the downtown core, thus missing much of the fun of youth.
So in 1891 he built what was called the citys first apartment building, on the southwest corner of Crescent and Sherbrooke - now a part of some kinda museum. The gimmick was that wives should not have to spend their time cooking, so he had every apartment equipped with a dumb waiter (a little elevator) and food would simply be launched up through the vertical space. It was such a unique idea that it was written up big in New York.
The building had four floors and four apartments per floor and he loaded it up with his friends and family. However nobody really went for the dinner-on-elevators thing and everybody had a proper kitchen installed into their unit. About 15 years later however he built another apartment building on the field next door and once again he used the pulley-food trick, but this time however hooking it up with a legitimate restaurant on the ground floor that lasted at least until the mid-70s.
Roswell was born in Montreal to a wealthy family, as his father was a medic. He was a man of ideas and went to Oxford and became a lawyer in this town. But he liked to debate and eventually came across a notion that young men were screwed because when they grew up and married, they only had enough money to live out in crappy little houses far away from the downtown core, thus missing much of the fun of youth.So in 1891 he built what was called the citys first apartment building, on the southwest corner of Crescent and Sherbrooke - now a part of some kinda museum. The gimmick was that wives should not have to spend their time cooking, so he had every apartment equipped with a dumb waiter (a little elevator) and food would simply be launched up through the vertical space. It was such a unique idea that it was written up big in New York.
The building had four floors and four apartments per floor and he loaded it up with his friends and family. However nobody really went for the dinner-on-elevators thing and everybody had a proper kitchen installed into their unit. About 15 years later however he built another apartment building on the field next door and once again he used the pulley-food trick, but this time however hooking it up with a legitimate restaurant on the ground floor that lasted at least until the mid-70s.
1991? That's not too long ago.
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ReplyDeleteWhere is my toast Jeeves? I'm sorry Sir it appears that the elevator is stuck again ..
ReplyDelete- Pinecourt Pete
That apartment building was so far from downtown at the time it was built -- and therefore considered a high-risk venture -- that many of Fisher's contemporaries referred to it as "Fisher's Folly"! Also, it contained the first (people) elevator in the entire country.
ReplyDeleteCaptain Carl
I guess I zhuld wright something about his daughter Kathleen becoming the city's first city councillor of the feminine variety as of 1940 too.
ReplyDeleteJust for the record, Montreal's first "people" elevator was incorporated in the New York Life Insurance Building at 511 Place d'Arms--that decorative brownstone edifice with its exterior clock at the northeast corner completed in 1889.
ReplyDeleteSee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Life_Insurance_Building,_Montreal
Also: http://www.aviewoncities.com/montreal/placedarmes.htm
As a further point of interest, Montreal's first escalator, however, was installed in the Dominion Square Building at 1010 Ste. Catherine St. corner Peel, construction completed in 1930.
Little know facts about the latter edifice are that the interior walls were originally modular and thus movable to allow reconfiguration of offices, an unusually forward-thinking concept for its time.
It is also alleged by author G.H. Gervais in his book "The Rumrunners" that the construction of the Dominion Square Building was financed by the "bootleg money" of certain seedy individuals of the "roaring 20s".
I remember those (wooden) escalators in the Dominion Square building - there were probably there until sometime in the 1980's.
ReplyDeleteEaton's also had at least two wooden escalators until the late 1960's (maybe later).
IIRC, the Oratory still has Otis wooden escalators.
ReplyDeleteWeren't those apartments at Sherbrooke and Claremont dumbwaiter-linked to the Murray's on the ground floor?
ReplyDeletePeabody