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I didn't live on my own in Montreal until I was was 27, as I left for university out of province at 17. When I came back it was with a long-term girlfriend who was set on living in Mile End as this was the hip new place to be in 2003.
We moved into a place on Esplanade and six weeks later broke up. I became great friends with the landlord who lived upstairs even after I moved up the street north of Bernard, when a friend of a friend offered me a sublet. At that time Bernard was considered a bit too far north. My new girlfriend, now my wife, mother of my children, used to show up to my three-and-a-half in her business suits, which was a strange turn-on for both of us.
I got it for $460 a month and this was considered alright back then. Some friends had there's for $200, maybe it's the same, you could tell the legitimacy of someone's Mile End claims by their rent. At $460, I was definitely new, but not considered foolish. I jumped right into "being a writer" which meant for me writing all day and trying to scrape together money this way and that to fund the life.
I met some friends in different places, some long lost from high school, some from French-classes, some from school and we began to collect each month for what I dubbed SUSO, which was short for Show Up Show Off, where the only rule was that to get invited to our potluck you had to bring something you were working on. Then we would get drunk and present. In short order we had to limit the novelists to five minutes.
Next door was a great rocker chick called Lily Sweet who now owns a catering company, last I checked. Our Hassidic landlord Harry drove around collecting rent in a large SUV. For the winter months, a double window that should have been installed was propped below the window. We could all hear each other through the walls, ceilings and floorboards. He had a bike fanatic handyman who once explained to me his idea of a vacuum tube up Mount Royal for cyclists unable to make the hill.
It was nice to be on my own, as I had been living with my ex-girlfriend for so long and I had also toured around the world with the rugby teams I used to play for. There weren't many days then when I could decide what to do and do it. Now I could. I could write or walk around town or go have a coffee and run into people and stay talking as long as I wished.
I wasn't as good as writer as I thought I was. I got a job that I found interesting I fell in love with my to-be-wife and we moved in together to a place on Durocher, across Park. We moved back to Esplanade - our first son was born. Within a few months, we had left the neighbourhood for good.
I still get my haircut there every month, a stone's throw from the old 3 1/2. It might be because I have kids, but there seems to be a lot more kids than I remember. The houses are incredibly expensive. The neighbourhood seems to have settled into a cleaned-up grown-up bohemian vibe. Maybe that's because I've cleaned up and grown up.
Back in 2003 when I moved in, people who had moved in in 1997 were saying the same thing that I'm saying now. Then there are really crotchety people like Kristian who point out that it wasn't even known as Mile End in the eighties. I have a friend from those days who moved in to a beautiful place and now invites us over to exquisite dinner parties.
Read the entire My First Montreal Apartment series
- Snarchland: Neil Cameron's My First Montreal Apartment
- My First Montreal Apartment: John Allore
- Mike Boone: My first Montreal apartment
- My first Montreal apartment: Jack Ruttan
- Vava Vol - My first Montreal apartment
- My first Montreal apartment: Kate McDonnell
- My first Montreal apartment: John Hood
- My first Montreal apartment: Stephen Lack
- My first Montreal apartment: Taras Grescoe
- My first Montreal apartment: Dennis Trudeau
- My first Montreal apartment: Colin Robertson
- My first apartment - Daniel Richler
I enjoyed this. Excellent stuff.
ReplyDeleteInteresting article, but I was drawn in at first by thinking it was about the more famous Colin Robertson...the one who followed Kim Campbell as Consul-General in LA and who was the backroom boy leading the charge for the recently-announced second bridge from Windsor to Detroit...
ReplyDeleteI know it didn't used to be called Mile End. My dad lived in the area in the 1940s and he never called it that – just talked about "when we lived on Waverly" or whatever. But he never called the Plateau that either – just "when we lived on Fullum" etc.
ReplyDeleteThere are a few reasons as to why Montreal's districts seem to have different names to different people--often tourist guidebooks confuse the issue.
ReplyDeleteLooking over old maps, some parts of the city were designated as parishes, wards (as in Chicago), districts, cartiers, and most recently boroughs (of British origin) and arrondissements (as in Paris).
To add further to the confusion, different parts of Montreal are referred to by their civic municipal name as well as by "electoral maps" for city, provincial, and federal elections--often continually geographically adjusted for the sinister purpose of gerrymandering in order to influence voting patterns, a situation compounded even further since the merger/demerger fiasco.
Thus we now have Cote des Neiges/NDG basically merged together electorially when geographically they couldn't be more different, LaSalle/Ville St. Pierre, and so on.
Even though Snowdon was originally and still is geographically a part of NDG, its overuse as a neighbourhood reference point eventually through inertia transformed it into an official electoral district. I can even foresee NDG at some future point being logically named "West Plateau"!
For the record, Snowdon (generically a mountain in Wales) comes from Snowdon Junction where major tramlines converged at the corner of Queen Mary and Decarie (then named Monkland Boulevard). Well-known resident John Snowdon owned a large house on the northwest corner and his son William Comire (or Comrie?) lived on what is now Snowdon Avenue.
St. Michel used to be an independent city until 1968 when its mayor was involved in a huge kickback-favouritism scandal which ended in financial difficulties and merger with Montreal. St. Michel's city hall was demolished and replaced by the park within the circular road Francois Perrault--previously named Octogonal Boulevard.
...and Queen Mary road was once part of (and called) Cote St. Luc (Luke?) road.
ReplyDelete"Anonymous said...
ReplyDelete...and Queen Mary road was once part of (and called) Cote St. Luc (Luke?) road."
Umm, you may want to check your maps. Those streets run parallel.
Researching old maps going back as far as 1871 actually does show Cote St. Luc (or Luke) Road as the former name of Monkland Blvd. (later renamed Decarie Blvd.), which then turned east and still named Cote St. Luc Road where it was later renamed Queen Mary Road. There was no actual road continuing westward into what would later become the town of Hampstead.
ReplyDeleteA map of 1873, however, shows a plan to name that westbound section "Third Avenue".
Anyone willing to spend some time in the map departments of our major public libraries will discover a great many such historical facts.
Otherwise, check out this site:
http://www.banq.qc.ca/collections/cartes_plans/ressources_BAnQ/doc_cartographiques/index.html?language_id=1
Check this 1907 map:
ReplyDeletehttp://services.banq.qc.ca/sdx/cep/document.xsp?id=0000174922&epage=3&eview=CARTES_PLANS/174922/174922_33.tif
Cote St. Luc Road "ended" at "Notre Dame de Grace Road" (now Decarie - the current NDG Ave. was "Beloeil Street") - note Monkland and the property of the "Soeurs". It then "resumed" father north as an eastward continuation of "Third Street" (i.e. Queen Mary).
One must remember that many of the "maps" in the archives were really projected plans of streets that were yet to be officially named.
ReplyDeleteNumbered streets like "Third Avenue", (for Queen Mary in this case) etc., were obviously used on such "maps" as convenient substitutes prior to the official naming or renaming.
Furthermore, some streets were laid out in one district and later linked up with others in an adjacent one, thus we would have Western Avenue in NDG and Burnside downtown later become transformed into de Maisonneuve, and so on.
Others like de Fleurimont, for whatever reason, were banished into oblivion.
Then we find oddball discrepancies which were either the result of poor research or plain stupidity such as in St. Michel where they named a street 22nd Avenue (just above Belanger) when, in fact Pie IX is the sequential, numerical equivalent of the 22nd avenue in adjacent Rosemount!
Strangely enough, there is no longer any more 22nd Avenue in Lachine; it having been erased decades ago and replaced by the existing driveway which leads into a condo complex.
More on numbered streets - those E/W streets just off Pie-IX in (or adjacent to) St-Leonard start at 39th Rue and go to 57th (52nd is Des Grandes Prairies). What happened to 1st through 38th?
ReplyDeleteAbout those non-existent, numbered streets in St. Michel, etc....
ReplyDeleteI can only guess what was in the minds of city planners (!) back then, but according to my 1950 Shell gas station map of Montreal (which could hardly be considered "official" in any case), much of the east end of the island was still farmland or scrub-brush in those days which presented a field day (sorry) for would-be cartographers.
The dashed lines of proposed streets (running east-west) and avenues (running north-south) in those districts are for the most part numbered and presumably slated to be given a proper name at some future point--which indeed did occur--but not everywhere, obviously. Besides, would you not feel more at home living on a street with a proper name or on one having only a number?
In St. Michel (shown as "Ville de St. Michel de Laval", believe it or not!), the aforementioned map shows quite a different numbering plan than what eventually came to exist as of today.
What is now Industriel Blvd. was in 1950 planned as 24th St. and the consecutive streets in a southerly direction end with 54th St. which is one street north of Cote St. Michel Road (today Jarry).
However, for some inexplicable reason, there are intervening parallel streets numbered from 1st to 9th as well as with proper names such as Dumouchel and Couture which throw that numbering sequence out-of-whack! Clearly, the "cartographer" took liberties with his assignment or had no real facts with which to work.
In Rosemount, the highest-numbered, dash-lined proposed avenue is 45th Avenue (later to be renamed de l'Assomption).
Furthermore, because in those days there existed the "Rosemount Public Golf Course" which stretched between Rosemont Blvd. to just north of Belanger, there were no east-west 20th or 21st Avenues in that sector.
You really have to study these old maps in order to puzzle it all out, but this over-analysis would likely bore most people to tears unless you happen to currently live in those neighbourhoods and want to know how they evolved.
It is interesting to note the proposed parks that never materialized, English and French street names which would have given those districts some real character but which were either changed or never to be, plus streets which were yet to link up.
What is today the Olympic Park was back in 1950 shown as..."Sport Centre (under construction)"!!