The 1947 aerial maps have become heroin for local geo-geeks, including emdx, who has graciously created this map overlay (higher res version
here) that could help you figure out a little bit of the what-was-where. The big square in the middle is what's now Place des Arts and those little now-disappeared streets in the middle of it were called Plateau and Winning. Who knew?
Of course someone named Ant6n
made an excellent map you can toggle between the Google maps/aerial view and the 1947 map, which is really essential although at this moment it's still a bit unfinished west of Atwater.
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| Where Alexis Nihon Plaza now sits |
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The Westmount Athletic Grounds
was hellish. |
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The Navy League building my dad demolished
to build his parking lot on Closse just about St. C |
I was working on a bunch of unsaved stuff which I lost when my photoshop crashed, including a map that coloured roofs to all the buildings knocked down between Peel/Guy/de Maisonneuve/St. Catherine since 1947.
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The massive parking lot behind city hall |
But I've popped in a few other geographical curiosities here, including the surprising nature of the area behind Westmount High (now the lovely Westmount Athletic Grounds).
Then there's the unabashedly huge parking lot on Champs de Marsand the buildings my dad knocked down to create his parking lot on the east side of the old Forum.
Thanks so much for these ongoing explorations of the 1947 aerial photos. There are detailed "road maps" with public buildings labelled for the central part of Montreal (covered by 70 maps) from 1949 at http://services.banq.qc.ca/sdx/cep/document.xsp?id=0003343054&&epage=1 ("Plans d'utilisation du sol de la ville de Montréal, novembre 1949")
ReplyDeleteGoogle Earth could incorporate this information and the aerial photos (though the process is beyond what I can imagine doing myself) to allow use of its "time slider" to go back and forth across the years, as done with aerial photos of San Francisco from 1938, as described at http://google-latlong.blogspot.ca/2012/03/exploring-1938-san-francisco-through.html
Thanks for the helpful efforts reported in this blog!
Harvey.
Lovely!!!
ReplyDeleteThank You!
A few nitpicks:
ReplyDelete— The are by Westmount high is obviously a military zone; you can recognize military trucks parked haphazardly, but, most important, the military barracks just north of the CPR Westmount subdivision. I believe that, to this day, the huge building on the middle left is still the drill hall. (But I didn't know that just west of the barracks was a bunch of team tracks…).
— The “huge parking lot on Place d’Armes” isn’t. It’s the Champ-de-Mars, and there are plenty of assholes who still park there nowadays even though it’s verboten to go there by car.
Any idea what the rounded building behind the Navy League building would have been? I guess it would have been located behind what is Chez Doris.
ReplyDeleteSimply amazing to see just how much was jammed into spaces now reserved for a single building or complex.
No wonder people felt the city would be terribly depopulated - it is by comparison.
@ emdx:
ReplyDeleteAre you familiar with Lachine?
In this picture: http://archivesdemontreal.com/greffe/vues-aeriennes-archives/jpeg/VM97-3_7P16-05.jpg
is the quadrant roughly bounded by the 20, 18th ave, 32nd ave, and Provost. You can see the Maison des Soeurs de Ste Anne at 18th & Provost.
I'm wondering if you may have any clue what the cookie-cutter buildings (H-shaped) are? Might it have been something military-related?
Hey Marc. They were WWII military barracks. I used to race my go-carts there in the fifties. The buildings were all gone by then, but the paved roads were still there.
ReplyDeleteThe empty plot where Alexis Nihon stands was the west-end baseball field. A friend who had just been decommissioned after the war told me he remembers playing a game there in February 1948 when it was close to 70F. That year had freakishly little snow and he confirmed it with his memory of the unusual temperature.
ReplyDeleteI remember what I think was a run-down United Cigar Store that was the sole building on that block, at the NW corner of Atwater and St. Catherine.
In Westmount on the corner of Hillside and Hillside lane is a drill hall still in constant use by the armed forces, which had been built as a riding school.
Along Hillside was the CPR's Westmount yard, and in front of the drill hall where St. Margaret's Home moved to was a coal distributor. I remember up to about 1970 an ancient CPR express car was permanently parked at the far west end of Westmount yard. It was all cleared out to build the subsidized housing for the residents who were turfed out of Selby street by the Ville Marie highway.
The Navy League building must have been the small Christian Science church that stood on Closse, just below what was the El Morocco. No idea if that church was affiliated with the bigger one on Cote des Neiges at Pine/McGregor/McDougall/Penfield but there's a picture of the small church in the collection already posted here by that freelance photographer from Mtl. West in the 30s.
Hasn't there been an Armory besides W.H.S. since at least the '40's?
ReplyDeleteWhat a great resource all this stuff is.
Even greater would be if it led to encouraging more preservation of the past.
A pipe dream, perhaps.
The Lachine complex is probably RCAF-Lachine (where my father was initially based in 1942). Some of them lasted well after the war.
ReplyDeleteOn the subject of military installations, I notice from
http://archivesdemontreal.com/greffe/vues-aeriennes-archives/jpeg/VM97-3_7P11-11.jpg
that the Naval Supply Depot buildings were not yet built along Dollard (near Elmslie) in Lasalle. I would have assumed that they were WW2 buildings. A search confirmed that a cornerstone was laid in October, 1953. The six huge buildings went up for sale in 1970 - they are still standing and being used.
http://goo.gl/maps/rklTW
According to http://www.westmount.org/print_page.cfm?Section_ID=2&Menu_Item_ID=16 Westmount purchased the MAAA grounds in 1936; it was requisitioned by the Department of National Defence in September, 1939; returned to the City on Jan. 2, 1948.
ReplyDeleteSome structures remained until the land was cleared (1959-61) for the construction of Westmount High School.
If you navigate the 1947 aerial photo you can see the last farm in Westmount which belonged to the St-Léon parish, bounded by Redfern and Clarke, St. Catherine and Western/de Maisonneuve. The fields were opposite today's Westmount High. Coolopolis published a view identified by Michael Fish, taken from the fields towards the SE and Hallowell Ave. It's so changed today people were confused about the Victorian houses and duplexes along St. Catherine, but they can be seen in the aerial photo.
ReplyDeleteWhen the harmonious row houses on Tupper and the north side of Dorchester were wiped out to enable parking lots to exist for the next fifty years a John Gaunt whose house stood where the present RCMP block is, refused to sell up. Westmount happily carved out the curve of the new Dorchester boulevard to correspond with the end of Clarke Ave, leaving the Gaunt house to loom for a while some ten feet above street level. I believe Mr. Gaunt died and the city finally demolished his house.
At the time, Westmount city fathers were planning to turn the WHOLE of lower Westmount into highrises. Progress à la 1960.
Riding my sidewalk bicycle there in the days before the mass demolitions I was intrigued by the corner of Hallowell and Dorchester because the name 'Hallowell' was moulded into the edge of the sidewalk. This was a practice for a while on other streets.
Interesting link about how people today may see the world when using Google Maps Street View:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21880217
There was also the War Assets Corporation's WWII munitions factory at 9500 St. Laurent (recently demolished) just north of where Chabanel Street would later be built. See the former complex here in the 1947 aerial view:
ReplyDeletehttp://archivesdemontreal.com/greffe/vues-aeriennes-archives/jpeg/VM97-3_7P20-34.jpg
Follow today's Google map along Louvain West between St. Laurent and l'Esplanade to see the current open space where the former complex used to be. Adjacent map grids to the west of the one above indicate where the CPR's sidings used to service this and other nearby companies.
Read the story of the munitions plant here:
http://journalmetro.com/local/ahuntsic-cartierville/actualites/872887/un-batiment-temoin-de-lhistoire-de-chabanel-disparaitra/
Also noteworthy on the map above is the Montreal Tramways test and training trackage on the east side of St. Laurent and the related Youville Shops at the bottom edge of the screen which can be viewed more comprehensively on the following map:
http://archivesdemontreal.com/greffe/vues-aeriennes-archives/jpeg/VM97-3_7P19-34.jpg
Clearly seen at the far right is the former trackage of tram route 24 running along its north-south right-of-way through miles of open fields where Millen Street later replaced it; the 24 then veering west from Millen onto Cremazie for access to Youville before continuing further south down St. Denis to the iconic Craig Street Terminus (address 119) previously located just west of St. Urbain where the Convention Centre exists today. Craig Street itself was later absorbed into St. Antoine.
See if you can spot the Craig Street Terminus with its accessing tram tracks at centre screen here:
http://archivesdemontreal.com/greffe/vues-aeriennes-archives/jpeg/VM97-3_7P7-32.jpg
The War Assets Corporation's Warehouse 2 can be seen on the 1947 aerial map grid below. It was located at 8500 Blvd. St. Laurent between Liege and Cremazie. Note the passenger train on the far left of the photo being pulled by its steam locomotive.
ReplyDeleteNoteworthy among these aerial maps, and generally to be found alongside major thoroughfares, are the ubiquitous V-shaped structures. These are billboard signs which were highly criticized as eyesores by both the public and in newspaper articles. Subsequent Quebec legislation outlawed much of this blight, but not completely. See the one on the east side of St. Laurent halfway between Liege and Cremazie and others elsewhere as single flat boards.
http://archivesdemontreal.com/greffe/vues-aeriennes-archives/jpeg/VM97-3_7P18-33.jpg