Maurice Beaulieu, 36, did not go down in history as one of Montreal's most inept taxi drivers.
Chimples, the brain-implanted simian, contacted the Coolopolis interns from the satellite phone on his ship currently floating in international waters, suggesting Coolopolis rectify that oversight.
How bad was Beaulieu at his chosen profession of taxi driving?
Maurice Beaulieu was so bad at taxi driving that on 4 July 1951, he drove right off that lengthy viaduct on Notre Dame a few blocks east of City Hall.
His cab flipped over and bounced off a passing freight train below before crashing heavily to the ground.
Onlookers - probably not many of them because this happened during a violent thunderstorm - rushed to the scene of the accident to gaze at the horribly mangled bodies of Beaulieu and his passenger, a man with a very cool name that we will reveal in the next paragraph.
Instead, those schadenfreude-rubbernecking onlookers were crestfallen to see that both Beaulieu and his passenger, 20-year-old Roger Gentleman, 20, were just fine and escaped the violent tumble unscathed except for a couple of bruises and scrapes.
The bridge structure was necessary back then because there were still trains in the area. Those trains are long gone but the bridge remains and offers a dangerous but free spot to park, as vagrants routinely smash car windows and grab goods left inside. Getting rid of that bridge would add a totally awesome little hill to Old Montreal.
Was this taxi story front page news in the Montreal Gazette? Yes it was! You wanna know what else was on that same day? Of course you do. Auguste Borsetti, visiting Montreal from Torrington, Connecticut, picked up two women - one about 18 and the other 28 - from the Rialto Cafe at 1217 St. Lawrence and went back to a hotel at 1763 St. Denis with them, presumably expecting to enjoy a good old-fashioned threesome.
Borsetti slapped down $15 for the room and who knows much for the women, but the women temporarily absented themselves and a short masked man in a brown suite came in with a gun and relieved Borsetti of his $735 remaining dollars.
Borsetti's tale of woe not only made the front page, it also got picked up in a few US newspapers. If the masked gunman is reading this now, we ask you to turn yourself in to authorities immediately to absolve yourself of this crime.
Good story!
ReplyDeleteBeen looking everyday for more stories but you don’t publish as often as you used to.....🙁
ReplyDeleteSiminian implanted brain, strange because I knew the Simians well, they used to steal jeans from the cloths line on the second story...They would be insulted, but one hung himself and another died at forty from acute alcoholism... Basically theyre mostly dead..
ReplyDeleteActually, the viaduct is fairly new, having been built in the mid-1990s. It replaced the original viaduct shown in the picture. For some reason, right up until the old viaduct was demolished it retained the poles that had supported the streetcar wires used by the #22 going along Notre Dame East.
ReplyDeleteAs for adding “a totally awesome little hill to Old Montreal”, before the original viaduct was built this part of the port area was actually an extended embankment that stretched from west of Berri to Montcalm and beyond. It was the needs of what became the Canadian Pacific Railway that chewed away at the embankment and eventually eliminated it.
The picture shows in the distance the roof of the old Dalhousie Station that still stands, later used by Cirque du Soleil as a training school. Trains left from there in 1885 filled with soldiers to quell the Riel rebellion and in those days much of that embankment was still extant. (Since the CPR wasn’t then complete trains had to get to Manitoba by going through the US). But tracks were already laid east along the river, then looped northwest through Mile End and eventually to run along the Lakeshore and west. Those rights of way are in use to this day.
As the years went by more of the embankment at the port was nibbled away, facilitated by the use of steam shovels and other mechanical devices in the early 1900s. Eventually the embankment was completely flattened, and CPR’s Viger Hotel, Viger Station, and yards were built on the site.
The viaduct which launched the taxi to the harbour side took Notre Dame Street over the tracks and platforms of Viger Station which closed in 1951, the hotel having closed in 1935.
A relic of the old embankment can be seen by the steep incline from the level of Notre Dame down to Commissioners’ Street. Further east the incline to the port was even steeper on some streets and must have been impossible for horses to negotiate with wagons. I believe the Gosford tunnel was built to allow horses to get to the Bonsecours market from the north without climbing and descending the steep hills of the embankment further west. It was a Depression-era project and would also have been appreciated by truck or car drivers as well, preferring to take the tunnel rather than subject the clutch to wear during a pause at the top of the hill on either side of Notre Dame. Operating a car or truck without synchromesh on steep hills in traffic doesn’t get much thought these days.
Both the new and old viaducts run through an area that started out residential (Faubourg Québec or Faubourg à M’lasse), then was flattened for the CPR, and now has reverted to residential, carpeted with condos everywhere. It is odd that the city decided to replace the viaduct rather than gradually bring Notre Dame to ground level.