Montreal's head race was a narrow waterway south of the Lachine Canal that ran east of
Cabot Street and flowed towards St. Remy St.
The head race not only disappeared from the map but became forgotten to the contemporary generation and their modern memories. These photos, posted online by the City of Montreal archives, might put a change to that.
A water race is a "watercourse constructed to convey water," which suggests that the head race was specifically built for the purposes of bringing water to the Lachine Canal.
Indeed the head race had a real function, which was to harness the waterfall created by adjacent locks to create local electricity.
The head race generated electricity as water exited industrial turbines into the Lachine Canal from double locks.
Montreal also had a tail race further west near the canal, which is defined as a "water channel below a dam or water mill." Coolopolis has written about the tail race.
The photos, taken in 1964 by City of Montreal bureaucrats, were shot in order to maintain a record of sites facing pending demolition, which indicates that the buildings and waterway were erased from the map soon after.
The makeshift bridges included one with a roof and were not required to be built at any particular height because no boats or ships were required to travel down the waterway.
Newspapers only make one clear reference to the head race, as on 9 July 1921 when The Gazette reported that Barnard Dempsey of Lachine drowned trying to swim across it (an earlier report called him Albert Dempsey, 38, and that his last words to his helpless friends were: "Hold my hat and coat I'm going to jump into the canal.")
The head race is mapped out here in 1949. It roughly followed the white line on the current image below.
The head race was boarded over for a time, as this 1947 aerial view photo demonstrates.
This 1964 photo is described as being at 5296 St. Patrick Street, now an empty field. The head race would have been near its backyard.
The building with the arched windows on the left sat near the covered bridge and served as a two-turbine generating station.
A reader sent these delicious photos of that same turbine generator.
He writes:
These are from June 1971. I biked down to the canal to see how it looked drained. There was a major clean-up operation that year pulling out old cars and inspecting the concrete canal banks. (I remember Acorn Street as a favourite dumping-spot for wrecked cars. Scrap prices must have been low.)
The canal had long been disused by ships and was yet to be revived for recreation so draining it in summer wasn't a problem. The Canada Malting operation was still going on the north side of the canal but all the old buildings between this flume and the head race to the right had already been demolished. I don't remember those myself.
Always thought it was a shame to pull that powerhouse down. Mrs Bates might have lived upstairs.
St. Patrick is now considerably wider than it was when these photos were shot. The distance between the south bank of the Lachine Canal to the south sidewalk of St. Patrick is now about 65 feet but these photos demonstrate that St. Patrick was about 20 feet wide and unpaved, possibly only open to one-way traffic.
The precise location of most of these structures remains a mystery as almost all of them were subsequently demolished.
Trains ran right along the edge of the north side of the canal - seen here.
A basin sat just east of the head race with a
bascule (raised) bridge at its entrance on St. Patrick. It carried both vehicles and rail until demolished in 1958. A steam winch moved boats inside the basin. The Lachine Canal Basins were
discussed previously on Coolopolis. (The canal bridge further west at Dollard was also a bascule bridge, which would have been awesome to watch when raised and boats passed underneath but less-so if you were waiting to cross.)
A Coolopolis reader wrote to explain the rail south of the canal. "The CPR canal bank spur once paralleled the Lachine Canal from the CPR swing bridge at LaSalle yard to Northern Electric at Shearer and Bridge streets. There was once a small yard to the west of the Northern Electric plant named ' Island Street yard. The locomotives were serviced at the Cote St. Paul yard at Church St. The LaSalle loop line once circled around west from LaSalle Coke to CPR LaSalle yard." See the picture in greater detail
here.
The line
looped around in LaSalle near this pair of gas holders.
Very interesting.
ReplyDeleteFor more intricate details about the Lachine Canal and its immediate surroundings, researchers may consult the 61-page, spiral-bound book entitled "Lachine Canal Historical Atlas", published in 1988 by the Association des Mil Lieues, which contains many fascinating photos and maps.
In particular, the 1890 map on page 30 shows the Head Race (Canal d'amenee). Here, however, St. Patrick Street does not yet exist and Workman Street is indicated as Cabot Street's previous name--this 1890 Workman Street being different to the Workman Street created at a later date north of Notre Dame West.
Indeed, many streets in this and other vicinities had, over time, undergone name changes for whatever reason; a lot of municipal, bureaucratic make-work that only serves to confound those pouring through directories and period maps and a practice that still occurs today but with more questionable motives.
North of the Head Race are also shown the locations of various industries, e.g. metallurgy, flour mills, etc., the names of which can likely be determined via Lovell's directory for that era.
The location of some of the structures isn’t too mysterious. As a teenager I took pictures of the already-abandoned powerhouse which still stood in 1971. I have a picture showing the building with the arched windows taken from the west. The powerhouse stood next to the locks which canallers and even small ocean-going ships used to get from the Atlantic to the far end of Lake Superior. There was a double lock at Cote St. Paul so ships in either direction could be handled simultaneously.
ReplyDeleteThe powerhouse was served by a narrow flume but the Goad map of 1912 shows the actual head race on the south-west side of the flume. The two-storey buildings stood between the power-house flume and the head race. You can see the latter at far right in the picture looking through the open chain-link gates with the arched-windowed wing of the powerhouse on the left.
Nominally that was St. Patrick street going through the gates but in fact until the mid-70s going west you had to turn left onto the short street Gilmour, then right on Cabot which led back to the canal and St. Patrick going to La Salle. The head race was still there as a visible basin of water. It’s all filled in now, and built-on.
One of the pictures shows a house with mansard roof with three dormers. It’s still there though much modified and since then a new street was created next to it as an extension of Hadley going to St. Patrick. The building to the left of that house is also a survivor though again very changed. The building on the right was demolished to create the Hadley extension and I remember it as possibly having been a church though in 1971 it was used as a dilapidated garage. There was a series of pictures of Point St. Charles in Coolopolis about a year ago and by mistake that same house with the three dormers figured. I wrote a similar comment to the above that it was in Cote St. Paul.
All those buildings were/are very old, probably going back at least to the 1870s and were/are remnants of the village of Cote St. Paul. Even in the 1970s there were houses with large gardens. One abandoned house on Dunn or Brock was used by the Montreal police as a practice site for the SWAT team. Maybe it was covered here, but an old gent who had lived there kept returning to the house in its ruined state, his dementia preventing his remembering he’d been moved away.
The small bascule bridge was just west of the foot of Courcelle Street on the other side of the canal. The aerial photo series of 1947 pre-date the building of the St. Remi tunnel.
There must be other readers who remember the twin bascule bridges at La Salle better than I do since I was a tot. but I do recall the “new” bridge being installed c. 1957. In those days it was Lafleur, not Dollard. Lafleur was the main approach to the Mercier Bridge and the route was direct, not as it is today with the dogleg from Dollard. Of course the original bed of the street is still visible.
The lift bridges, in combination with the CNR mainline that ran through Ville St. Pierre, were a death trap for many an unsuspecting motorist stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic going to the Mercier bridge. If the lift bridges were up, the back-up of course would obstruct the railway crossing and cars were regularly hit by trains if they couldn’t clear the level crossing. The 91 streetcar tracks ran parallel to the CNR but were hardly the hazard that CN’s trains were to cars stalled on the crossing. Conrad Poirier took pictures of a mangled Model T there and the morgue van taking away a victim, late 1930s.
The picture showing the Simmons mattress plant shows its east wall so it’s taken from St. Ambroise at the corner of Sir-Georges-Étienne-Cartier. The billboard advertising a 1965 Ford is supported by a recycled MTC line pole. Claude Néon must have scooped up a large number when the streetcars were abandoned.
Awesome. Thanks. Please post the pictures you have or send them to megaforce@gmail.com and I'll post them.
DeleteInteresting and like the old photos of the past…
ReplyDeleteConcerning the original bascule-type bridge (currently named the Gauron Bridge) which has connected Ville St. Pierre (now merged with Lachine) over the Lachine Canal to LaSalle since it was built in 1912 this structure suffered a major incident on October 3, 1923 when one of the 900-ton counterweights broke away from its rivet bearings, just missing the S.S. Beauharnois, a passing steamer. The debris crashed onto both the canal bank and the roadway below. Remarkably, no one was injured. Read the details in the Montreal Gazette for Thursday, Oct. 4, 1923, page 4: "Lachine Canal Blocked By Fall Of Concrete Mass", and for Friday, Oct. 5, 1923, page 6: "Grain Ships Wait For Passage Way".
ReplyDeleteTo ease the growing vehicular traffic bottlenecks, in 1959 the single-leaf bascule-type Lafleur Bridge was built directly adjacent to the east of the Gauron Bridge.
Around 1970, both bridges became un-manned and unraisable when ships no longer used the Lachine Canal, henceforth to use the St. Lawrence Seaway which had opened in 1959. As of the summer of 2020, rehabilitation work was being done on these bridges' infrastructures as well as on their roadbeds below.
To see exactly how such a bascule bridge operates in live action, see the YouTube video link below of the Johnson Street Bridge in Victoria, B.C. A brand new bridge has since been built adjacent to it after much political squabbling, not to mention the controversial removal of a popular passenger VIA Rail line over the original bascule bridge several years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZpD8NoSJts&ab_channel=Welwyn22
On June 22, 1934, the Mercier Bridge opened. See the Montreal Gazette for Saturday, June 23, 1934, page 2: "New River Bridge Opened To Traffic". It began operation as a toll bridge but they were subsequently dropped, although such tolls continued in force on both the Jacques Cartier and the Champlain Bridges for decades until they too had them abolished due to public pressure. In 1963, a parallel Mercier Bridge was erected, but this and subsequent upgrades to deal with the ever-increasing traffic volume has done little to ease congestion, particularly during rush hours.
A Montreal Gazette article of Saturday, September 14, 1957, page 21 entitled "New Plan Effective Today Eases Canal Bridge Traffic" included a map that proposed a new route to smooth the traffic flow from the Gauron Bridge to the Mercier Bridge, but this never became a reality.
Indeed, the entire north-south area between 5th Avenue (since renamed Avenue St. Pierre) across the Lachine canal had historically been dubbed the "worst traffic problem in Canada" and "the Death Strip" due to the many fatalities of pedestrians traversing the original, east-west-running Metropolitan Boulevard (since reconfigured and renamed Route 20) and years of train-vehicle collisions at the original CNR mainline level crossing (later closed and relocated further north as of June 4, 1961 (see Canadian Rail Magazine for May-June 1961, page 66) including the frequency of former MTC route 90 trams at its level crossing as well (yet with its rusted, unused trackage remaining intact as of 2021 and terminating at 10th Avenue, Lachine).
Even today, however, unwary cyclists and pedestrians have been killed due to the heavy traffic with cars, busses, and heavy trucks impatient to beat the lights and escape this zone as quickly as possible--which is rarely even possible. Everyone moving around here must keep their eyes and ears open at all times.
Regarding the St. Remi Tunnel, it opened on Saturday Dec. 15, 1951 (See Gazette, Monday, Dec. 17, 1951, page 10 "Snow Bars Tunnel Ceremony But Forces Opening Anyway". This tunnel was first talked about in 1939 but work only began in October 1949.
Thanks for this excellent contribution. That bridge is fascinating.
ReplyDeleteAlways happy to contribute.
ReplyDeleteI am still researching the exact date in 1912 when the original bascule bridge opened.
Perhaps even more "fascinating", in my opinion, is why anyone would choose to live in those old dwellings located on the east side of Rue St. Pierre between Rue St. Jacques and the westbound service road of Route 20. The non-stop traffic noise and air pollution would be horrendous.
This entire area must surely be zoned industrial and commercial so I assume those dwellings pre-date the zoning rules and are therefore exempt from expropriation unless we assume that the owners are hoping to sell those properties for as much as they can get--that is, if they live long enough to find a buyer.
Presumably due to the obvious danger to pedestrians and cyclists versus drivers' impatience, a police officer can sporadically be seen manually regulating the traffic lights from the control box at the northwest corner of Rue St. Pierre and Route 20.
A solution to this entire multi-intersection's "controlled-chaos" would be to build a pedestrian/cyclist right-of-way overpass--an idea that had been proposed decades ago but which ended up unrealized due to the usual political squabbling among the relevant governments, the then-railway and the then-tramway. "Who is going to pay for it?", etc. Strange that no one ever considers sharing such expenses equally!
In any event, to create such a pedestrian/cyclist overpass through this sector today would clearly be very complicated if not impossible to construct, which is why the apparently imminent plan (as of 2021) to enable access from N.D.G. down through La Falaise (The Bluff) via a new cyclist/pedestrian bridge over the former CNR Turcot Yards, Route 20, the Lachine Canal and directly into LaSalle will be an excellent alternative.
Here is the Montreal 1947-49 aerial view of the bascule bridge over the Lachine Canal and its surrounding area.
ReplyDeletehttps://archivesdemontreal.ica-atom.org/uploads/r/ville-de-montreal-section-des-archives/2/2/223103/VM97-3_7P11-11.jpg
Note in particular on the north side of the canal the curving ramps to access the then Metropolitan Boulevard (since reconfigured as Route 20) with the CNR main line and tramway tracks below it. The Death Strip!
Collision at The Death Strip.
ReplyDeleteThe Montreal Star article for September 5, 1956, page 3 "Two Track Accidents" with photos outlines the death of a Pointe Claire woman hit by a train and a CNR train-truck collision in the Town of Ville St. Pierre (since annexed by Lachine). The exact location in Pointe Claire where the woman was killed is not revealed.
The Montreal Gazette for September 6, 1956, page 3 article entitled "Train Kills Woman, 68, at Pointe Claire Crossing" goes on to include similar details with photos of the same accident at the 5th Avenue (since renamed Rue St. Pierre) level crossing.
Of interest, note that the same Montreal Star edition for May 5, 1956, includes "Buses Moving Crowds 10-15 Minutes Faster" with reference to how the city's newly-purchased Brill diesel buses have sped up the movement of downtown workers during rush hour following the streetcars' discontinuance, and another heading "Propose Mountain Tunnel to Link Laurentian Road".
Regarding the latter article, one must wonder if city planners were truly serious with their conception to run "The Laurentian Road" (since renamed Autoroute 15) through The Town of Mount Royal, Outremont and through Mount Royal itself directly over the existing Two Mountains line train tunnel.
Indeed, such a plan is difficult to swallow, based not only on the potential cost financially but on how clearly destructive it would have been to the affected neighbourhoods. Indeed, these "planners" clearly acknowledge this where they ultimately suggest the alternate plan to instead use Persillier Blvd. (later reconfigured as l'Acadie Blvd.) rather than--perish the thought--bulldozing through the high-end housing of the wealthy in T.M.R. and wiping out McEachran Avenue in Outremont and onward over the Mount Royal Tunnel.
Then again, one can only imagine the gleeful expressions among such bureaucrats as they surely visualized in their minds the inevitable outrage by well-heeled residents in fear of having their homes obliterated in such a mercenary fashion in order to improve the traffic flow. Of course, "car was king" back then and the liveability of neighbourhoods and community mattered way less than "getting Joe Bleau to his downtown office on time".
Nevertheless, I can easily imagine these faceless 1950s bureaucrats sitting around a table poring over similar plans that had already been completed or underway in certain U.S. cities where residential districts were ravaged and divided by ugly polluting expressways, many of which in subsequent decades have thankfully since been demolished and their communities restored as best as possible--e.g. Brooklyn, Boston, San Francisco, etc.
Sadly, however, such destruction continues elsewhere in the world by despotic governments only too happy to sacrifice their own people's best interests to foreign financing. Read the link below and weep:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/dec/08/how-nairobis-road-for-the-rich-resulted-in-thousands-of-homes-reduced-to-rubble
Latest tragedy at "The Death Strip"...Jan. 3, 2022
ReplyDeletehttps://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/woman-dead-man-in-serious-condition-after-suv-plunges-into-lachine-canal
The Montreal Gazette for Jan. 7, 1956, page 3 article "What About Pedestrians? Tunnel No Safeguard Crossing Boulevard" (with map) outlines the long-discussed, but never-realized plan to create a tunnel in this still-hazardous, high-traffic bottleneck area of the Ville St. Pierre district (since merged with Lachine).
ReplyDeleteRecent noises by Lachine to establish a light-rail line to Montreal by re-purposing the abandoned former CNR main line track alongside Victoria Street, across busy Dollard Avenue, and continuing east between Notre Dame and Route 20 would problematically re-establish a level crossing which had in previous decades been a major cause of deadly accidents in this the notorious "death strip".
Regarding the Rue St. Pierre bascule bridge over the Lachine Canal, newspaper research has thus far only determined that its actual construction began in early 1913 and opening in the spring of that year.
ReplyDeleteThe Montreal Star, Feb. 22, 1913, page 3 "Biggest Bridge in America for Lachine Canal - Next Spring Will See Completion of of Three Hundred Foot Structure" re. plan for Bascule Bridge over Lachine Canal."
The Montreal Daily Star, Feb. 24, 1913 photo "Largest Bridge of its Kind in America". caption: "Straus Bascule Bridge now in course of erection on the Lachine Canal Banks at St. Pierre aux Liens. Its total length will be about three hundred feet, the moving part alone having a length of two hundred feet and the weight is six hundred tons.".
The Gazette, May 30, 1913, page 5 article "To Enlarge the Welland Canal" includes "...The amount of $400,295 was passed over the Rockfield bascule bridge over the Lachine Canal."
The Gazette, Oct. 7, 1913, page 9 article "News of Railroads", includes "...The bascule bridge across the canal at Rockfield has excited a good deal of attention.".
Oddly enough, tracking down the actual opening dates of city projects such as bridges, parks, streets, sewers, etc., via newspaper archives is less successful than discovering relevant notices of initial tenders for interested contractors, articles and photos of work-in-progress, reports concerning citizen group opposition (often frivolous), as well as editorials pro and con.
I must assume that newspapers either lose interest in tying up such "loose ends" or for whatever reason do not consider an opening date important enough to print. Admittedly, while newspapers would not be the very best source, they are nevertheless the most accessible to the general public.
This state of affairs is further complicated by the fact that a road, bridge, underpass, etc. may actually open to the public days, weeks, or months before the "official" ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by grinning politicians.
Here's a tough one: when exactly did the noise pollution of cacophonous harbour ship whistles (other than for imminent potential collisions and other such emergencies) come to an official end? I will assume such "tooting" signalling was mostly replaced by two-way radio traffic when it became universally available. One would imagine there was an international agreement outlawing the practice.
Most of us are familiar with this whistling ship racket as it is so often used as background noise for movies filmed in and around major city ports, although usually re-using stock sound footage no matter what city port is portrayed.
Another recent tragedy near the notorious "death strip". See:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.mtlblog.com/montreal/car-hit-cyclist-lachine-morning-police-fear-for-her-life
There was talk of excavating a tunnel or creating a separate, cyclist-right-of-way; familiar suggestions that have come and gone over the past decades but with no resolution.
Quite frankly, the entire infrastructure within this stretch from the north end of Dollard Avenue across St. Patrick, the Lachine canal, Rue St. Pierre, highway 20 and its service ramps would have to be completely re-imagined and rebuilt to completely segregate vehicles from cyclists and pedestrians. Such a complicated undertaking would involve the expropriation of some adjacent private and commercial properties, and, of course, the closure of this vital, cross-canal link until the project was completed, which would undoubtedly take years. Until then, everyone
must keep their eyes and ears when moving about the
area.