Around 1073 Prudhomme. Houses were demolished in the mid-1960s for the Decarie Expressway
The Pulcini family in front of 941 Minto, a home - and street - demolished in 1964 for the Decarie Expressway.
985 Addington, Peter Ponzi's mother and granny in front of a home demolished for the Decarie Expressway, along with the rest of the buildings on the east side of Addington, all of Minto and the west side of Prudhomme.
Addington below Upper Lachine, before the east side, on the right, was demolished for the Decarie motor vehicle trench. Photo Peter Ponzi, featuring his mom and uncle from the USA.
Italian women on Minto Ave. in the 1950s, now totally demolished on both sides.
Addington 1950s, buildings on right later demolished
970 Addington prior to the demolitions which claimed the opposite side of the street. Friends and family were split with the wrecking ball. Photo features Peter Ponzi's grandmother who performed her evil eye removal and nervo chavalato, and other medical healing magic on anybody willing to put up with it.
Peter Ponzi's father on Addington, in the area demolished for the expressway.
NDG Curling and Bowling, demolished for the expressway. It sat just north of Sherbrooke in the middle of where the Expressway now sits.
Gilson School at 1020 Harvard, was built in 1918, as a temporary structure for 133 students taught by three teachers, during a time when the area was full of apple trees and not much else. It was reinforced with additions in 1924, 1926, 1930 and 1949. About 340 pupils attended in the years following World War II. It was demolished in 1966, not long after the massive demolitions a few blocks east.
Shirley Anderson at the now-demolished Brodie farmhouse structure at the south side of Oxford Park, 1954. The Brodie family sold their farm to the City of Montreal in 1949 for $75,000. They asked that the city turn the building into a community facility but the city demolished the venerable structure instead. The building sat on the south side of the park not far from St. James.
West End Motel, now demolished 6700 Upper Lachine, aka St. James
Glen Yards, demolished and replaced by the superhospital
Motel Raphael - Ste. Anne de Bellevue Street, or Montreal-Toronto Blvd, just west of where the McDonald's now stands. Left abandoned for many years before finally being dismantled and removed a few years back.
St Raymond's school on Upper Lachine Road, northeast corner Oxford. It was demolished long ago and recently replaced a French school. Similarly John XXIII elementary school on Old Orchard was closed around 2000 and the building is now used as an adult learning center
Oxford Park once had a baseball field inhabited by fearless young people unfazed by curveballs and brushback pitches. The park is still there but the baseball infrastructure removed. This pic shows the Oxford Park Community Association Senior baseball team, champions of 1932. All lived in NDG. Back: Pat Patterson, Bob Flegg and Alf Connolly. Center: Fernand Dalpe, Ken Stewart, Ernie Healy, Bert Mosdell Front: Des McGuire, Hal Connolly, Ed Murray and Mascot Willis Mosdell. George (Percy) Miller, Buster Creighton and Coach Ernie Mosdell not shown.
great ,write up & photos
ReplyDeletethanks for the memories of growing up on Prud'homme in the fifties!
ReplyDeletei was living a the 1028 prud'homme
DeleteThank you for this trip down memory lane. I believe that the Motel Colibri, (6960 St. Jacques), and Motel St. Jacques, (1980 Westmore) are the last hold outs from that era. Who can forget Elmhurst Dairy as well. All the best for the holidays!
ReplyDeleteValuable record of times past.
ReplyDeleteNow I know why I'd never heard of, or seen, Minto.
ReplyDeleteExcellent pics, Nittolo's brings back memories lol
ReplyDeleteThanks for the story and old pics, some of those old motels I remember….
ReplyDeleteCool pics!
ReplyDeleteThe scourge of urban renewal.
ReplyDeleteMontreal has seen and continues to see too many of its historic places demolished and neighbourhoods divided by projects supposedly created for "the greater good".
As predicted, the Empress Theatre in N.D.G. was deliberately allowed to deteriorate until the city "had no choice" but to let it become another victim of demolition. It could have been saved but the usual partners in crime chose to ignore citizens groups and the endless parade of half-baked political promises that dragged on for decades. They must really think we are stupid.
The Decarie Expressway was pretty much a foregone conclusion, however, once Expo67 was announced, although it had been proposed as far back as the late 1950s when vehicle traffic seriously began to clog city streets.
A comparable situation occured in Toronto years ago concerning the thankfully ill-fated Spadina Expressway, however. Neighbourhood citizens groups and politicians opposed to the project rose up in arms to prevent it from going ahead as originally planned. See:
https://www.blogto.com/city/2010/07/nostalgia_tripping_the_spadina_expressway_debacle/
and others via Google Search.
Newspapers.com now has the Montreal Star
ReplyDeleteSo glad that Newspapers.com has added The Montreal Star to its archive.
ReplyDeleteThis was our major evening newspaper for decades but which unfortunately ceased publication in 1979. Its archives were purchased by The Montreal Gazette. To date (as of December 2021), the free online Google Newspaper Archives website has not added The Montreal Star to its list for researchers' access. Hopefully, this oversight will be addressed in the near future.
Now, to the topic at hand...See The Montreal Star of Friday, July 17, 1959, page 3 which shows a "staff map by Owen Maccabe" of the proposed Decarie Expressway which suggests an alternate route which I suspect was a trial balloon cynically tossed like a hand grenade for potentially-affected, neighbourhood residents to gape at in horror.
Note how this proposed route swerves west from Dupuis Avenue, razing a large number of residences alongside Earnscliffe Avenue, incidentally destroying MacDonald Park in the process and continuing on to smash its way through to Monkland Avenue where, lo and behold, a tunnel was to be excavated beneath the N.D.G. Catholic church (5333 Notre Dame de Grace Ave.), only to surface again through much more demolished housing until ending abruptly at St. James St. West (St. Jacques West) although the caption mentions Upper Lachine Road as its presumed terminal point with evidently no concept of a future Turcot Interchange at that point in history.
One can only imagine the fury hurled against this proposed route when anyone with a brain could clearly see that running the expressway straight down Decarie Blvd. itself would have been the most logical and less destructive path--which, as we all know, was indeed the ultimate choice. Even that too-short tunnel beneath the church and adjacent properties became reality.
Fast-forward to today (2021), exactly how and when our infamous "Trench" will eventually be completely covered over to accommodate a green space, cycling paths, and some vehicle parking is anyone's guess despite the all-too-familiar campaign promises made by countless municipal and provincial politicians over the years, so Don't hold your collective breaths.
Also note the usual gobbledegook trotted out in the adjacent article "Councillors See Need For Subway" along with the babble about long-standing projects, many of which either never saw the light of day or were altered considerably.
Yeah, we certainly needed a subway (Toronto's opened in 1954) but it took until 1966 for our Metro to start running.
Great photos and while a bit before my time, NDG was my second home after TMR, because my parents lived, and my mother and uncle grew up, on Oxford Ave. In the 80s, I lived on Old Orchard in an apartment above Cinema 5. Thanks for this article. I didn't know anything about this lost history of NDG.
ReplyDeleteDid you know that:
ReplyDelete1) The funeral home at 5610 Sherbrooke West (southwest corner of Marcil Ave.--was originally the residence of Georges Marcil, the last mayor of N.D.G. before the town was annexed by Montreal in 1910.
2) The recently-renovated "chalet" in N.D.G. Park (corner Sherbrooke and Girouard) was originally a police station.
3) An insane asylum (The Hospital for Incurables) once occupied the southeast corner of Decarie and Cote St. Luc Road.
See:
https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/uhr/1900-v1-n1-uhr0791/1018121ar.pdf
The last picture showing the corner of Minto and de Maisonneuve/Western is looking west, not east. It's the north side of the CPR tracks. The sun is to the left and it's between 11 and 12 noon. The sign near the greenhouses says E. Daccord. Can't find a record of the business on any of Minto, Western, or Addington Avenues in the Lovell directories of 1935-45 but there are listings for Emmanuel Daccord, gardener, at various residential addresses in NDG in the likely period of this photo of Conrad Poirier.
ReplyDeleteThe 1947 aerial photos show the greenhouses had been demolished but the trees on the right are visible.
Lovell's Directory for 1937-38 reveals that the business address for florist Emmanuel Daccord was 2085 Addington Avenue, which was the first numbered address north of the CPR tracks. Daccord's home (h) residence was also listed as 4615 Clanranald.
ReplyDeleteAddington Avenue itself, being the very next street west of Minto Avenue, managed to escape obliteration by the Decarie Expressway. I can't imagine living on Addington today, however, with all of that non-stop traffic noise. Property values must comparably low to the rest of NDG.
The photo faces the eastern side of the greenhouses and clearly shows a footpath between them and the fence separating the CPR railway tracks.
What looks curiously like a 1937 Dodge pickup (with at least one passenger sitting on its tailgate) is heading south on Minto and turning the corner onto Western.
I can only imagine the excitement in that long-lost era created by the ubiquitous steam trains that routinely chuffed and clanked along those tracks and how the neighbourhood kids must have run yelling right up to that fence to watch! Thankfully, I myself managed to witness those unforgettable, final years of steam train action which ended circa 1960-61.
A 1939 Montreal archive map (see the link and details below) clearly shows Western Avenue (since renamed de Maisonneuve) turning north onto Minto but no further west at that point.
Indeed, it would be several years before Western Avenue's intersection with Decarie would be reconfigured and eventually extended all the way to West Broadway Avenue, a process which certainly would have involved much negotiation for the purchase of the private housing that existed right up to the CPR's fence on all of those north-south NDG streets, followed by their demolition and the completion of the Western Avenue's pavement.
A close look at the 1939 map reveals that, oddly, a few of those north-south streets were in fact connected together at their southern ends and wide enough for vehicles to pass but likely unpaved until much later. The current bike path along Western/de Maisonneuve was created in the 1980s or 90s.
https://archivesdemontreal.ica-atom.org/1939-3-cite-de-montreal-city-of-montreal-1939
Scroll the above for map item P058 - 1939-3: City of Montreal
For those who may be interested in such local history minutiae, further details regarding Western Avenue, etc. can be found in The Montreal Star of May 3, 1956, pages 3 and 5 including a map which explain the then road expansion north of the CPR tracks and relevant street name changes.
ReplyDeleteThe overall plan was to eventually assimilate Western Avenue into its new name Boulevard de Maisonneuve which occurred in 1965 and included Rue de Montigny, Burnside, and Rue St. Luc, thereby creating a unified westbound through-road from Rue du Havre (Harbour Street) all the way to N.D.G. while reconfiguring St. Catherine Street from its original two-way into an exclusively eastbound route for the majority of its downtown area length. Lovell's Directory for 1966-67 notes the name change based on information collected from the previous year.
One conundrum yet to be explained, however, is that Western Avenue did NOT intersect with Elmhurst Avenue as its perpendicular terminal point despite what was implied on various vintage maps and city planning projections.
Instead, Western Avenue swerved north onto West Broadway (as indeed it still does) with the newly-created Coffee Park blocking any potential intersection with Elmhurst which, by the way, would have been physically problematic. The one-block-long Coffee Avenue runs east-west on the north side of the park.
Another question is exactly when in 1956 was the paving completed along Western Avenue north of the CPR tracks?
Perhaps anyone who routinely drove through or resided in N.D.G. at the time can enlighten us regarding these and other details?
Page 1 of the Montreal Gazette for July 17, 1959 also features a map and an article outlining what was then described as "a preliminary study" of the Decarie Expressway--the article entitled "Proposed North-South Expressway Would Cost $43 Million".
ReplyDeleteThankfully, that route proposal was later significantly altered from what would certainly have been way more devastating to other residential sections of the neighbourhood in addition to those who indeed ended up being expropriated, but, as I alluded to in an early post, I suspect that this early plan was a scare tactic. It reeks of unnecessary overkill.
Presumably the Catholic Church was influential in making sure that their N.D.G. Church property at 5333 Notre Dame de Grace Avenue was spared demolition and that it be tunneled under.
Interestingly, the article goes on to report that "elevated construction, comparable to depressed in cost, had been abandoned because of the residential character of the vicinity and foundation difficulties.". Not sure how much of that is true.
I will assume that at least a few members on the planning committee had suggested tunneling for a much longer distance between Cote de Liesse and Upper Lachine Road/St. Jacques but, unfortunately, as we all know, this did not happen--much to the dismay and disappointment of those living nearby who have since been forced to tolerate the constant traffic noise and air pollution.
The "east-west harborside expressway" mentioned in the article evolved to become Routes 20 and 720 and the long-proposed (since the 1920s), so-called "Trans-Island Highway" became Boulevard Metropolitain, Route 40.
I can only imagine the shocked looks on the faces of Minto Avenue's vintage four-plex residents and on those of the hundreds of apartment building dwellers located on the east side of Decarie between Cote St. Luc and Queen Mary Road when they received their notices to vacate their homes.
Update to N.D.G.'s Western Avenue extension north of the CPR tracks:
ReplyDeleteRead The Montreal Star for May 3, 1956, pages 3 and 5 article: "Artery to Montreal West - Western Avenue Extension Work", includes a map and a description of the roadwork planned to begin the summer of that year, and presumably to be completed before year's end resulting in significant street name changes for the sake of continuity, after which I will assume the affected residents developed problems with mail delivery.
Note the map indicating that Western would intesect directly with Elmhurst--which never happened.
Western Avenue was amalgamated into Blvd. de Maisonneuve in 1965.