Leonard Cohen's artist-filled neighbourhood

Sculptor Cheryl Kenmey bought this house for $8,000

Sculptor Cheryl Kenmey bought this home at 4255 St. Dominique around 1968 for $8,000 and sold it in 1988 for $75,000.
   When she moved in, there was a rope factor and a candle factory a couple of doors down and the block was full of immigrants and had a biker issue.
   She bought it because her mentor had recently moved in few doors up.
  Morton Rosengarten,who lived at 4307 St.Dominique, had moved there because he got the idea from Michel Garneau, a prolific playwright who wrote about 50 plays and now lives in Magog.
   Garneau was the first of the artists to move into the block and would be seen hard at work at a desk near the window, a Do Not Disturb Artist At Work sign prominently displayed.
   Rosengarten still owns his modest duplex, which was never renovated or even touched up much, it has an old fashioned-four legged bathtub right in the hall near the kitchen. But he is rarely there, preferring instead to live in Ways Mills in the Townships.
   He told me that artists were pushed out of downtown in the 60s as the area became jammed with bars and other commerce. Now he's a bit miffed that the Plateau has seen a similar fate, making is noisy and unpleasant as drunken youth galavant well into the night.
   When Rosengarten came, so too did his best friend, a poet named Leonard Cohen, who bought a triplex right across at 28 Vallieres, which he still owns but doesn't spend much time at. Cohen's property is evaluated at $298,000, which is very low, so it's probably not in great shape inside.
  Rosengarten and Cohen came from comfortable backgrounds that saw the neighbourhood as a symbol of immigrant desperation, the kind of place you try desperately to move away from, so it was a counter-intuitive move coming back to the area.
  But nonetheless, when Cohen bought in, the critical mass of artists kept sprouting and soon it became a real artists community right in the heart of the city.
  The neighbourhood saw artists break bread and discuss ideas, it was cauldron of creativity, as artist Charlie Gurd called it.
  And Cohen was at the centre of the action. 
  "We call him the master of depression but he has to be the funniest guy I ever met," said Kenmey. "It really made me feel like I was part of something, I felt like I was in the world because everybody was doing something."
  When Kenmey took off for a few years, a filmmaker named Derek May, now deceased, moved in and shot a documentary about Cohen in the neighbourhood.
   Another filmmaker George Ungar recalls the artistic energy that reigned when he lived there.
    "The presence of that kind of spirit, they engage in a creative field, it gives you energy, you take yourself more seriously  you pursue things with more conviction and that’s important  especially  in today’s world where the pressures of mercantile pursuits are enormous. It's like going back in time to a slower world w here instead of turning onto the TV you go and talk to your neighbours," he said.
   The area was so intimate that one resident reported that he was walking down the middle of the street and could hear people snoring on both sides. "It was like one big apartment," said Ungar.
  Historian Denise Beaugrand-Champagne lived in the area and has studied its history.
  She said that in a previous generation the adjacent Portugal Park had been nicknamed Communist Park because of all of the swap meets that saw people exchange goods to save money.

  She said it was a quiet neighbourhood almost exclusively populated by immigrants when the artists moved in. 

  But she, like Rosengarten, soured when the bars proliferated. 

  "When the immigrants started leaving going to the suburbs it became less interesting, and all those bars just ruined the neighbourhood."