Denis Delaney, the heart of old Griffintown, dies

   The great Denis Delaney has died.
    Delaney was the quintessential lively Irishman from below the hill and once enthusiastically told me the true story of Neptune's broken leg, which I wrote about here.
  I spoke to Delaney once about old Griffintown, which is being totally rehauled now.
    Delaney, born in the Griff, blamed Catholic brass for the abandonment of the well-located downtown-adjacent area.
  It happened in 1970 when St-Anne’s church was demolished.
   This is what I wrote in an interview I did something like a decade or 12 years ago.
   “The Catholic Church decided to get of either St. Anne’s in Griffintown or St. Patrick’s Basilica and even thought St. Patrick’s is impressive, it wasn’t an obvious choice, because Ste. Anne’s was well attended. Busloads of people would come down to the Tuesday devotions to visit the picture of Mother of Perpetual Health, it was said to cause miracles. Even my mother used to say that it did something for her but she never told us what it was.”    Delaney, who now lives in Westmount, frequently rides his bike down to the old area to reminisce about his youth.

   “The canal was our summer resort. I’d say about six or seven kids drowned there when I was growing up. There was the Oka Sand barge that would park down there, it was basically a big rectangular thing with a big pyramid of sand on it, we’d climb up the sand and dive off. One time a kid swam against the other side of the barge but it moved against the wall and he couldn’t get out.”
“We’d dive off the Black’s Bridge at Wellington and dive to the bottom of the canal and grab a handful of silt from the bottom and show the other idiots this stuff, that was probably highly polluted. Every spring they’d empty the canal and find old cars and occasionally somebody who’d been murdered.”
   Delaney also confesses to his role in the mysterious disappearance of Neptune’s bronze Leg. “One day we were playing in the fountain beneath the statue of John Young and we knocked off the leg by accident and we ended up hiding it on a cart and bringing it to a metal worker who gave us $1.85 for it as scrap metal.”
Although the memories are sweet, Delaney also remembers how heat and food were luxuries, while hot water was unheard of. “These homes had only one tap, it was the cold water tap in the kitchen.” Delaney, however, has no doubts that the area will eventually be the “next Westmount.”
   But the old Griffintown is gone, never to return. “I used to hear this song since I was about five years old.”
    He sings: “Take me back to Giffintown Giffintown Griffintown, that’s where I long to be – where my friends are good to me – Hogan’s bath on Wellington Street where the Point bums wash their feet - Haymarket Square I don’t care anywhere - for its  Griffintown for me.”