Alanah Heffez looks back to a critical wood shortage in 1872 that left poorer Montreal residents chilly. This makes me wonder: when did people here start using coal to heat their homes and cook? I heard about coal use from older relatives when I was a kid, but not about people using woodstoves in town until their trendy resurgence in recent years.
More recent winter content, but still historical: Urbanphoto has some photos of Square Victoria in the winter of 1970.
Richard Bergeron is taking aim at the Union Montreal tendency to hand out lavish sums of cash to party loyalists who lose elections, not only finding them plum new jobs (André Lavallée and Michel Labrecque are mentioned) but also giving out consolation prizes called “transition allowances.”
More on this Friday in Le Devoir and in La Presse.
A profile of the new director of L’Itinéraire, a young journalist who cut her teeth on Métro.
Statistics show that more bodies are going unclaimed in Quebec and this is implied to be evidence of society’s indifference – Fagstein describes it as depressing on Twitter. But I don’t see it. Funerals are expensive. If someone calls you up and says that a distant relative you haven’t seen in decades is dead and what about it, claiming them can leave you on the hook for thousands in funeral costs, and funerals don’t help somebody who’s already dead. Only the funeral industry benefits.
Not everyone lives in the heart of a family. It’s just a fact of human nature, it doesn’t make us bad people.
St. James United, whose façade emerged into the light in 2005 on Ste-Catherine after being hidden by another building in the 1920s, has been given a grant by Quebec to begin necessary repairs on its front steps and roof. The building dates from 1888 before the United Church even existed, and was originally a Methodist church.
A downtown rooming house is being demolished, but will be rebuilt to give more homeless people the possibility of having a room of their own, a postal address, and the other beginnings of a life off the street.
More detail on the art gallery fire earlier this week and how firefighters and neighbours pitched in to save valuable paintings from the flames.
Great news. The revelation of the church front there has helped the look of that block enormously. We also greatly enjoyed the organ performance they had there for La Nuit Blanche.