Updates from October, 2011 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

• 09:33 on 2011/10/09 Permalink | Reply  

  

  This sketch was published 100 years ago. The pencil notation on the clipping says it appeared in the Witness, a paper I know nothing of, and the text below it reads:

  The earthworks in the foreground give the appearance of excavations for a dyke or canal. But that is not what they are. They merely represent a great trunk sewer long in the laying. The view, of course, is Sherbrooke street as it has appeared for upwards of two years. The sketch was made just to the west of Bishop street, and shows clearly the shanties erected by the contractors – shanties which have come to be landmarks on this thoroughfare. The great main being constructed thirty feet under ground of course is not shown.

  Plus ça change…
  
  Image found by chance in the Massicotte archive.

  Kate and Singlestar are discussing. Toggle Comments

   

  • Singlestar 11:22 on 2011/10/10 Permalink

    See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Witness

  • Kate 11:26 on 2011/10/10 Permalink

    Excellent! I didn’t do any research, which was sloppy.

    It’s funny to think of there being a Protestant paper here now (or any major paper having a religious affiliation, I mean).

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• 09:23 on 2011/10/09 Permalink | Reply  

  FRAPRU is planning a demo Sunday after their caravan completed a road trip through Quebec to publicize their demand for 50,000 new social housing units over the next five years. 13h00 at Parc metro in Park Ex.

   

• 09:22 on 2011/10/09 Permalink | Reply  

  
  Guillaume Saint-Jean continues his series of then-and-now shots with a view on Amherst and another on Roy in the Plateau, both featuring churches that have vanished. The Roy Street shot explains why there’s a handsome gray stone presbytery on Laval Street nearby with no church attached to it: the original Saint-Louis-de-France church, shown above, burned down in 1933. (The parish later built a new church on Roy east of Saint-Denis, corner Berri.)

  Below is another clipping from the Massicotte archive showing the packed church in 1913 on its 25th anniversary. (Click on this one for a bigger view.) It can be startling to recall how dominant the church was in those days. Even now on a church website the parish is listed as serving 6000 families, surely a number based on the fiction that everyone inside a parish boundary is a practising Catholic.
  

  Kate and David M are discussing. Toggle Comments

   

  • David M 13:21 on 2011/10/10 Permalink

    yeah, it also explains the commercial orientation of the street more generally – there are an unusually high number of commercial spaces along roy, which make far more sense if one realizes that it once owned a heavily-used community centre.

  • Kate 13:54 on 2011/10/10 Permalink

    That’s true. There was a bank branch nearby at the corner of Hôtel de Ville back in the day too.