by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

My $125 all-included downtown apartment from 1985 was on a street that’s been taken off the map. Its sidewalks and streets were dug up and repaved. The street lamp and sign, Kinkora Avenue, removed. The buildings around it demolished, nearby Dorchester renamed. The Camaros, Mustangs and Ltds that rolled over it are long in the scrapheap.

Montreal of 1985 was a totally different beast, no more so than around my first apartment. Gone is the decrepit welfare hotel at Mackay, the Desjardins fish restaurant, the lesbian bar. So is the Bank of Montreal where you’d have to fill out a form and give it to the teller before 3 p.m. Friday to get the $20 you’d need to get you through the weekend.

At Ste-Catherine, naughty nightlifers chatter conspiratorially at 4 a.m. at Lentzos. At Toe Blake Tavern, melancholy old men sit motionless in front of draft beer. At the stale donut shop, the Great Antonio peddles shamelessly self-aggrandizing postcards.

All gone, as is the Swiss deli and its spicy Hungarian salami, the TV rental place, the Italian cobbler with his custom new wave footwear. At Toscana Fruits, you hear Kajagoogoo on the radio while the crazy old stringbean with giant rubbers and rolled up pants examines oranges for purchase, slowly rotating them under the fluorescent lights.

Downtown had started migrating east. The gays of Tupper and Guy sped to the Village. Few remnants remain, such as the bathhouse near my old street, where straight-looking guys still sheepishly sneak in at all hours.

The Main was little more than a ramshackle row of sausage-sandwich delis with butchered animals in the window. Other shops sold dusty rolls of fabric, my favourite being run by a one-armed tailor.

When Business nightclub opened on the Main, the migration was official. Downtown would never again be the city’s only playground.

But in that pre-festival era, we took exaggerated pride in our underground city. The most gripping spot was les Terraces, a dim-lit, low-ceilinged labyrinth where fat-ribbed plastic tiles would guide your feet from juicebar to boutique, which all sold pleated mauve cotton maxi dresses, as air ducts circulated a happy mix of hairspray, red apples and moist panties.

The loss of the Drummond Court was a wallop to our urban solar plexus. Where else do they drill a hole right through a lobby to build a street?

Before it was reduced to an antiseptic food court and mall, the Mount Royal Hotel offered an armchair refuge that beckoned stragglers, bed-head and all. You could slip into the Kon Tiki bar and sip multi-umbrella drinks and buy a souvenir photo in a cardboard frame. My father ran that photo business for years. On grad night he’d make a fortune.

Prior to 1985, it was enough to look hip to the punk revolution. Slowly that changed. People started testing your politics. It was a slight buzzkill. Billy Idol lost his airtime to REM. Frankie Say Relax T-shirts were bumped off by “If I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of the revolution.” How can you worry about politics and dance at the same time?

Midnight Oil recommended insomnia as the price of an unfair land deal. Jeez. If sleeplessness were the consequence of past regretted Montreal real estate transaction, we’d have no shuteye. Even in the great mid-’80s real estate spike, the average price of a Montreal home was still under $100,000.

It was a city without Internet, 50 channels, cell phones, debit cards, VCRs, Sunday shopping and ethnic diversity.

But it had Hungarian sandwich joints, videogame parlours, sidewalk news kiosks, repertory theatres, tuxedo rental joints, hashish, a wax museum, Bill 101 = swastika graffiti, $1 album specials at Sam the Record Man, muddy railway fields south of downtown, leaders like Trudeau, Bourassa, Drapeau, Lévesque and gossip reports by Doug Leopold, a voice so ubiquitous that it caused radios to switch on by themselves.

It’s still Montreal by name. The map is largely unchanged. But it doesn’t look the same or feel the same.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca