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Magical misery tour New guided tour highlights lurid Montreal by COLIN MACKENZIE GRAY If you're wary of paying for one of those somnambulistic official-history Chamber of Commerce tours that feature the lives of prominent citizens, you may want to yield to the repressed. Montreal Confidential, a tabloid-style tour of the city organized by Stephanie DeBono and Penny Colbourne, starts making the rounds this weekend. The tour is the result of an innocent dinner conversation that grew into a reality and became a way out of the underemployment grind for these two young Montrealers. "It's a jazzy, sexy kind of tour," says DeBono from Quartier Latin Pub, our rendez-vous on Ontario Street, once home to what she calls "the most infamous brothel in North America." The former red-light district is a highlight of the tour, accompanied by descriptions of a not-so-bygone era of crooked cops, gangsters and houses of ill repute.
At times the tour's sensationalism risks creating circus-style victims of its own. Montreal Confidential also makes a stop at Fetish Café on Ste-Catherine Street in the Gay Village, and en route it's impossible to avoid the very visible street life from a tour bus vantage. "This is not a freak tour," DeBono insists, noting that Fetish Café is pleased to welcome her buses. "We don't want to exploit or take advantage of the gay community or sex workers." Fake torture chambers lead to real ones. Figuring prominently is the eerily gothic Allan Memorial Institute at McGill, once home to a CIA-funded house of horrors under the direction of a demented Dr. Cameron. Our very own Dr. Frankenstein kept involuntary Manchurian Candidates in isolation boxes and administered electroconvulsive shocks and psychotropic drugs in an effort to control their minds. Down the street we find an eccentric reclusive former politician. Pierre Trudeau's Art Deco hideout is easy to miss and is like the man, with its humble facade obscuring a labrynthine complex. As a counterpoint, tourists also trek up the mountain to Brian Mulroney's ostentatious Xanadu. With attractions such as these, Montreal Confidential is as much for local residents as for tourists. But DeBono says that the tour is not attempting to profit from the tragedies of others. Crimes against humanity retain their taboo and our recent tragedies are missing from the tour. "We wouldn't go to the Polytechnique massacre or the Concordia murders--it's too fresh and too sensitive," says DeBono. While she sees the contradiction of doing some sites and not others, DeBono says the choice became an "ethical" one. So voyeuristic pleasure is instead found in cases where there is room for some kind of identification with the participants. The Stanley Cup riots, for example, are a case where the tour-taker might even have been a perpetrator. Montreal Confidential's three-hour tours begin Friday, July 18 at 12 pm at Dorchester Square. Tickets: $20 adults, $9 kids. For info on times, call 270-8840 or 249-4023 |
The tour also resurrects sites that first gained notoriety as tourist attractions but faded with time. The flower shop at des Pins and St-Urbain, briefly owned by two of the Dionne quintuplets for a few months in the 1950s, is a sad ghost of Canada's first mass-media circus: the quints, snatched from their parents and paraded as freaks in their infancy, were never able to shed their notoriety, even as florists.