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>> Historical property endangered thanks to government goof-ups

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Photo by Jason Felker

As a child Yvan Chaput would wonder about the flaky white stuff outside the window flying through the winter sky. He only knew snow through the windows of the St-Jean de Dieu insane asylum (now called Louis H. Lafontaine). “I never went out in the snow. They
wouldn’t let me outside to play, so I never knew what it was,” says Chaput, 61, who was a Duplessis Orphan—a normal child committed to Catholic-run insane asylums to allow the provincial government to get more federal grants. “The worst was that I didn’t know when my birthday was. I never knew how old I was and I never went to school and I still can’t read or write,” says Chaput.

Later in life Chaput found a home as a handyman for Gertrude Fendall, the last remaining member of a family that once owned large chunks of Côte-des-Neiges. From 1969 on, Chaput helped maintain the home at 5333 Decelles. “I never charged her more than $5 an hour. Those were happy times for us,” he says.

In 1986 Fendall asked him to paint a room in the colour of his choice. He chose blue. She then wrote up a codicil, a separate, legally admissible paper adding him to the will she had written three years earlier. He was to inherit her home after she passed away, says Chaput. The codicil, which Chaput could not read, was placed in a desk drawer.

One day in 1990 Chaput noticed that the 90-year-old Fendall had a cut on her leg. “Gangrene was starting. I knew I had to bring her to the hospital or else they’d have to cut it off,” says Chaput. “She had never been to a hospital, she didn’t even have a Medicare card. She’d never been sick.” The officials at St. Mary’s Hospital chose to keep her under supervision and she was eventually transferred to public curatorship. Chaput says there was nothing wrong with Fendall. Although in most such cases individuals are returned home and offered home care, authorities refused to allow Fendall to go back, in spite of her protests.
Within weeks of Fendall’s hospitalization bureaucrats from the provincial public curator’s office emptied her home. Gone were the valuable artwork and antiques, as well as the codicil that Chaput says would have left him the house. Chaput’s efforts to have her returned home and find out what became of her belongings fell on deaf ears at the famously unaccountable Public Curator.

In the months before Fendall’s 1995 death, following years of neglect, the curator sold her historic family home to Andrée Ballard for $200,000. Fendall never knew. “I never told her that all her things were taken away and her home was ruined,” says Chaput.
Developer David Owen now owns an option to demolish the home and build condos but a preservationist group led by Pierre Ramet has, up until now, convinced the city of Montreal to allow the oldest house in the area to stand. Ramet tells the Mirror that it’s unclear whether the new administration will allow the building to stand.
Meanwhile Chaput lives in a nearby basement apartment and sees the home everyday. “It’s a wreck, it’s disgusting. The whole thing makes me sad,” he says. :