Demolished but not forgotten

Razed and paved over in the name of progress, three communities are remembered in the Centre d’histoire de Montréal’s Lost Neighbourhoods exhibit

PRE-EXPO EYESORE?: A Goose Village backyard
Archives de la Ville de Montréal

Though much of Montreal’s historic red-light district was long ago razed to the ground, Robert Petrelli grew up there and remembers the neighbourhood’s charms. He recalls the banter that took place between people hanging out of windows and those passing in the street, and the way the prostitutes, perched at their windows, would run a bobby pin up and down the shutter, creating a zipping sound, to signal they were ready to receive visitors. The now-retired UQÀM urban studies professor even remembers that as a child, he was paid by men on the street to lift the girls’ skirts— just a little—so that the clients could admire their knees.

It is stories like this one that make up the Centre d’histoire de Montréal’s current exhibit, Lost Neighbourhoods. The exhibit seeks to give voice to three working-class communities now gone: the old Red-light district (that once stretched between St-Denis and Bleury, south of Sherbrooke), Goose Village (an area officially named Victoriatown that once lay at the foot of the Victoria bridge), and Faubourg à m’lasse, which existed where the Radio-Canada skyscraper now stands. All three areas were deemed slums and subsequently bulldozed during Mayor Jean Drapeau’s tenures in late 50s and 60s, during the postwar zeitgeist of urban renewal. The Red-light neighbourhood was demolished in 1958 in anticipation of the construction of Habitation Jeanne-Mance, a major social housing project; Goose Village in 1966, in anticipation of Expo 67 (the Autostade was constructed on the village site, only to be demolished in the late 70s); and Faubourg à m’lasse in 1969, to make way for the Radio-Canada tower.

In the process of demolishing these neighbourhoods, CHM director Jean-François Leclerc estimates that over 10,000 people, or 2,000 families, were displaced.

HOOKER ROW: Red-light district on de Bullion
Archives de la Ville de Montréal

The Centre found inspiration for the exhibit in Montreal Archives’ collection of over 6,000 photos of these neighbourhoods, taken by city planners once they were slated for destruction. The exhibit includes about 500 of these photos, as well as video clips from the 60 or so interviews that were recently conducted with former inhabitants by oral historians Catherine Charlebois and Stéphanie Lacroix.

“When doing the interviews, whenever it was possible, [the interviewers] would bring the pictures of the house for the people,” says Leclerc. “It was a very intense moment for some to be con­fronted with those photos.”

Frances Ortuso, who grew up in Goose Village, says the destruction of his childhood neighbourhood was “like a death” for him. On the subject of residents’ grief, Leclerc states that “while people were sad to lose their houses, the major loss was for the community they had.”

While giving space to people’s sense of loss, the exhibit also explores the vision of the modern city that captivated the public’s imagination at the time. “Expo 67 would put Montreal on the map,” explains Leclerc. “Everything would be clean and new. But the decision was to erase whatever didn’t fit in.”

Certainly, living conditions in these areas were not ideal. One family reports living in a house with only a dirt floor. Others talk about rat infestations. “In the old city, everything was mixed together,” says Leclerc. “There were slums next to big institutions next to nicer homes and stores. But their solution to the problem at the time was radical,” says Leclerc.

Once presented with these residents’ powerlessness, the exhibit asks viewers to reflect on how much things have changed, and to what extent they feel involved in the process of urban planning today. ■

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