Thoughts on the Montréal Massacre
December 6, 2014 § 12 Comments
Twenty-five years ago today, on 6 December 1989, a deranged young man wandered into the École Polytechnique in Montréal and opened fire. He was angry at women, he was angry at feminists whom he blamed for ruining his life. So he targeted women studying at an engineering school. He killed fourteen of them:
- Geneviève Bergeron
- Hélène Colgan
- Nathalie Croteau
- Barbara Daigneault
- Anne-Marie Edward
- Maud Haviernick
- Maryse Laganière
- Maryse Leclair
- Anne-Marie Lemay
- Sonia Pelletier
- Michèle Richard
- Annie St-Arneault
- Annie Turcotte
- Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz
Today, I’ve seen patently stupid media articles in Canada praising us for being so much better today than we were then. Bullshit. We’re not. I’m not even going to list all the misogyny and other bullshit I see around me on a daily basis. I’ve noted much of it on this blog.
I’m sick of. I’m sick of misogyny. I’m sick of men’s violence towards women. It’s time to man up, it’s time to end this.
UPDATE: The Griffintown Horse Palace
September 29, 2014 § 1 Comment
The Griffintown Horse Palace Foundation has met and exceeded its goal, and with three days to spare! As of right now, the Indiegogo page has raised $49,335! The goal was $45,000.
The Foundation is also hosting a fundraising soirée at the Horse Palace, 1226, rue Ottawa, in Griffintown, on Thursday night, 2 October, from 5pm. Tickets are $75, and can be purchased here. More details on the soirée can be found on the Foundation’s Facebook page here.
A huge thank you to all who have contributed. Even though I am no longer involved with the Foundation, I strongly believe in its mission and want to see Leo’s Horse Palace saved!
Research Note: Playing hockey against priests in Griffintown
June 6, 2014 § Leave a comment
As I noted in yesterday’s post on Frank Hanley, we really do live in a different era today. In one of the chapters of The House of the Irish, I talk about hockey in Griffintown in the 1950s and 60s. I interviewed Gordie Bernier, an old Griffintowner, a few summers ago about his life and growing up in Griff and his thoughts on it today. The previous weekend, he was playing in an old-timers hockey tournament in Pointe-Claire, so clearly it was a major part of his life. I can relate.
Bernier recalled playing with the Christian Brothers who ran the School for Boys in Griff and who liked to play hockey against the young men:
Keep your head up. But the league we had, we were only young…I was only, I think 17 or so, and we were playing against men, so some of the guys were older. It was a good experience….You keep your head up [laughs]. We used to go there, I think 8 in the morning to the rink on Basin, I lived other on Duke, we used to walk with our skates on, by the time we get over there if there was snow, give us the shovels, we had to clear off all the snow, and we’d play from 8 in the morning ‘til closing time, 10 at night. We were still there, play hockey all day at the weekend. Walk back, your ankles [were all swollen and sore].
Don Pidgeon, a man who has done more than anyone to create the memory of Griff as an Irish neighbourhood, also remembers playing the Brothers, and smashing one over the boards of the outdoor rink on Basin Street Park in Griffintown, with a hip check.
The Brothers, obviously, played hard, and they played to win. And the lads of Griffintown were not about to give any quarter, as David O’Neill recalls, the Brothers were
great athletes, and a lot of them liked the rough stuff just as much as the boys, and the older boys used to try to establish themselves among their own friends, and there were a few of the priests who used to give and take as good, or better. That generated the respect from the local community towards the priests, and a lot of people respected the priests for their ability to give and take without any complaining. No punishment, except that you got decked back when you weren’t looking.
Certainly, then, this was a different era, when decking a priest, or getting hit back as hard, if not harder, was a means by which the young men and priests earned each others respect, and that of their friends and colleagues, and the wider community.
Research Note: The Legend of “Banjo” Frank Hanley
June 5, 2014 § 1 Comment
Frank Hanley, 1909-2006, in 1942
I met Frank Hanley a couple of times back in the early aughts, including one afternoon in Grumpy’s on lower Crescent St. He was holding court, drinking, I think, a club soda. He was, at this point, already in his 90s. But he was irrepressible. Even though he was 96 or 97 when he died in 2006, I was still surprised to hear the news. He got the nickname sometime back in the 1920s or 30s when he was a minstrel player in Montreal, or so he told me. He didn’t know how to play the instrument. Hanley is the kind of guy that doesn’t exist anymore, which is kind of sad. He was the city councillor for St. Ann’s Ward from 1940 until 1970. He was also the MNA for St. Ann’s from 1948-70. He didn’t belong to any parties, he was always an independent. He tended to side with ‘Le Chef’, Maurice Duplessis, in the National Assembly during the 1950s. But I just never could hold that against him. He also despised Jean Drapeau, Mayor of Montreal from 1954-7 and from 1960-86.
Griffintown was left to die in the 1960s whilst the other neighbourhoods of the sud-ouest were given makeovers, mostly in the form of slum clearances and the building of housing projects in the Pointe, Burgundy, and Saint-Henri. Griff got the rénovations urbaines part, but that was it. Nothing was built to replace what was torn down. And it was not because of the 1963 re-zoning of the area as ‘light industrial.’ All of St. Ann’s Ward was, as were other parts of the sud-ouest. Griffintown, quite simply, did not attract the attention of hôtel de ville and Drapeau’s team of rénovationistes as a site of investment. The only voice demanding Griff get some love was its councillor: Hanley. Local legend has it that Griff was left to die to hurt Hanley’s re-election chances, such was Drapeau’s enmity for him.
Anyway. Hanley was an old school populist politicians, his first real concern was his constituents. And his constituents tended to be poor in Griffintown and the Pointe. He raised money for an emergency fund to help out his constituents when they ran into trouble. Most of this money was raised from other constituents. Occasionally, of course, a few dollars would fall into his own pocket. While today we would shake our heads at this or perhaps bring Hanley up on charges of corruption, in his era, no one had any problem with that.
In the summer of 1967, Hanley ran into trouble with Revenue Canada. He had been handing out over $150 per week to his constituents in trouble for much of the past decade, maybe longer. And, of course, he took a bit for himself. So Revenue Canada threatened to take his house at 500 Dublin St. in Pointe-Saint-Charles. His constituents from Griffintown and Pointe-Saint-Charles had other ideas, and they showed up one morning in Hanley’s yard and proclaimed the ‘Republic of Hanley’ in his front yard.
In the end, Hanley and Revenue Canada reached a settlement.
Research Note: The Pont Champlain
June 4, 2014 § Leave a comment
Nearly every time I drive over the Pont Champlain, I turn my brain off, and don’t think about the crumbling infrastructure of the bridge, I don’t think about how far it is down to the St. Lawrence. I don’t think about how deep the river is. I don’t think about the litres of ink spilled in the Montreal newspapers, in both official languages, about the bridge. I don’t think about the fact that god-knows-how-many billion dollars are being spent to fix a bridge that needs replacing whilst the politicians in Ottawa and Quebec City continue to argue about how best to replace the bridge. I don’t really think the bridge is going to fall down, of course. But.
So it was a nice change of pace to be finishing off a chapter of The House of the Irish on the dissolution of Griffntown in the 1960s, and to come across documents I’ve collected from the Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, as well as newspaper articles from The Star, The Gazette and La Presse from the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the Pont Champlain was first opened, and it was a marvel of engineering, and then the city and federal government built the Autoroute Bonaventure into the city in preparation for Expo ’67.
The optimism! The excitement about a new bridge connecting Montreal to the South Shore! The excitement about the Bonaventure, which “sweeps majestically into the city, the river on one side, the skyline in front,” to quote one article from The Star. Next time I cross the Champlain, I’ll try to think of that.
Is Gentrification Inevitable?
June 3, 2014 § 3 Comments
Yesterday, in response to this post, I was accosted on Twitter and accused of many things, most of which were untrue, but most notably of standing by and watching gentrification from the sidelines and not offering any solutions. In and around that accusation, repeated in many different ways, I was also told that ‘gentrification is inevitable.’ Since then, I have been wondering if it is.
Now, I must point out that my critic, who ultimately dismissed me as “just a guy in Boston making false judgements about my hometown,” is also a real estate agent and is of the opinion that her neighbourhood, Verdun, is the next up and coming neighbourhood in Montreal. So she has a vested interest in gentrification and rising property values. Not that I don’t, of course, both when I lived in Montreal and now. And it also doesn’t matter which city I visit, gentrification benefits me. I’m a middle-class white guy. But is gentrification inevitable?
Mulberry Bend, by Jacob Riis
I was in New York City a couple of weeks ago, on the Lower Eastside of Manhattan. We eventually had dinner on Mulberry Street, on the terrasse of an overpriced, but delicious, Italian restaurant. As I looked up the block, I could see the formerly notorious Mulberry Bend. The Mulberry Bend, when the Five Points still existed, was perhaps the worst bit of real estate in the Western world for poverty and crime. It was central to Jacob Riis’ 1896 classic, How the Other Half Lives. Today, however, Mulberry Street is beautiful and on this sunny Sunday the street was blocked off to cars and a street fair was going on. Even twenty years ago, this wasn’t really all that nice a part of town. But today, it’s all smoothed over and gentrified.
But is the kind of gentrification that has occurred on Mulberry Street inevitable?
I think it might be relative, it might be locational. Take, for example, New Haven, CT. New Haven is a smallish city and has been dealing with a variety of social problems, from high crime, to drug use, since deindustrialisation in the 1960s and 70s. It has also experienced ‘white flight’ and the people who ended up being stuck in inner-city New Haven had no hope, no option for a better life. And so, New Haven, despite being the home of Yale University, has struggled. On the train into New York City last weekend, I saw its newest solution, called Re:New Haven. The city is offering people up to $80,000 in incentives to purchase a home and live in New Haven. It seems to be working, at least according to the couple sitting next to us on the terrasse on Mulberry Street, who were from New Haven (as is the friend I was with that night, though he no longer lives in his hometown), who reported a boom in new restaurants and other hangouts. On that front, Re:New Haven sounds like a brilliant idea. But there is always a cost for gentrification. In the case of New Haven, African Americans who already live in these gentrifying neighbourhoods pay the cost.
New Haven has decided that gentrification is inevitable. And it certainly looks that way on the ground in New York City and Montreal. But there’s also a question of neighbourhood, especially in big cities. If you look at New York City, it’s interesting to note that Queen’s and Staten Island are not getting as much love from the gentrifiers. No doubt because they are rather inconveniently located vis-à-vis Manhattan. Similarly, in Montral, gentrification is in neighbourhoods that are conveniently located in relation to the downtown core of the city. Thus, Saint-Henri, Griffintown and Pointe-Saint-Charles make sense in their gentrification. Even Verdun is no more than 15 minutes from downtown on the métro. But, other neighbourhoods, are more or less free of gentrification, or at least have not been overly affected. Take, for example, Hochelaha-Maisonneuve, or HOMA, a chronically depressed neighbourhood in the east end. Despite attempts over the past decade to gentrify, the neighbourhood remains largely immune. Similarly, neighbourhoods north of the Métropolitaine in the north end of the city are also seemingly gentrification-proof.
Collective action against gentrification tends not to work. It happens either way, whether residents welcome or resist it. However, my interlocutor yesterday also had interesting ideas about practical, boots-on-the-ground ways to ameliorate the effects of gentrification for the working classes of Verdun. Pointe-Saint-Charles has long had similar ideas, but, each time I’m back home in Montreal and go through the Pointe, I see fewer and fewer of the old school working classes and the stores and restaurants that served them and more gentrified homes and hipster coffee shops and the like.
But what makes gentrification inevitable? A search for cheap(er) housing? A search for The Next Big Thing? Recently, Richard Florida’s thesis about the Creative Class in cities is getting some static, because in many places it hasn’t worked out how he predicted. And yet gentrification carries on.
Expensive Bikes and the sud-ouest of Montreal
June 2, 2014 § 4 Comments
I was in Montreal for a nano-second last week, in and out in 22 hours. As I sat Friday morning sipping a proper café au lait and a croissant amande at Pain D’Oré at Atwater Market, a woman kitted out in cycling gear pulled up outside the boulangerie. She took off her gloves and helmet, and then leaned her very expensive bike up against the shop’s window and came in to get her coffee and croissant. I thought to myself that things had changed in the sud-ouest of Montreal.
Not too long ago, in response to a post on this blog about gentrification, my friend Max, who is a gentrifier, and has bought a place in a gentrifying neighbourhood, chided me for being so dead-set against gentrification. I am not necessarily. But I think we need to problematise the process, to recognise what we’ve lost, and so on, to not simply jump into the future unquestioningly. But. He pointed out some benefits about gentrification in his neighbourhood: he could find a decent cup of coffee and he said hipsters, as annoying as they generally are, are safe. He doesn’t have to worry about his wife walking home at night.
I thought about that as I watched this woman leave her expensive bike outside the boulangerie, unlocked. When she came back out with coffee and croissant, she moved her bike to her table on the terrasse. I lived in the sud-ouest for the majority of my time in Montreal, mostly in Pointe-Saint-Charles, but also in Saint-Henri on the Last Ungentrified Block in Saint-Henri ™. The rue Saint-Ferdinand, north of Saint-Antoine remains ungentrified. I drove up it last week just to make sure. But the streets on either side of Saint-Ferdinand ARE gentrified, so, too, is the block on Saint-Ferdinand below my old one. So are large swaths of Saint-Antoine. And so on. The first place I lived in the Pointe wasn’t. There are housing projects on the block, and my place backed onto the asphalt back lot of a project (Montreal’s projects, I might note, at least in the sud-ouest are not great towering cinderblock apartments, they are usually no more than 3-4 story apartment blocks. They usually fit into their neighbourhoods). My second place was definitely gentrified, as, by that point in my life, I was no longer a struggling student, but a tenured CÉGEP professor.
And still. There is no way in hell I would ever leave an expensive bike outside a boulangerie at Atwater Market. I never left my car unlocked. Or my front door. I keep a close eye on my computer bag. Do I just trust people less? Or had I just lived in the Pointe longer than this woman? But, yet, her bike was completely safe, and not because I was sitting in the window. About 15 people passed it as she got her coffee and croissant. And no one even gave the unlocked, very expensive bike a second look.
Has the sud-ouest changed that much? Or was her bike simply in a high traffic area and safe? I can’t decide.
I should also point out, for American readers, that gentrification in Canada tends not to get caught up in questions of race like it does here in the US. Most gentrifying and gentrified neighbourhoods of Canadian cities are places where inner-city working-class white people lived. So while class is still a very prevalent issue, race tends not to be. There are exceptions. of course, such as in the traditional Anglo Black neighbourhood of Montreal, Little Burgundy, which is undergoing a massive shift right now. But, on the whole, discussions surrounding gentrification don’t centre around notions of race. Then again, few things in Canada do, at least publicly. But that doesn’t mean that race and skin colour aren’t central components to Canadian life.
On the Radio: Boston College’s Belfast Project
May 28, 2014 § Leave a comment
Tomorrow, Thursday 29 May, I’ll be appearing on CKUT, McGill University Campus Radio’s programme on Oral History, O Stories. The show will be hosted by my old friend, Elena Razlagova, a professor of Public History at Concordia University. I will be talking about Boston College’s Belfast Project, and the fallout therefrom. So tune in around 2pm tomorrow, I’ll be on around 2.30. You can tune in the old fashioned way, on your radio at 90.3 fm, or on CKUT’s website.
The Out-Sourcing of Memory
May 27, 2014 § 2 Comments
Four or five years ago, we saw Josh Ritter at La Sala Rossa in Montreal. Sala is one of my favourite places in the world to see a gig. In fact, I’d rank it just below the legendary Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver, with its bouncing dance floor. Anyway. We made our way up to the front which, frankly, wasn’t that difficult, Josh Ritter fans aren’t exactly scary people. But after Ritter took the stage with his excellent Royal City Band, something strange happened. The crowd around us became younger. A lot of early 20-somethings. And very female. They were cooing over Ritter himself, and his bassist, Zack Hickman. This had happened to me once before, at a Grapes of Wrath gig in c. 1992. The teeney-boppers at this all ages gig in Ottawa went nuts when the Grapes hit the stage and nearly mauled my companion to death. She required first aid.
Anyway. This Josh Ritter gig happened just after cellphones began to be equipped with decent phones. There was still some novelty in them. But all these 2o-somethings watched the gig through the lens of their phones, snapping picture after picture of Ritter and Hickman. It got incredibly frustrating, especially when they stepped on us to get a better shot. But I just felt sorry for them, their entire experience of Josh Ritter and the Royal City Band was mediated through their cellphone camera lens. They wouldn’t take any memories away from the show. Not that I really did, either. I remember getting stepped on and all the 20-somethings with their camera phones.
But photos aren’t memories. I recently went through some old photos for some reason I no longer recall. Included in these files (all photos are on the hard drive of my MacBook now, of course) were pictures of a trip to Tanglewood in the summer of 2006 with my then-girlfriend, now wife. I have very distinct memories of that day. It was the July 4 weekend, we went with her sister and her parents, to see Garrison Keilor and a live performance of A Prairie Home Companion. I had no idea what any of this meant, frankly, I’m Canadian and lived in Canada then. And avoided NPR and PBS like the plague (I’ve modified my stance somewhat since). But in looking at these photos, I found they didn’t necessarily match up with my memories. In fact, I think I’ve conflated two or three trips to Tanglewood in my memories of that day. I think this because I remember the night time stars and sitting with Margo by ourselves looking up at them hearing classical music. But that couldn’t have happened in 2006, it was the time we saw Yo-Yo Ma with the Boston Pops in 2008 or 2009, after we got married. But such is memory, it’s dynamic and our memories evolve over time.
Indeed, this is the point made in this article on NPR.org (so clearly I’ve modified my views of public radio in the US) today by a psychologist, Linda Henkel. She notes exactly that,
It’s also a mistake to think of photographs as memories. The photo will remain the same each time to you look at it, but memories change over time. Henkel likens it relying on photos to remember your high school graduation.
“Each time I remember what my high school graduation was like, I might be coloring and changing that memory because of my current perspective — because of new ideas that I have or things that I learned afterwards,” she says. “Human memory is much more dynamic than photographs are capable of.”
The larger context of the article is our addiction to taking photos on our cameras, due to its simplicity. No kidding. I have over 1,000 photographs on my iPhone. And I’ve probably deleted another 1,000, some because they’re bad, some because they’re not all that remarkable in the long-term. And this from a guy who probably took a grand total of 50 photographs from 1989-2006. We’re hyper-memorialising everything. I presume I’m not all that different than anyone else in how often I look at old photographs, which is close to never, unless I’m looking for something. And yet, every time I see an old photo, my memory of the events doesn’t entirely jive with the photographic record.
Henkel did an interesting experiment with her students. She sent her students to the university art museum and instructed them to view some items and photograph others. Then she gave them a sort of test when they got back on their memories:
[She] found what she called a “photo-taking impairment effect.”
“The objects that they had taken photos of — they actually remembered fewer of them, and remembered fewer details about those objects. Like, how was this statue’s hands positioned, or what was this statue wearing on its head. They remembered fewer of the details if they took photos of them, rather than if they had just looked at them,” she says.
Henkel says her students’ memories were impaired because relying on an external memory aid means you subconsciously count on the camera to remember the details for you.
“As soon as you hit ‘click’ on that camera, it’s as if you’ve outsourced your memory,” she says. “Any time we … count on these external memory devices, we’re taking away from the kind of mental cognitive processing that might help us actually remember that stuff on our own.”
And so I come back to those early 20-something girls at the Josh Ritter gig in Montreal on a cold, snowy February night four or so years ago. What do they remember from that night? Probably next to nothing, they outsourced it all to their phones. But, of course, the phones we had in 2010 compared to the phones in 2014. The camera in my two year old iPhone 4s is infinitely better than the camera that was in my then-state-of-the-art Motorola Razr. So, chances are, their photos are long lost. And they just have a vague recollection of a gig.
Compare that with an old friend of mine who, whilst bored and sick this week, attempted to reconstruct her entire concert-going life over the past 25 years. Relying largely on her memory, and aided by the internet and some photos, she did manage to reconstruct most of her concert-going life. Why? Because she didn’t outsource her memory to her phone. Largely because we didn’t have phones to take pictures on (or even digital cameras, for that matter) in 1992.
On Being Called a “Frog”
May 23, 2014 § 30 Comments
I got called a ‘frog’ today. Every time this happens, it stuns me. Like stops me in my tracks stuns me. It’s happened a handful of times in my life, a few times in Ontario and British Columbia and now twice in Massachusetts. The last time it happened was at the bar of a restaurant in a small town in Western Massachusetts. I was having an amiable conversation with a guy about hockey. He was a New York Rangers’ fan and I, of course, cheer for the Habs. When I told him I was from Montreal, he said, “Oh, I guess that makes you a frog.” I don’t think he really understood what the word meant. But it was a conversation stopper, I visibly recoiled from him.
I have asked most of my French Canadian friends about this. They, of course, have been called ‘frog’ many times in their lives, in Canada, the US, and Britain. None of my friends is particularly fond of this particular epithet, of course, but most of them are also rather sanguine about it. Perhaps due to being called a ‘frog’ repeatedly, according to one friend. One of my tweeps is married to a French guy, as in from France, and she calls him ‘the Frog.’ Clearly, for most people who actually are French or French Canadian, the term isn’t a big deal. Me, on the other hand, it is a big deal for me. Maybe because I’m an Anglo.
The term ‘frog’ was actually first applied to the Dutch by the British, who saw the Dutch as marsh-dwellers. Get it? Frogs live in marshes, too. But then, in the mid-18th century, the French became the main enemies of the British, so the term got applied to the French due to their propensity towards eating frogs’ legs. Eventually, the term ended up getting applied to French Canadians, just, I suppose, due to Anglo laziness. Then again, Anglo Canadians have come up with other names for French Canadians, such as ‘pea soupers’ and ‘Pepsis,’ due to their alleged fondness for pea soup and Pepsi. One Anglo Montrealer once told me that the Pepsi epithet also worked because French Canadians were said to be ’empty from the neck up.’ And French-speaking Quebecers also have a whole long string of nasty names for Anglos, including my favourite, tête-carré.
But. I’m not French Canadian. I’m an Anglo from Quebec. So when I get called a ‘frog’, it stuns me. Today I was called a ‘frog’ because I was wearing my Montreal Canadiens ball cap around. I’m used to the abuse the hat brings me in and around Boston. I welcome most of it, especially since the Canadiens knocked out the Bruins in the last round of the playoffs. But usually it doesn’t go beyond “Habs suck” and variations thereof. I don’t get told to go back to Canada (though I was once told to “Get out of my country” by a guy in Vancouver once), I don’t get called names or anything like that and 98% of the banter is friendly. Since the Canadiens knocked out the Bruins, most people have even been respectful.
What makes today’s name-calling all the more puzzling is that I’m wearing a t-shirt that makes fun of Irish stereotypes and I have a huge Celtic cross tattooed on my right calf. So clearly I’m not French Canadian. And when this guy called me ‘frog’ and dissed the Habs, I actually stopped cold in my tracks. I was stunned. I just looked at him, he seemed to realise he’d gone too far and scooted off.
But I do find it interesting how much I detest the term. And how much it offends me. Any thoughts on the matter are welcome.
Matthew Barlow 