In Griffintown/Dans L’Griff
April 2, 2012 § 1 Comment
In Griffintown/Dans L’Griff will be a documentary about Griffintown, made by my friend, film-maker G. Scott MacLeod. Scott’s most recent film, a short entitled The Saga of Murdo MacLeod has been received rapturously by Montrealers at its various showings around town, most recently at Ciné-Gael, Montréal’s Irish film series, which is celebrating its 20th season this year.
Scott is proposing to do a short documentary on Griffintown through the eyes of Claude and Lyse Mercier, amongst the last generation of Griffintowners. Claude and Lyse, as you might guess by their names, are NOT Irish! Shock! Indeed, they are French Canadian, a voice that has long been lost in the stories and memories of the Griff (as my forthcoming book, The House of the Irish: History, Memory and Diaspora in Griffintown, Montreal, will tell you). Almost all the attention on the Griff’s history has been focused on the working-class Irish Catholics, leaving out the other residents there: French Canadians and Anglo-Protestants, and Scott’s about to address this lacuna.
Scott and I have had a lot of conversation about Griffintown, over Thai food and as we’ve wondered the streets of the neighbourhood both of us are so hell-bent on preserving the memory of. And while books are great (especially mine!), a documentary, graphic evidence of what once was, is a brilliant addition to the growing corpus of Griffintown memories.
The trailer for the film is below, but I urge you to click on this link, which will take you to Scott’s indiegogo page, where he is attempting to raise money to help with the costs of film-making. Any amount will help, but Scott is offering 3 levels of support. 20$ gets you a thank you in the end credits and a copy of the DVD, 100$ gets you into the end credits and a DVD, and 1000$ makes you a producer, and you also get a copy of the DVD.
On Living in a Gentrifying Neighbourhood, Part 3
March 3, 2012 § 11 Comments
There is an SAQ outlet at the corner of Centre and Charlevoix here in Pointe-Saint-Charles. For those of you non-Quebecers reading this, SAQ is the Société des Alcools du Québec, the state monopoly, the liquor store. The SAQ here in the Pointe is a tiny one, a little boutique, but very busy and the staff there are friendly, helpful, and very knowledgeable. But the SAQ is closing it down as of 30 March this year because, it alleges, the outlet is unprofitable. If that outlet is unprofitable, I am the King of Siam. What is at work here is the SAQ forgetting its mandate as a state monopoly, which is not just to make money hand-over-fist, but to provide a service.
So the people of the Pointe, as mobilised as ever, are protesting the closure of our SAQ outlet. There was a march to our MNA’s office on rue Saint-Jacques yesterday to protest. Why are people protesting? That should seem to be obvious, quite frankly. But the SAQ at the corner of Centre and Charlevoix is in many ways an anchor of the commercial outlets along the next few blocks of Centre. Kitty corner from the SAQ is Restaurant Machiavelli, a relatively upscale eatery. Next door over is Cari Mela, one of the handful of Indian restaurants in the Pointe, and probably the best. Cari Mela, Machiavelli, and the other Indian restaurants along Centre are all bring your own wine. This makes sense, given the SAQ down the block.
Centre has seen some rough times, but in the past few years there has been a slow regeneration and revival. There have been these new Indian restaurants opening. There is a mosque acros the street and up a block. A series of Bengal dépanneurs have popped up. And a series of coffee shops/casse croutes have opened up or have maintained. More recently, a trendy boutique restaurant, Ma Tante Quiche has opened its doors next to a laundromat, and there are rumours a boulangerie is opening up where the old video store was.
Losing an anchor like the SAQ will have serious ramifications for Centre as a commercial zone.
The CBC had a short story on its website yesterday about the protest, which will no doubt come to naught. The story itself is innocuous, but the comments on it are quite simply, jaw-droppingly stupid. Michael59 says the protest was a stupid joke because the next store is a few blocks away. mikeysm notes that the Pointe is a poor neighbourhood. HughNugent reports that most of his family grew up here and their response would be for us to get up off our fat arses and walk to the Atwater Market, where there’s a big SAQ outlet.
These comments reflect the general idea of the Pointe of a neighbourhood of poor folk, collecting welfare, and spending their banlieue money on lottery tickets. But there is obviously more than that. The Pointe is a diverse neighbourhood these days, and the clientele of the SAQ reflects this. There are people of all ethnicities and socio-economic classes at the outlet buying their alcohol, primarily wine, as that’s what dominates the shelves. Atwater Market is a good 15 minute walk from the corner of Centre and Charlevoix. It’s a lot farther away if you live further into the Pointe.
But beyond that, the general gist of these comments is that the people of the Pointe are fat and lazy and because they are such, they shouldn’t be wasting their money on alcohol to start with. I am very curious what the comments would be in response to a story about the closing of a busy SAQ outlet on, say, the Plateau, or the Mile End, or Outremont, or NDG or Westmount. I’d bet they would be asinine comments such as these.
On Living in a Gentrifying Neighbourhood, Part 2
February 24, 2012 § 5 Comments
It is interesting looking at the search terms that have led people to my blog here in the past few days: “car theft pt. st. charles” “murder pt. st. charles” “housing projects pt. st. charles” “crime pointe-saint-charles” “low income housing pointe-saint-charles.”
All negative, all reflecting an old stereotype of the Pointe. When I first moved down here, from the Mile End way back in 2002, my great uncle, a man who has been around some, said to me, “That’s a good place to get your nose punched in. Or worse.” I kept trying to tell him it’s not like that, at least not anymore. He never believed me. I just shook my head. But it seems that old visions of the Pointe die hard.
On Living in a Gentrifying Neighbourhood, part 1
February 20, 2012 § 11 Comments
A couple of weeks ago as I was coming home from work, I passed two young women on my block looking at a big, fat cat crouched underneath a pickup truck. They were concerned about the cat’s welfare and were worried it might be homeless (a tip, no cat that fat is homeless). I told them it lived in the housing project right next to us. They looked relieved and one said, “Well, you never know, you know what kind of people live in this neighbourhood.” “Yes,” I said, “I do. People like me.” This rather left them speechless, before one attempted to apologise, saying she didn’t mean…”I know exactly what you meant,” I said as I walked off, shaking my head.
So what made them think I wasn’t the sort who lives here? Could be I looked like them, wearing designer clothing, carrying a briefcase, clearly a worker commuting. Just like them. But I’m not, apparently. I’m the kind of person who lives here.
Where is here? Here is Pointe-Saint-Charles, a kind of gritty neighbourhood in Montreal’s sud-ouest borough in the throes of gentrification as we speak. Within a five minute walk out my front door, there are 8 new or on-going condo developments. And at least as many old tenement houses being renovated as single-family dwellings. But this kind of gentrification is relatively new, the past 4-5 years or so.
These two young women no doubt worked in the old NordElec building on Richardson at the corner of Shearer. The NordElec was re-jigged and fixed up years ago and is now home to a whole range of businesses, most of them of the cultural sort, producing various forms of art, there’s a yoga studio there on the ground floor, a cooking school, and a rock-climbing gym. If memory serves me, Ninja Tunes Records’ North American outpost was there once.
What amenities that exist in the Pointe are largely geared towards these workers, the various cafés and restaurants that serve them don’t think it’s worth their time to be open in the evenings or at the weekends. After all, you know the type who live here.
I grew up poor, I grew up working class. I never had security of tenure in our housing growing up, always renting, always at the whims of landlords. More importantly, we were always at the whim of the economy. The old man got laid off a lot, despite being a skilled worker (a welder). Therefore, I know what it feels like to be invisible. Not just feel it, but to be invisible. My high school guidance counsellor told me that “People like you don’t go to university.” People like me? Working class people. I keep meaning to send Ms. Samuda-Lehman a postcard.
We like to think that class doesn’t exist in Canada. It doesn’t for most Canadians. For the most part, the people who work at the NordElec building and other outposts here on the frontier of Pointe-Saint-Charles don’t see what’s around them. Or if they do, they see the housing projects and the downtrodden buying alcohol in the dep the moment it opens. And they are beneath contempt for the most part.
I see this every day in the Pointe. I see it in the yuppy and hipster workers who deem themselves to be more important than I am walking down the sidewalks, refusing to give me space to pass. Perhaps they don’t see me if I’m wearing jeans and a hoodie. Perhaps my tattoos and piercings make them think I’m just another piece of white trash. I know they don’t see me when I’m crossing a busy street, like Saint-Patrick, with my dog. I have a big dog, he weighs over 150 pounds, so maybe they just see another piece of white trash walking his overgrown, vicious dog. How do I know this? Because at least once or twice a week, the dog and I are nearly hit crossing Saint-Patrick at the intersection of Island on our way up to the Lachine Canal for a walk.
What do drivers do? They fail to stop at the stop sign, they fail to yield to the pedestrian crossing. Some look at me and then take off right in front of me, stepping on the gas as I am crossing the street but before I’m in front of them. This always scares the dog. Or perhaps they’ll just keep coming through the intersection even if I am right in front of them.
The police don’t care. I have emailed the police. I have tweeted at them. I have called them. No one returns my calls or emails. Someone is going to get seriously hurt crossing at that intersection, and given it’s on a bike path…
How do I know the drivers’ behaviour is class based? I’m not 100% certain, but it feels familiar. And also, if I walk to the train station downtown on my way to work, and I am dressed like another urban professional, they yield for me, at least most of the time.
And herein lies the crux. If I am dressed properly, if I wear the right clothes, I am given respect on the streets of my neighbourhood by the workers who come here during the day. They don’t try to push me off the sidewalk into the snow and ice. They don’t dismiss my presence in the intersections. They don’t cut in front of me in the cafés. But I’m dressed down, if I am in more comfortable clothing, this is what happens to me.
And it’s not personal. I watch it happen hundreds of times a week to the actual working classes in the Pointe. I see them squeezed off the sidewalks, cut in front of, threatened with cars. Every day.
Of course I know I am as much part of the problem in the Pointe as the solution; I am part of the crowd pushing the working classes out. But I live here, and I have lived here for most of the past decade. Certainly, there are others like me living in the Pointe. Increasingly more and more, what with all the condos, and one day, those cafés and restaurants will be open in the evenings and at the weekend, so we, too, can get a pint after work, or some decent take-away food.
In many ways, the Pointe is a fascinating place to be, as the neighbourhood both gentrifies and diversifies. The big church next to me, Saint-Charles, is an old French Canadian parish that has been rejuvenated by Africans and Haitians. There’s an African grocery store on Centre across from the Church. There are a series of Bengali grocery stores around the intersection of Centre and Charlevoix, where a bunch of Indian restaurants can also be found (interestingly, they are open in the evenings and at the weekend).
But in the meantime, the workers who come here to do just that, work, they don’t see this. They see a Pointe that existed a decade or longer ago. They see “those people” all around them, people not worth their respect or the time of day. And they act it out too.
Bloomsday Montréal 2012
February 4, 2012 § 19 Comments
I am on a steering committee attempting to launch Bloomsday Montréal this year on 16 June.
For those who don’t know, Bloomsday is an annual celebration worldwide of James Joyce’s masterful novel, Ulysses, which was first published in 1922. Ulysses traces the travels of one Leopold Bloom, a Dubliner, across the city on 16 June 1904. That date was significant for Joyce as it was the date of his very first outing with his wife to be, Nora Barnacle. Many consider Ulysses the finest novel of the 20th century. The first Bloomsday was celebrated on 16 June 1954, the 50th anniversary of Bloom’s travels, in Dublin, where the Irish artist John Ryan and the novelist Flann O’Brien decided to re-trace Bloom’s route around the city.
From there, Bloomsday has grown to be a massive cultural phenomenon, celebrated in over 60 nations around the world. In 2004, the 100th anniversary of Bloom’s travels, a massive celebration was held in Dublin, with over 10,000 people in attendance. On 16 June 1958, the star-crossed Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were married on Bloomsday. Why Montréal, a major city of the Irish diaspora has not had a Bloomsday until now is beyond my ken. But, it is time.
We are just getting organised, our webpage will be up soon, but in the meantime, follow us on Twitter or Facebook for updates and news of our events on 16 June!
Rural Palimpsests; Or, the Changing Rural Landscape
February 3, 2012 § 9 Comments
Drawing of the Old Hawley Town Commons
About 18 months ago, I wrote this piece about the old Town Commons in Hawley, Massachusetts. I was struck by the history of what could no longer be seen in Hawley at the Town Commons where, in the mid-19th century, there was a vibrant townsite. Hawley also stirred up my own memories of having lived in a ghost town as a teenager, on the old town site of Ioco, British Columbia, now a part of Port Moody, BC. But Ioco, which will eventually become condos, I’m sure, was a (sub)urban townsite. Hawley is a town a few miles west of the Middle of Nowhere.
In urban centres, we see the ruins of past civilisations all around us, whether they are palimpsests of old advertisements on the sides of buildings, or the ruins of buildings, still dotting the landscape. Indeed, I wrote my doctoral dissertation and a book on a neighbourhood that was, at least when I started writing, a ruin: Griffintown, Montréal. A decade ago, the landscape of Griffintown was an urban ruin, the foundations of the old Irish-Catholic Church, St. Ann’s, poking through the grass of Parc St. Ann/Griffintown; the rectory of the French Catholic Church, Ste-Hélène still stands, but the church is long gone, just a few corner stones and the remains of an iron fence are left. But this is a city, and cities, we are constantly reminded by scholars, poets, novelists, film-makers, etc., are living organisms, built to be rebuilt, constantly evolving and changing. By definition, then, the rural landscape is unchanging and constant.
Don’t believe me? Spend a bit of time reading literature set in the countryside. Or watch movies. Read poems. The landscape of the country side is eternal and unchanging. Entire nations have been built on the mythology of the countryside (I’m looking at you, Ireland!). Here in Québec, Maria Chapdelaine, a major novel of the early 20th century nationalist school explicitly tied the virtue of the nation to the land. The anti-modernists of a century ago celebrated the unchanging “natural” landscape of the countryside as a tonic for the frayed nerves of modern man. In Canada, the Group of Seven built their entire careers/legends on representing Ontario’s mid-North back to us as the nation. Watch a Molson Canadian ad these days, and you’ll learn that Canada has more square miles of “awesomeness” than any other country on Earth. And all that awesomeness is somewhere in the wheat fields of Saskatchewan. But the rural landscape DOES change and evolve, as the Old Hawley Town Commons will tell you.
This is where Robert Corrigan was fatally beaten on 17 October 1855
This was brought all the closer to me in late November, when I travelled out to Saint-Sylvestre, Québec, which is located about 70km south of Québec City, in the Appalachian foothills. I was there because a long time ago, I wrote my MA thesis on the Corrigan Affair, which erupted in Saint-Sylvestre on 17 October 1855 when Robert Corrigan, an Irish-Protestant bully, was beaten to death by a gang of his Irish-Catholic neighbours. The mid-1850s saw the height of sectarianism in Canada and a murder case involving the two groups of Irish proved to be too much for many Anglo-Protestant Canadians to take and a national crisis broke out. By the time the Affair was over in 1858, not only had Corrigan’s murderers been acquitted of all charges, the McNab-Taché coalition government had fallen. All these years later, I had it in my mind that it was time to do something with the Corrigan Affair. I had done my best to avoid it after I finished my MA, I did attempt to write an academic article, but it seemed to me to be too good a story to be wasted in a journal article that no one would ever read. So I have decided to write a book that no one will ever read, but at least a book is a physical thing, something to offer tribute to this rather amazing story that erupted onto the front pages of newspapers across British North America from a rural backwater. So it was out to Saint-Sylvestre to meet Steve Cameron, a local man who has a deep interest in the Corrigan Affair and the history of the Saint-Sylvestre region in general.
Corrigan's homestead, Saint-Sylvestre, Québec
Hugh Russell's farm
Steve offered to give me the grand tour of the landscape, where the Corrigan Affair took place. I don’t really know what I expected, but I certainly didn’t expect what I saw: the entire landscape of Saint-Sylvestre and the landscape of the Corrigan Affair is gone, completely changed in the 155 years since Corrigan’s death. He was beaten on the county fair grounds; the site where he was beaten is completely non-descript today, just a corner of a farmer’s field. Corrigan’s homestead is covered with scrub and a random cross someone threw up sometime in the past century. Where the farm of Corrigan’s friend, Hugh Russell was once located there is nothing but high tension electrical wires, forest, and a dirt road passing by in front. There is no evidence of human habitation ever having stood there. Where the Protestants had their burial ground here in the backwoods of Saint-Sylvestre/Saint-Gilles, there is nothing left but a stone wall, though the grave yard has been carefully and lovingly restored by Steve’s organisation, Coirneal Cealteach.
Old Anglican grave yard in the backwoods of Saint-Sylvestre
In short, the rural landscape is just as dynamic of that of the city. In Saint-Sylvestre, the mostly Irish-Catholic farmers were settled on poor farming land in a harsh and unforgiving landscape; their descendants left. And in their stead, nature reclaimed its place. When I first began studying Griffintown a decade ago, Talking Heads’ song “Nothing But Flowers” kept creeping into my head as I pondered the ruins of the churches, the trees growing in vacant lots and the vegetation in the cracks of the concrete. But “Nothing But Flowers” applies just as much to Hawley or Saint-Sylvestre or countless other rural landscapes once settled by humans who have long since moved on.
Update
January 31, 2012 § Leave a comment
Ah, what the hell, this is my blog, if I can’t flog my media appearances and other publications and whatnot here, where can I? I’ve been rather silent around here for the past 8 months or so, though that will change in the coming weeks.
First, I have submitted the manuscript for my book, The House of the Irish: History, Memory & Diaspora in Griffintown, Montreal, to the publisher. It is out for review now, and with any luck, it will appear on bookshelves and on-line stores around this time next year. Academic publishing moves rather slow at times. As long as The House of the Irish appears before 2014, we’re good. I published an article on the Montreal Shamrocks Hockey Club at the turn of the last century in a book edited by John Chi-Kit Wong of Washington State University, entitled Coast to Coast: Hockey in Canada to the Second World War. I wrote the article in 2005-6, it was published in 2009.
I have a raft of ideas for the next projects, but two I am pursuing, or will be once I get the chance later this semester are:
1) I wrote my MA thesis on the Corrigan Affair, which involved the fatal beating of a neighbourhood bully, Robert Corrigan, by a gang of his neighbours in Saint-Sylvestre, Québec, in October 1855. Corrigan was an Irish Protestant, and his attackers, Irish Catholics. What’s more, the Orange Order and an Irish Catholic secret society, the Ribbonmen, got involved. This led Corrigan’s death to become a cause célèbre in the era of heavy sectarian tensions in 1850s Canada. Right now, this looks like it will become a book.
2) Boston as the cultural centre of the Irish diaspora. I am fascinated by the Irishification of Boston in recent years in pop culture. Sure, Boston’s always been a major centre of the Irish diaspora, but as the city itself has become less and less Irish over the years, it has become more and more green in pop culture. Aside from the obvious, a basketball team called the Celtics, you’ve also got the Affleck brothers who play up that Southie culture in film, the novels of Dennis Lehane, and, of course, the music of the Dropkick Murphys. I’m not sure how this will proceed, whether as an article, a book, or a documentary film, but time will tell.
In the meantime, last month’s controversy surrounding the Habs and the firing of Jacques Martin and his replacement by a unilingually Anglo coach in Randy Cunneyworth found me doing a bit of punditry in the national media here in the Great White North. First, an article that appeared on Canoe.ca and then I was on Global National news later that week. And way back in September, I welcomed the Winnipeg Jets back to the NHL on the National Council on Public History’s Off the Wall blog.
At any rate, as I move forward with these projects and begin to think about history, memory, and the public in coming months, there will be a lot more here. As they say, “Watch this space!”
Globalised Montréal
May 12, 2011 § Leave a comment
In the past few years, there’s been a new trend in Montréal History and historiography that has seen us seek to place the city within a global context. This is a welcome change from our usual navel-gazing, as we sought to explain developments in Canada solely within a Canadian context. Certainly, the local context is important, but Canada did not develop in solitude. It was always a colony and nation tied into global political and economic currents, closely related to goings-on in Paris, London, and Washington. Indeed, scholars of Canadian foreign policy have long framed Canada within the North Atlantic Triangle, along with the UK and USA.
But, culturally and socially, while historians have noted the impact of British and/or American ideas in Canada, we have gone onto explain and analyse the Canadian context separate from the global. In Québec, though, perhaps due to political exigencies. Back in undergrad at UBC, Alan Greer’s masterful book, The Patriots and the People was the first study I ever read that attempted to internationalise Canadian history. In it, Greer re-cast the 1837 Patriote rebellions in Lower Canada within the revolutionary fervour that had swept Europe and the United States since the late 18th century. Seen in this light, the Parti Patriote wasn’t just a nationalist French Canadian political party, but part of an international of liberal revolutionaries that had corollaries in England, Ireland, France, the German territories, the Italian countries, the United States, and so on.
Greer’s book fit into the larger work of the revisionist Québec historians, who often sought to put Québec into a global context, both to explain the colony/province/nation’s development, as well as to give credence to Québec’s claims to nationhood. The goal was to present Québec as a nation commes les autres. Perhaps the book that had the greatest impact on me in this sense was Gérard Bouchard’s 2000 monograph, Genèse des nations et cultures du Nouveau Monde: Essai d’histoire comparée, in which Bouchard examines the development of Québec in relation to other “new world” cultures in Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. Put this way, Québec’s (and Canada’s) development from the moment of European settlement is globalised and we realise that Canada (and Québec) is not really all that unique.
This tendency to internationalise Québec seems to be continuing with a younger generation of historians. My friend and colleague, Simon Jolivet, has just published his new book, Le vert et le bleu: Identité québécoise et identité irlandaise au tournant du XXe siècle. Simon and I did our PhDs together at Concordia, and in 2006, the School of Canadian Irish Studies there hosted a roundtable discussion that looked at connections between Ireland and Québec, in large part this grew out of the work our PhD supervisor, Ronald Rudin had done early in the decade. It was probably the most dynamic and informative conference I’ve been at, as ideas flew around the table. Both Simon and I gained a lot from that conference and it is clear in both of our work.
For my part, I am interested in the Irish in Griffintown, Montréal, over the course of the 20th century. What I look at is, of course, identity, but I’m interested in the shaping of a diasporic identity amongst the Montréal Irish, one that situates the Irish of the city within the global context of the Irish around the world, as well as the links (such as they were) with Ireland itself. To do so, I make use of post-colonial theory, which seems particularly à-propos for the Irish, descendents of a colonial culture in Ireland, living in Montréal, the largest city of the French diaspora and thus necessarily a post-colonial location.
And this is what Sean Mills picks up in his brilliant new book, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal. Mills situates Montréal within that postcolonial framework, and examines the ideas of decolonisation and colonialism within activist circles in Montréal in the 60s. The activists were heavily influenced by what was going on in the world around them, in de-colonial movements in Algeria, Tunisia, and, especially, Cuba, as well as the Caribbean in the 50s and 60s. Certainly, they were well aware of their skin colour and Canada’s place as a first-world nation. But the ambivalence of Montréal (still the economic centre of Canada in the 60s) is something Mills excels at drawing out. As the decade went on, American activists, in particular African American activists like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, became influential in the de-colonial struggle of the French Canadian majority of the city. This was further complicated by Montréal’s own black population, which also identified itself with the ideas coming out of the United States and the Caribbean. And as Montréal became a more complicated city, ethnically-speaking, to say nothing of the actions of the FLQ in October 1970, ideas of decolonisation lost their appeal.
Nonetheless, what is clear is that Montréal is a global city, one that takes its cue from its global connections as much as its local ones. Indeed, this is the basis of my next project about layers of diaspora on the urban landscape of the city. In the meantime, it also gives me a way to situate my own work on the Irish of Montréal in a larger global context.
Community in Pointe-Saint-Charles
April 29, 2011 § 3 Comments
Pointe-Saint-Charles has historically been an inner-city working-class neighbourhood. And a forgotten one, hemmed in by the industrial nature of the Lachine Canal and the Canadian National Railway tracks and train yards. The inhabitants toiled away for long hours for low wages, often without security of tenure at work. And then deindustrialisation hit the Pointe hard in the 70s and 80s. Suddenly, all the people who worked long hours for low wages couldn’t work anymore for any wages. And the Pointe’s unemployment rate shot up, reaching something like 33% by 1990. Even today, with creeping gentrification, the Pointe still has shocking pockets of poverty, high unemployment, and high reliance on social services. Each week, the food bank at St. Gabriel’s Church across the street from my flat has a long line outside it. The Mission du Grand Berger on rue Centre and the charity shop in the back of the towering Église Saint-Charles are going concerns. As is the pawn shop and the dollar stores on Centre. Wellington, the former commercial hub of the Pointe, looks like a ghost town.
In short, the Pointe is a classic, inner-city, downtrodden neighbourhood. And yet, it has one of the strongest senses of community I have ever seen in a city. And it is an inclusive community, one that welcomes all: French, English, working class, yuppies, immigrants. The lingering tension that hangs over the sud-ouest of Montréal between French and English doesn’t exist here. The tensions surrounding gentrification is also more or less absent. The block I live on is a dividing line between the yuppies and the working classes. I live on the north side, the yuppified side. And yet, everyone is friendly. This is seriously a place where you go into the dépanneur and end up having a 20-minute conversation with the shopkeeper and customers about the Habs. Where you know your neighbours.
The sense of community is deeply-rooted in the Pointe. One of the focal points is the Clinique communitaire de Pointe-Saint-Charles on rue Ash in the southern end of the neighbourhood. The Clinic was founded back in 1968 when a bunch of radical medical students from McGill came down here and were appalled by what they saw in terms of public health. My favourite story involved a young girl who said that when she went to the bathroom at home, she had to pound the floor with her shoes so that the rats didn’t bite her. So they did something. They weren’t entirely welcomed by the people of the Pointe, it must be noted. Instead of picking up their marbles and going home, instead they invited the community to get involved. The Clinic was a radical organisation, grassroots in nature, and the medical staff there made the connection between poverty, ill health, and mental health. The Clinic has had a psychiatrist on staff since 1970.
The Pointe Clinic predates Québec’s innovative CLSC (Centre local des services communitaire) system, a sort of front-line centre for health and other social services in the communities of the province. In fact, the Pointe Clinic was a model for Robert Bourassa’s Liberals when they created the CLSC system in 1974. The Pointe Clinic demanded that it’s autonomy be respected and the government left it outside of the CLSC system. Five years later, the Parti Québécois of René Lévesque was in power, and the government attempted to bring the Pointe Clinic into the CLSC system. Bad move, as the community mobilised and protested against the government’s decision. The government had no choice but to back down. Indeed, the Health Minister said: “Compte tenu de votre existence antérieure à l’implantation des CLSC, le ministère des affaires sociales a confirmé son intention de ne pas vous assimiler à ce type d’établissement mais bien de respecter la spécificité de votre organisme.”
And so the Clinic survived and thrived, as it continued to grow in terms of staff and importance in the community. Indeed, the Clinic is still run by members of the community, not the medical staff and certainly not the government. But this autonomy has not been easy to protect. Perhaps the greatest battle came in 1992, when Robert Bourassa and the Liberals were back in power. That year, the government proposed the Loi sur la santé et les services sociaux. As the Clinic explains on its website:
Le projet de loi C-120 menace la survie de la Clinique en la plaçant devant un choix qui n’en est pas un : soit la Clinique conserve sa charte d’organisme communautaire ‘privé’ et perd alors son permis de CLSC ainsi que le financement qui lui ai rattaché, soit elle devient un CLSC ‘public’ et renonce à sa charte et à son mode de fonctionnement communautaire.
Bad move, government. The community of Pointe-Saint-Charles mobilised on the streets. 600 people marched to protest the government’s plan. There was street theatre and delegations to the local and provincial politicians. Half of the adult population of the Pointe signed a petition protesting the government’s plans. The government had no choice but to back down.
A final battle in the middle of the last decade saw the Clinic brought within the larger system, but at the same time maintaining its autonomy. No one calls it the CLSC here in the Pointe. Instead, we all know it as the Clinique Communautaire de Pointe-Saint-Charles, or the Clinic.
A second branch was opened on rue Centre. One of the deepest ironies of a protest against the condofication of the neighbourhood came a couple of years ago when a condo development on Centre, next door to the CLSC went up in flames when it was still under construction. The developers returned, and rebuilt the condos. But those who suffered: the small drycleaner next door and the CLSC, which was closed for nearly a year as it attempted to recover.
The Clinic is a community centre in the Pointe, something for which the people here have every right to be proud. And because the people of the Pointe have been so successful in creating and protecting their clinic, the community here has been able to successfully protect itself from some forms of gentrification. I had the opportunity to spend a fair amount of time at the Clinic this winter due to some freaky health issues, and I was always blown away by the ways in which this community has mobilised to protect itself.
These days, the big issue is what is to become of the CNR yards at the southern end of the neighbourhood, the point for which Pointe-Saint-Charles is named. Rather than allow a bunch of condos be thrown up on the old rail yards , the Comité Action CN formed out of the Carrefour d’éducation populaire de Pointe-Saint-Charles on rue Centre to protect the community and to propose an alternative for the development of those lands. Last autumn, the Comité created a glossy publication, “Les terrains du CN de Pointe-Saint-Charles: Des proposition citoyennes.” Not wishing to be subject to expensive condos that will further alienate the residents of the neighbourhood and continue to put affordable housing out of reach, to say nothing of the pollution and noise caused by the construction condos on the site, the Comité proposes community gardens and a market, and to use the old buildings as a new community centre, as well as a housing co-operative. But before any of this happens, the Comité insists that the CN lands need to be decontaminated.
Too often I read of laments for community, or worse yet, the argument that community can only be forged by yuppies in their soul-less condos. Clearly, the Pointe says otherwise.
Les Expos, Nos Amours: Gone, but not Forgotten
April 25, 2011 § Leave a comment
Last October, as the Expos should have been winning the World Series, I wrote a piece at the National Council on Public History‘s blog, Off the Wall, about the strange marketing after life of Nos Amours. This provoked a steady stream of comments, both on that site and into my inbox, as well, to a lesser degree, here at Spatialities. One of my readers, Sarah, pointed out Montréal rapper Magnum .357′s track “Expos Fitted.
It seems that rap has emerged as a key component to remembering our long gone baseball team here in Montréal. Aside from Mag .357, Anakkin Slayd, who is more famous right now for his viral hit, “MTL Stand UP”, also wrote a song about the Expos, “Remember”.
Matthew Barlow 