The Irish Catholic Churches of Quebec - S is for St. Ann's Church

St. Ann’s Church was the heart of Griffintown’s Irish Catholic community. 

Built in 1854, it was Montreal’s second English Catholic church after St. Patrick’s (1847). Whereas the “lace-curtain” Irish around St. Patrick’s consisted of merchants, skilled workers and professionals, St. Ann’s parishioners were known as “shanty Irish” -- unskilled labourers employed in factories, in construction or on the docks.

The population of Griffintown began declining after World War II and, in the early 1960s, the municipality decided that Griffintown no longer had a future as a place for people to live. It was rezoned as industrial commercial in 1963 and, in 1967, approximately a third of the neighbourhood was demolished to make way for the Bonaventure Expressway. 

Having lost most of its parishioners, St. Ann’s Church was torn down in 1970. A few years ago the City of Montreal ‘restored’ the foundations of the church and today the site is a park with benches instead of pews.

Dawes Brewery

Year unknown.
9 of the 31 Black horses owned by the Dawes brewery in Montreal.
The stables were in Griffintown

Entrepreneur Thomas Dawes founded the Dawes Brewery in 1811 on the banks of the Lachine Canal.

When he died, his two sons, Thomas and James, took over the company. When James died, his two sons went into business with their uncle Thomas. One of these two grandsons, Andrew James, eventually assumed ownership of the company and became president of National Breweries Ltd., a group of breweries including the Dawes Brewery.

This company was the first in Canada to employ the telegraph, using it to communicate between its Lachine facility and offices downtown.

A true family business, the company continued to be run by other descendants (including Norman J., Kenneth T., and Donald) between 1921 and 1952, although the brewery shut down its Lachine operations in 1927.

1943-1944 sign atop of Dawes brewery on St-Maurice St.

After that, the buildings were used for various purposes: a candle factory, the sale and repair of household articles, and now a museum. The Maison du Brasseur (Brewers home), Vielle Brasserie (Old Brewery), and Pavillon de l'Entrepot (Warehouse) now make up the Guy-Descary Cultural Complex.

Photographs courtesy of Roger Albert and Griffintown Memories on Facebook

Apocalypse for a horseman

FOR 40 YEARS, Leo Leonard has been operating the Griffintown Horse Palace. But a redevelopment plan for the area would turn his property into housing and commercial space.

Leo Leonard at his Griffintown stable on Ottawa St., with horse Rocky in the background. “People say I should turn the place into a zoo and charge admission,” he says.

During the Second World War you could hire a calèche to take you up to Mount Royal for $5. Today, if you can find a driver willing to make the four-hour return trip to the mountain, it would cost about $300.

“When I began driving in 1942, it was another era,” said Leo Leonard. He has owned the Griffintown Horse Palace on Ottawa St. for 40 years.

“Back then there were 62 carriages at Dominion Square outside the Windsor Hotel and another 25 outside the gates of McGill. Today, there are only 35 calèche drivers’ permits, and all the drivers are down in Old Montreal.”

The price of a calèche ride is $45 for a half-hour, $80 for an hour. Competition is stiff.

Horse-drawn carriages are an anachronism in the 21st century, and their future, as well as that of Leonard’s stables just south of the École de technologie supérieure on Notre Dame St. W., is up in the air.

The Southwest borough has designs on Leonard’s property, one of the last in the area to house horses.

A redevelopment plan unveiled in October for the neighbourhood has the stables, tack house and corral earmarked as an area for office and commercial space, and affordable and subsidized housing.

Inspired by Toronto’s Distillery district, an industrial area that was transformed into a gentrified neighbourhood, urban planners see Griffintown as an ideal site for redevelopment.

Heritage Montreal’s Dinu Bumbaru says while he wel- comes development in the area, razing the stables would be a mistake.

“They are not a great monument,” he said, “but they are the only remnants to remind us that the driving force behind the metropolis was the horse.

“There is room in the city’s heritage policy to keep Leonard’s stables, and perhaps integrate them into a … network of Montreal memory to remind us it is the unheralded blue-collar workers who make a great city.”

Leonard was born in Goose Village and raised in Griffintown. He is 81.

Known as Clawhammer Jack, he is probably one of the last residents to have lived and worked in the neighbourhood for eight decades.

His permit to run his stable has a grandfather clause that states he can keep horses on the property as long as he owns it.

Leonard concedes, however, developers are eager to acquire his land, and perhaps the time has come for him to sell.

“I’ve always been in the horse business, but now I’m fed up with the industry,” Leonard said.

“People say I should turn the place into a zoo and charge admission,” he said with a chuckle.

Leonard bought the stables, which date from 1862, for $15,000 in 1967 when the city ran the Ville Marie Expressway eight blocks to the east, and people moved out of the neighbourhood.

He won’t say how much he wants for the property, which contains residential units, a tack house, a barn for eight horses and a small exercise corral.

“I’m not supposed to talk about anything, but, yes, agents have been coming around to talk to me about selling. We’ll see what happens,” Leonard said.

In addition to his property, he says, real estate agents are looking at a nearby scrapyard and an old paint shop next door.

Should he sell, Leonard isn’t sure what he’ll do if he no longer has horses to look after.

“I won’t go live in Florida, that’s for sure,” he said. “You’ll never catch me on a plane.”

Dow Brewery

 

984 - 1000 Notre-Dame, 333 Peel Street

image courtesy – Griffintown Tour

The former brewery complex consists of many buildings. On Montfort we find the oldest building at the site; formerly a refrigerated warehouse, it is built in the vernacular style with 'porteur' walls in stone. The brewery's large warehouse and fermention buildings were constructed between 1924 and 1929 the length of Colborne Street (now Peel), between St. Joseph (now Notre-Dame) and William.

In 1929, a garage for the brewery's delivery vehicles, designed by architect Louis-Auguste Amos (1869-1948), was erected at the southeast corner of William and Peel. In 1930-1931 an administration building, designed by Harold Lea Fetherstonhaugh (1887-1971), was built at 984-990 Notre-Dame.

Constructed in the art deco style, this building, which served as head office for The National Breweries Limited consortium, boasts a rich interior decor of various marbles and precious woods, bronze and brass and an exterior ornamented with pilasters and bas reliefs showing elements and symbols of the brewing process and of the consortium members.

The first brewery at this location, owned by Thomas Dunn, moved to Montreal from La Prairie in 1808. In 1920 Dunn hired recent immigrant William Dow, son of a Scottish brewmaster, to assist with the brewing. By 1829, Dow was Dunn's partner and the brewery name was changed to Dunn & Dow.

Dow's younger brother Andrew eventually joined the company and, after Dunn's death, the name was changed to William Dow and Company and became Molson's main competitor. By the mid-1960s the Dow brand was outselling every other beer in the province and their slogans, such as: "Wouldn't a Dow go good now?", "Now for a Dow" or "Dis donc Dow" were ubiquitous.

Then, in 1966, as a result of poor public relations handling of the tainted beer scandal in which 16 deaths were attributed to the use of cobalt as a heading agent, Dow's popularity dropped overnight and the company suffered a decline in sales from which it never recovered. In 1968, the Dow name, by now representing a national consortium, was changed to La brasserie O’Keefe du Québec Ltée. O’Keefe closed the plant in 1991 and in 1996, École de technologie supérieure (ETS) recycled the O’Keefe building at the southwest corner of Peel and Notre-Dame into an engineering school and is currently at work repurposing portions of the buildings on the east side of Peel into a Centre of Innovation for the technology sector.

Sadly, while renovating to accomodate the new Centre of Innovation, ETS had the top portion of the brewery’s chimney removed: where it used to read “Dow Brewery”, it has now been reduced to “Brewery”. According to local property owner Harvey Lev, Normand Proulx at the borough’s permit department asserts it will be restored.

The garage at Peel and William was renovated in 2003 and currently houses the offices of the Board of Montréal Museum Directors as well as ETS’s AÉROÉTS and Centre de technologie thermique.

 

©2016 Linda Sullivan – Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved

Disaster at Windsor Station

It's march 17 1909, St.Patrick's day. Around 08:30 the overnight train from Boston with 200 passengers aboard is being pulled by engine 2102. On the final approach to Windsor station an explosion happens in the engine scalding the engineer Mark Cunningham and fireman Louis Craig, the engine is uncontrolable, both the engineer and fireman jump out around Westmount. The passengers and the rest of the train crew are unaware of what is going on. The rear end brakeman senses something is wrong and applies the emergency brakes around Guy St. but it's not sufficient, the train plows in to the station.



Mrs W.J. Nixon of 143a Ash st in Pointe St-Charles is in the station washroom with her two children, they have no chance and all three perish. Louis Craig the fireman will survive, unfortunately the engineer mark cunningham dies.
My Dad worked for the CPR in the 50's and 60's and this story was still being told by train crews.
-courtesy Roger Albert Griffintown Memories

©2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved

The Ghost of Mary Gallagher

 

Mary Gallagher was murdered on June 27, 1879 by her friend and fellow prostitute Susan Kennedy. In the years that followed the heinous murder, stories of Mary Gallagher’s ghost began to circulate around Griffintown, Quebec.  By the end of the 19th Century Mary had become something of a local legend.

The story of Mary Gallagher’s ghost began when Mary and Susan Kennedy went out for a night of drinking. While at a tavern the drunken Mary picked up a young man named Michael Flanagan.  The three left the tavern and went to Kennedy’s home where the drinking continued for hours.  At some point in time, before midnight, the young Flanagan passed out.  Then at about 12:15 AM the neighbor that lived below Kennedy said she heard loud sounds coming from above which lasted several minutes.  She would describe the noise as “chopping sounds.”  As it turned out the description was horribly accurate.

Not much if anything is known about what was going on between Mary and Susan.  The two were known to be good friends and often seen in each others company.  One idea is that over time, Susan became jealous of Mary because of Her apparent ease in picking up men as well as the money she made from prostitution.  Whatever the reason or cause was, something sent Susan Kennedy into a homicidal rage and she murdered Mary by chopping off her head.  Susan Kennedy as well as the passed out Flanagan, were both charged with the Gallagher killing.  As police continued to investigate the case however, all charges against Michael Flanagan were dropped and Kennedy faced the murder charge alone.

Kennedy was found guilty of the killing on December 5, 1879, and sentenced to be hanged. Following a re-sentencing, Susan Kennedy was sent to prison where she served 16 years for her crime before being released.  Interestingly, on the same day that Kennedy was convicted of murder, Michael Flanagan fell while working and drown in Wellington Basin.

By the turn of the century the headless ghost of Mary Gallagher had been seen several times.  Soon the legend began to develop that Mary appeared every seven years, on the anniversary of her death, near the old police station where Susan Kennedy and Michael Flanagan were taken following their arrests.  The location of Mary’s appearance may have to do with the fact that the location of the murder, 242 William Street, was demolished when the area was re-zoned and developed.

If your thinking about a trip the see the Ghost of Mary Gallagher it may be too late.  After making her once every seven years appearance many times, reports of Mary’s ghost stopped after 1928. Perhaps Mary’s headless ghost is gone for good, but if you’re in the area and want to take a look for yourself, Mary’s next scheduled visit is June 27, 2019.

courtesy – True Tales of the Unexpected

 

Chicago Cubs - 3
Cleveland Indians - 2

©2016 Linda Sullivan-Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved