East End Kids Documentary

 

Carole Laganière films the hopes, the fears and the dreams of kids living in the deprived Montreal neighbourhood where she grew up.

East End Kids

 

©2017 Linda  Sullivan – Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved

Saint Helen's Island

 

Saint Helen's Island (French: Île Sainte-Hélène) is an island in the Saint Lawrence River, in the territory of the city of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is situated immediately southeast of the Island of Montreal, in the extreme southwest of Quebec. It forms part of the Hochelaga Archipelago. The Le Moyne Channel separates it from Notre Dame Island. Saint Helen's Island and Notre Dame Island together make up Parc Jean-Drapeau (formerly Parc des Îles).

Picnic - 1938

It was named in 1611 by Samuel de Champlain in honour of his wife, Hélène de Champlain, née Boullé. The island belonged to the Le Moyne family of Longueuil from 1665 until 1818, when it was purchased by the British government. A fort, powderhouse and blockhouse were built on the island as defences for the city, in consequence of the War of 1812.

The newly formed Canadian government acquired the island in 1870; it was converted into a public park in 1874. The public used it as a beach and swam in the river.

In the 1940s, during World War II, Saint Helen's Island, along with various other regions within Canada, such as the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean and Hull, Quebec, had Prisoner-of-war camps. St. Helen's prison was number forty seven and remained unnamed just like most of Canada's other war prisons. The prisoners of war (POWs) were sorted and classified into categories including their nationality and civilian or military status. In this camp, POWs were mostly of Italian and German nationality. Also, prisoners were forced into hard labour which included farming and lumbering the land. By 1944 the camp would be closed and shortly afterwards destroyed because of an internal report on the treatment of prisoners.

The archipelago of which Saint Helen's Island is a part was chosen as the site of Expo 67, a World's Fair on the theme of Man and His World, or in French, Terre des Hommes. In preparation for Expo 67, the island was greatly enlarged and consolidated with several nearby islands, using earth excavated during the construction of the Montreal metro. The nearby island, Notre Dame Island, was built from scratch.

After Expo, the site continued to be used as a fairground, now under the name Man and His World or Terre des Hommes. Most of the Expo installations were dismantled and the island was returned to parkland.

The island can be accessed by public transit, by car, by bicycle or by foot. The Concordia Bridge links St. Helen's Island to Montreal's Cité du Havre neighbourhood on the Island of Montreal as well as Notre Dame Island (which itself is connected to Saint-Lambert on the south shore by bicycle paths). The island is also accessible via the Jacques Cartier Bridge from both the Island of Montreal and Longueuil on the south shore.

 

©2017 Linda Sullivan – Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved

Old seminary of Saint-Sulpice

 

The Society of the Priests of Saint-Sulpice built this building from 1684 to 1687 and enlarged it at the beginning of the eighteenth century. This is his second seminar in Montreal. The first, built in 1657, had a main façade towards the river and overlooked Saint-Paul Street. After the construction of the old parish church, Rue Notre-Dame, inaugurated in 1683, the Sulpicians decided to leave the market place and choose to settle on a vacant lot next to the church they serve . Attributed to the superior of the seminary of Montreal, François Dollier de Casson, the building must mainly house the priests of Saint-Sulpice. In addition to their role as educators and missionaries, the Sulpicians were responsible for the parish of Notre-Dame and, from 1663 until the 19th century, they held the seigneury of the island of Montreal. The residence of the Sulpicians is therefore both a presbytery, a seigniorial manor and a seminary where some fifteen priests receive a good part of their sacerdotal training during the French Regime.

Originally, the building consists of only a long body of building parallel to the street. It then has two stone floors, including the ground floor (rather than three as is currently the case) and it is capped with a broken roof at the Mansart - we do not know when it will be modified to the benefit of The current configuration. Two wings, perhaps projected from the beginning, were added around 1710 - between the elaboration of the plan of Jacques Levasseur of Nere in 1704 and that of Gédéon of Catalonia in 1713. Other modifications were added, Portal in 1740. The stone wall that separates the courtyard from the street may be built at the end of the 18th century - a map of the city elaborated by Louis Guy in 1795 clearly shows its presence.

The Conquest of New France had serious consequences for the Sulpicians of Montreal, whose future was threatened. The Compagnie des Prêtres de Saint-Sulpice, whose mother-house is in Paris, possesses Canadian property. She handed them over to the priests of the Montreal seminary in February 1764, but this transfer was unofficial and gave rise to thorny questions about the legal status of the seminary. Things were not clarified until 1840 when the British colonial government recognized the Ecclesiastics of the Saint-Sulpice Seminary of Montreal as a legally constituted body - it was later changed to "The Priests of Saint Sulpice of Montreal ".

In 1840, too, the Sulpicians, in agreement with the bishop, founded the Grand Seminary of Montreal for the complete formation of the priests. Their role as ecclesiastical trainers is thus consolidated while that of lords is on the verge of disappearing. Beginning in 1848, the Sulpicians embarked on a vast project to rebuild their building on Notre-Dame Street in order to reunite their residence and the new major seminary. Only the left-hand part of the project is realized, which leads to the demolition of one of the two wings of the 18th century.

The main facade changes little afterwards, except in particular a plaster imitating the cut stone, which covers the facade for a certain time and then disappears. In the back, a long two-storey brick wing (including the ground floor) was built in 1907-1908. Various renovations take place in the 20th century, both inside and outside the seminary. In 1985, the building and the entire property were classified as a monument and historic site under the Quebec Cultural Property Act. After several studies, the most important restoration campaign in the history of the building was launched in 2005 and continues in 2011. In the meantime, the building's primary function, the residence of the Sulpicians, remains the same , But the priests who live there at the beginning of the twenty-first century are mostly retired.

 

©2017 Linda Sullivan – Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved

The 1950’s and 1960’s of public Transit

 

The municipalization of public transit in 1951 led to all of the tramways being replaced by buses. The new Montreal Transportation Commission (MTC) acquired 1,300 buses, including a thousand of the Canadian Car-Brill model. The Commission set about transforming the old tramway sheds and expanded its shops at the Crémazie Plant, built in 1948. Finally, it opened the Namur (1954), Frontenac (1956) and Saint-Michel (1957) garages, as well as the Atwater and Frontenac terminuses (1956). The first express bus service was launched on Saint-Denis Street in 1955 and a completely new model of bus, the New Look from General Motors, was put into service in 1959.

 

Atwater Terminal - 1956

The MTC’s service territory grew with the addition of new bus routes in Saint-Léonard (1963), Rivière-des-Prairies (1966), Jacques-Cartier (city subsequently merged with Longueuil in 1966) and Anjou (1966). Unveiled in 1962, the Commission’s new modern bus shelter was installed at certain key locations in the network. In 1965, fare zones were abolished to allow for fare integration between the buses and métro. The métro’s launch in October 1966 had a major impact on the bus network: dozens of routes were created, changed or eliminated. New magnetic tickets and new connections were also introduced.

 

Hochelaga Terminal – 1957

 

©2017 Linda Sullivan – Simpson
The Past Whispers
All Rights Reserved

Farmville: Mr Lamy Feeds Maisonneuve's Poor

 

In 1917, during a recession, urban agriculture came out of the shadows. The Montreal Cultivation Committee lobbied Maisonneuve, then an city industrial city that was independent from Montreal, for formal urban agricultural programs.

Maisonneuve transformed at the future Maisonneuve Park into a gigantic vegetable garden in order to feed the poor. But planting crops required investment and the city had not approved a budget. In order to do his job, the garden’s superintendent, J.N. Lamy, gambled—he bet the harvest could cover the costs of starting the garden as well as feed the city’s poor.

 

We don't know much about J.N. Lamy, even his full name is a mystery. Like most ordinary men, he left few traces in the archives. But when he was the garden superintendent he kept meticulous records. Most of his notes are in one yellow covered ledger titled Cultures intensives de Parc Maisonneuve. He titled it intensive agriculture because he knew it was a huge venture. Every week, Lamy recorded the jobs completed and the hours his team of five worked. He calculated how much tending the garden cost—the tally carries forward for over twenty pages. Each detail was recorded in a steady, neat cursive. There is one exception; the recurring notation “chargés aux patates” is slightly askew. It crawls up the margins. The three words accompany smaller expenses Lamy couldn’t afford to pay. The note became more common as the season progressed.

A new venture meant everything has to be bought or borrowed, but Lamy had few resources. On May 29th, Lamy bought $241.75 worth of seeds on credit. He then bartered part of the harvest to rent a harrow, buy burlap sacks, and hardware to build fences. The note “chargés aux patates” preceded each purchase. The humble potato became currency, like salt during the Holy Roman Empire.

If it had been a meager harvest, it's unclear how Lamy would have covered the expenses or what he would have said to hungry families who were promised potatoes. City council did not know what Lamy was doing. The superintendent’s reports contained concrete numbers and no mention of the charge-to-the-potato system. By June, the potato seeds had cost $771.65 and another $955.80 was spent in wages, yet not one green stem poked above the ground.

In September, Lamy and his men leaned on their shovels and dug into the ground. Whiffs of sweat and loam must have made Lamy suck in his breath, hopeful. Their shovels tilted the earth up and revealed mounds of Prince Edward
Potatoes like gold nuggets. The team pulled potatoes out of the ground until the end of October, filling 1,050 eighty-pound sacks. The heavy sacks may have eased Lamy’s mind—the wait was over, the gamble won. He managed to feed several hundred families and cover his costs.

Lamy checked off all but one of the charged-to-the-potatoes marginalia. It was an end of season bonus that he had asked the city to approve. As superintendent, Lamy earned eighteen dollars a week--the same as the labourers, but he had more experience and responsibilities. The man who invented the charge-to-the-potato system tested it one last time. He asked for ten sacks of potatoes. Jos. Écrement, Maisonneuve Secretary-Treasurer, refused and the next day ended Lamy’s contract. Lamy helped feed the city, but the harvest must have been bittersweet.

courtesy: Jess Grosman

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

Hochelaga School Fire

Sarah Maxwell received her Elementary diploma from the McGill Normal School in 1892 and her Model diploma the following year. That was enough to get a good position in one of Montreal's larger Protestant schools, but not normally sufficient to be eligible to become a school principal, at least for a woman. Nevertheless, by the time she was 25, Miss Maxwell found herself the head teacher of the multi-grade, three-storey school in Hochelaga. Built in 1890, it was relatively new, having replaced a one-room school that the Montreal Protestant board had inherited when the city annexed the village of Hochelaga. Much thinking had gone into the design of schools in recent years, but Hochelaga's contained one inconsistent feature: the Kindergarten was on the top floor, making it hard for those with little legs to get to class.






On 26 February 1907, a fire broke out in the school and quickly spread, forcing an evacuation. Having seen the classes on the lower floors safely out, Sarah Maxwell suddenly realized that the kindergarten class was trapped in the attic. "Miss Maxwell could have escaped," an eyewitness recounted, "but she went to the top floor to rescue the little ones. She did rescue about thirty of them, and died while attempting to save more." She "handed the children to workmen who had put ladders up to the windows. The firemen only rescued two children." The remaining sixteen "suffocated" in the smoke alongside their principal.



Public appreciation of this act of courage was matched only by the horror of the tragedy itself, which newspapers described in grim detail. Pictures of the dead children were printed, accompanied by headlines such as "Heart-Breaking Scenes at the Montreal Morgue" and "Scenes of Sorrow at the Bereaved Homes." Newspapers also pointed accusing fingers at the firemen, who arrived too late to control the fire and to stop Miss Maxwell from plunging back into the smoke, and at the school authorities for their carelessness in placing the youngest children in the least accessible rooms.





The city mourned Sarah Maxwell in a style that was elaborate, but entirely appropriate. Her funeral was held two days later - not in St Mary's Church in Hochelaga, where a service for many of the victims took place at the same time, but in Christ Church downtown. The cathedral was "packed" with mourners, who then followed the cortege up to Mount Royal Cemetery where she was buried in a lot donated by the trustees. A call went out for a fitting monument to the heroine, and was answered by the Montreal Star which set up a fund to create a "children's testimonial." Children across the city sent donations of ten cents or more: "I send you 25 cents for 'Sarah Maxwell Memorial," one little girl wrote. "Mamma cried when she read about her in the Star." The fund eventually paid for a touching monument on the site which overlooks the section of the cemetery with children's graves. It is dedicated "in loving memory" to the lady herself and to "the little ones who perished with her."





When the Hochelaga school was rebuilt the following year it was renamed "Sarah Maxwell Memorial," and when that school was closed after the Second World War a new building in the northern part of the city took the name. Now, even that school is long gone, but the Professional Library of the English Montreal School Board has been officially named the Sarah Maxwell Library. It features a portrait of Miss Maxwell near the door, along with a framed copy of a letter describing the incident (quoted above) written by a boy, Orrin Rexford, to friend who had moved away. "It will be a long time before we forget her heroism," he concluded.


courtesy: qahn (March 18, 2013)

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