Expo 67 had a dark, lingering hangover, says lecturer
Lecturer focuses on world fair’s lingering hangover, long-term consequences
Shawn Rosengarten wasn’t even born when Expo 67 came into being. Yet our world’s fair has been a lifelong fascination for the Montreal film and TV sales agent.
In the ensuing years, particularly last year’s 50th anniversary, Expo 67 has triggered a plethora of film, TV, art, architecture, fashion and multimedia homage presentations. Small wonder. Expo 67 marked the zenith of Montreal’s glory years, according to many. Heady times, when head offices still remained here.
And the tributes continue into the 51st anniversary year.
Still going strong is the Expo Extra! lecture series being held at the Centre d’histoire de Montréal in Old Montreal.
On Sunday at 1:30 p.m., Montreal historian Bruno Paul Stenson will be delivering his Expo Extra! lecture, The Infuriating Obsession: Collecting Expo 67, dealing with his compulsion to keep adding new material to his collection.
Rosengarten, born 10 years after Expo 67, made up for lost time by also accumulating a massive collection of memorabilia, starting when he was 8. But he gave the 6,000 slides of Expo 67 and Man and His World (the annual summer exhibition that followed Expo until 1984) he collected to the National Archives in 2003 and donated hundreds of his artifacts to the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 1998.
However, unlike the majority of lectures and other presentations, Rosengarten, in spite of his love for the world’s fair, will be focusing on a darker side when he does his Expo Extra! speech March 3, The Expo Hangover.
Rosengarten’s view is that the Expo 67 site came to reflect the opposite of everything that then-Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau and his team who delivered the exhibition had seemingly stood for.
“The city ran huge deficits keeping Man and His World open until 1984, which must have resulted in less money for necessary infrastructure spending,” Rosengarten says. “The site also deteriorated rapidly and fell victim to crime. Large parts of the site were abandoned and arson befell many of the pavilions.
“Another kind of irony is that this great event sought to highlight environmental concerns, yet thousands of litres of DDT were poured into the river in the fall of 1966, ostensibly so that shadflies wouldn’t contaminate the site. Who knows what the legacy of all that could be?”
No surprise to Rosengarten that such a dystopian environment would induce late/great film director Robert Altman to use the site for his 1979 postapocalyptic film Quintet.
Employing the venue turned out to be perfect casting, too.
Not even star Paul Newman was able to detract from the overwhelming bleakness.
“Some kids collect baseball cards and some kids are not like the others,” Rosengarten says.
“So long before there was eBay, I hit all the antique shops and started collecting everything I could put my hands on relating to Expo 67 — licence plates, posters, souvenirs, print ephemera and books.”
Rosengarten also collected what could be considered some most arcane stats. At the age of 9, he dazzled his elders by informing them that 33.5-million ice-cream cones were sold during Expo 67. Of more significance, he learned that 50,306,648 had visited the exhibition — which could trigger the blues for many Montrealers still distressed by our Formula E race debacle that drew precious few.
“I got into Expo 67 hook, line and sinker, but I couldn’t overlook some of the darker aspects and, hence, my speech. There are many interesting fields of study from which Expo 67 was the starting point.”
These are dealt with in coming Expo Extra! events such as historian Robert Côté’s Feb. 24 lecture on how the FLQ crisis unfolded at Man and His World in December of 1970; Julie Bélanger’s March 10 peek into the creation of Habitat 67; and Jean-Philippe Warren’s March 17 speech on how the Quebec underground movement began here in 1967.
“The irony of this is so huge for me, once such a passionate collector of everything Expo 67,” Rosengarten says. “I lived at Habitat, I worked on the site at the Biosphere, I gave guided tours. My mom worked at Expo 67, and my father worked on the lighting system. Expo 67 is very much part of who I am — even if I wasn’t born then.
“OK, God knows Expo 67 was great and it left its mark on the country. Clearly, there was a lot of innovation that came about as a result, but nostalgia is not enough. We have a tendency here to look back at Expo and other events with rose-coloured glasses.
“If anything, we should take inspiration from the innovation that those events created and we
should consider this as we aspire to come up with more innovation and new projects. But we should do more than reproduce the past and try to keep the party going. It’s like keeping your Christmas tree up until Easter. We should realize that there are consequences in so doing.”