A STITCH IN TIME
Take tour of city’s shmatte history
Listen hard enough as you walk the wooden floorboards of the old Vineberg garment factory building and you can almost hear the whirring of sewing machines and the sound of shears cutting through fabric. Certainly you can imagine the needle workers, heads down as they worked, most of them women, or the cutters, all men, better paid than the needle workers.
It has been decades since the building at St-Laurent Blvd. and Duluth Ave. housed Harris Vineberg’s Progress Brand factory, manufacturers of men’s suits, and decades since it was even called the Vineberg Building.
But Inside the Shmatte Factory, an engrossing addition to the popular walking tours offered by the Museum of Jewish Montreal, takes visitors back in time to when the city’s garment industry was robust, and recreates elements of that heyday. Shmatte is Yiddish for rag, but the term is used in a casual way to denote the clothing industry.
Ninety per cent of the eastern European Jews who came to Montreal in the second half of the 19th century settled along or near StLaurent, the heart of the city ’s garment industry for decades. Vineberg himself (1857-1942) was an immigrant from Poland.
Between 1870 and 1930, the industry employed more workers than any other industry in Mon- treal. About 40 per cent of them were Jewish; most of the rest were French Canadian. But 75 to 80 per cent of the city’s Jews worked in the garment industry in some capacity. The tour examines the history of the community’s involvement in the industry through the lens of Progress Brand, Vineberg and the building itself, where the 90-minute tour takes place. Because it’s an indoor tour, it can run year-round.
The Vineberg Building went up in the winter of 1911 to 1912 — unusual for the time, it used reinforced concrete — in what was otherwise the largely residential neighbourhood of Plateau Mont Royal. Like Mile End, it was a heavily Jewish neighbourhood at the time and signs for shops like the kosher butchers and grocery stores were in Yiddish, the language most commonly used.
“Vineberg built the factory here
because the workers were already here,” said Kate Bauer, one of the original Inside the Shmatte Factory tour guides. She has a master’s degree in history from McGill University and, before returning this month to her native Toronto to pursue a PhD, she was one of several people involved with research for the tour; she also wrote the tour script.
Vineberg moved his factory to the Plateau from a smaller location in Old Montreal, nearer to the original garment district. Progress Brand took up most of the space in the new building, but other clothing factories were also listed at the address.
Today, the building is a mixed-use residential and commercial space; the Museum of Jewish Montreal occupies part of the ground floor. Walls and doors block the view of the large south-facing windows through which daylight streamed onto the Progress Brand factory floor. The original wooden floors, however, are still intact.
The tour features a replica of the type of garment manufactured in Vineberg ’s new factory: the sack suit. An alternative to homemade and bespoke suits, it was intended for the new middle class of the day, explained Bauer, 23. It was also a relatively straightforward garment to sew, with the back of the jacket in one piece, like a straight burlap sack.
One of several highlights of the tour is the opportunity to grab tablets and headphones and listen to first-person archival accounts from factory workers, some of whom were better paid than others. Cutters were the “aristocracy of the garment workers,” said Sidney Sarkin, presumably a cutter. They were paid by the hour. Needle worker Rose Esterson said in her account: “The workers used to slave from 7 in the morning to 10 at night, and got paid 50 cents for two dresses, can you believe?”
In the summer of 1912, mere months after the move to the Vineberg Building, there was a massive industry strike. About 4,500 workers of the nearly 10,000 workers went out on strike for 45 work days: About 4,000 of the strikers were Jewish.
That there weren’t more French Canadians on the picket lines was not surprising, said Bauer, considering the Catholic Church’s antiunion stance in 1912. And 70 per cent of the needle workers were French Canadian; most were female and they tended to work in small sweatshops, not in large, unionized factories, so they had little bargaining power.
The strike was one of more than 100 that affected the industry between 1910 and 1920. A timeline of the 1912 strike features articles in the English and French press, including pieces by Vineberg, who advertised for — and hired — workers to replace the strikers, offered them room and board and housed them on his building ’s fourth and fifth floors.
Progress Brand was sold in 1927 to the Guttman family, who operated it until the early 1990s, when it closed. At some point, the factory was moved to the Park-Extension area. In 1951, the St-Laurent Blvd. building was sold and renamed the Berman Building. Sadly, said Bauer, “a lot has been lost to history because we don’t have company records or Vineberg ’s personal files.”
(Harris) Vineberg built the factory here because the workers were already here.