The many faces of the Plateau
traces the neighbourhood’s rich history through the lives of the people who have lived there
Couples pushing baby carriages in the Plateau district’s tranquil Jeanne-Mance Park may well be unaware that 150 years ago, the ground was the scene of horses thundering around a racetrack. Not far away from that racetrack, on what is now the corner of St-Laurent Blvd. and Mont-Royal Ave., members of the Montreal Hunt Club used to mount steeds and set off on the chase, leaving less sporty gentlemen to quaff ale at the next-door tavern, whose name, Mile End, still resonates today.
The Plateau’s transition over the past 200 years from country estates to an immigrant working-class district to a trendy neighbourhood of gentrified duplexes and cool nightspots and eateries is shown through a wealth of borrowed artifacts in a new exhibit at Pointe-à-Callière called Lives and Times of the Plateau.
“We decided to represent the Plateau through the people who lived there,” said the exhibition’s chief curator, Elisabeth Monast Moreau, at a media preview. “We discovered the richness of the cultural variety was greatly influenced by the mix of communities. All those communities did not necessarily communicate together, but just by living close to one another, they caught each other’s attention.”
During the early 20th century, Jewish immigrants settled in large numbers along St-Laurent Blvd. After the Second World War, Greeks formed “Little Athens” along Parc Ave. Many Portuguese came in the 1960s. With varying degrees of ease, they mixed with the English- and French-speaking population.
The exhibition tells a multitude of residents’ stories. The earliest belongs to British immigrant landowner John Clark, who virtually owned the entire Plateau region, a territory bounded today by Parc Ave. and d’Iberville St. to the west and east, and Sherbrooke St. and the CP Rail tracks to the south and north.
Clark’s 1810 lease of Mile End Tavern to Stanley Bagg — an American who fled to Montreal to avoid his debts — is among the exhibition’s oldest artifacts. Bagg’s marriage to Clark’s daughter, Mary Ann, produced a son, Stanley Clark Bagg, an entrepreneur for whom two Plateau streets are named. Tanneries and quarries operated in the 19th cen- tury along the Plateau’s streams, connected by Tannery Rd. (now Mont-Royal Ave.) and Quarry Rd. One depleted quarry became Sir Wilfrid Laurier Park.
Appropriately for a neighbourhood teeming today with artistic residents, the exhibit devotes a section to the district’s major cultural figures. Poet Émile Nelligan, of course, and Michel Tremblay, whose 1968 play Les Belles-soeurs, at Théâtre du Rideau Vert, was a cultural watershed. Displayed are the spectacles and writing tools of Yiddish poet Jacob Segal, for whom the Segal Centre is named. Mordecai Richler is somewhat underrepresented, with only a printed quote and some scenes from movie versions of his books.
Plateau-based painters included Louis Muhlstock, who secretly sketched people in local parks, Refus Global author Paul-Émile Borduas, Jean-Claude Riopelle (represented by his small 1947 painting Hochelaga, from Power Corp.’s collection) and Marcel Barbeau, forced by his mother to move his studio out of her house into a cold shed behind St-Hubert St.
The Plateau had its notorious figures too. A poster for the Cartier district’s Communist member of parliament Fred Rose, later a convicted spy, urges voters to “Send the fighting Voice of Cartier to Parliament.” Another period poster promotes outspoken fascist anti-Semite Adrien Arcand.
Lea Roback, a Communist and trade union activist who was born on Guilbault St., organized a 25-day labour strike in 1937 that succeeded in reducing the workweek for badly paid seamstresses in the Plateau’s sweatshops from 60 to 44 hours a week.
Towering over the other artifacts is a three-metre copper and metal statue of an angel titled The Last Judgment, made for St-Enfant-de-Jésus church in 1909 by Joseph-Olindo Gratton, who also sculpted the 13 large figures atop Mary, Queen of the World Cathedral.
Schoolchildren might be surprised to see that their grandparents’ milk came in glass bottles. The grandparents, meanwhile, can wax nostalgic over a photo of the streetcar that once plied up and down Parc Ave., or reminisce about Gelindo Bertoldi, the itinerant knife grinder whose horse-drawn cart had rails for traversing the snowbound Plateau in winter.
Debate continues over the origin of the Plateau’s name. The exhibition leans toward the charming tale of a school bus driver in the 1930s who, when stopping at Le Plateau School opposite Lafontaine Park, used to shout, “Le Plateau!” Apparently the name stuck.
Lives and Times of the Plateau opened Wednesday and continues until Sept. 1 at Pointe-à-Callière museum, 350 Place Royale in Old Montreal. Open Tuesday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission: $20 adults, $7 age 6 to 12, $9.50-$12 students, $16 seniors. Call 514-872-9150 or visit pacmusee.qc.ca.